The Path of Giants by B.T. Narro (best novels to read .txt) 📕

it for an essence. She had done this same thing to many moonstones when she was still in the castle, spending most of her time there practicing enchantments. When she was done priming a moonstone, she would watch Leon put his palm flat against it and cast an erto spell for the better part of an hour. This was how essences were made. Leon picked an element and casted the primary spell of that element until the moonstone was filled. That’s all it took. The moonstone held the essence of the spell within it. No locking spell was necessary. She figured the king was selling the essences for coin, because she didn’t see what else happened to them.

She tried to do the same thing to this gem, pressing her palm against it and casting dteria. She went on doing this for the better part of an hour. She was terrified of disappointing Valinox by not opening the portal speedily, but if she was right, this might be the thing that saved her life.

Sure enough, the clear gem started to darken as she went on. Eventually, she felt that it could absorb no more dteria. She held it up in front of her again.

It looked just like the Induct stone that Valinox had given her, only about a third the size. Valinox said that he had cursed his stone with dteria, but now she was wondering if that was a lie. Either he had gotten a different mage of order to prime the stone before embedding it with dteria, or there was a curse that could prime stones just like a spell of ordia could. There were a lot of similarities between enchanting and cursing, so the latter might be possible.

She looked around the ground again. So these are all Induct stones here. All the other legends seemed to be coming true, so this one probably was as well: The cause of the Day of Death was when something massive came from the stars and struck the center of the forest. The resulting fiery explosion destroyed much of the forest. It had left a huge crater, now the resting place of Gourfist as well as the entrance to the fae world.

Eden believed that these Induct stones she was finding in great abundance had to do with whatever it was that had crashed into the earth. These could be pieces of it—pieces of a star? Or they could have been formed in the fiery chaos. There was no way for her to know.

She pushed on for a while longer. It didn’t dawn on her until then that she had been going down a steep hill for a while now. Is this the crater? she wondered. Am I close? The dirt here looked no different than the rest of the forest, but there was one major difference: There were far fewer trees. Even the mist seemed to abate here.

She saw something ahead. Gourfist. It had to be him. It was much too large to be anything else.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Eden approached the gigantic sleeping beast. Gourfist was as beautiful as he was terrifying. He was a winged beast whose feathers were as large as Eden’s entire torso. He seemed to have four legs, the ends of which were tucked underneath his body as he slept.

The sound of his breath, a slow inhale and then a raspy exhale, created a powerful wind surely strong enough to knock Eden down if she was to stand in front of his beak. He had the face of an eagle, golden-tipped feathers down his neck. The rest of his feathers blended from gray to green, with blue tipped feathers sprouting up around his legs as if to offer extra protection. She could only imagine what kind of claws she might find at the ends of his feet.

This was once the demigod Airinold. She wondered if he had designed every part of Gourfist before transforming into the beast, or if that had been out of his control. The creature seemed almost majestic, as if Airinold had thought his purpose of hunting down the other demigods was righteous.

Unlike Airinold, at least Valinox didn’t pretend to be doing good. He was rotten inside, selfish and avaricious, and he didn’t care who thought it. He wanted power, control, and possibly nothing else. What had Airinold wanted? He had been born the most powerful, yet he had given up most of his power to create dteria. What might’ve happened had he created something more beneficial to humanity, something like erto or ordia? Even Valinox had created something useful, mtalia, though it was too low range for most people to have access to it. That was his only fault in his creation. Eden assumed he just hadn’t been strong enough to make it more accessible, like Airinold had done with dteria.

Looking at this beautiful beast, Eden wondered if there was something more to Airinold’s story. She couldn’t imagine someone like Valinox turning into a beast that looked like this. She imagined he would be more like some of the creatures she’d seen in the short trek here, vicious through and through.

Was she kidding herself or just stupid? Gourfist could be just as vicious. And there was a good chance she would find that out soon enough.

A large sphere twinkled next to his curled up body that had to be the portal into Fyrren. She walked over to it as quietly as she could. She had doubted such a thing could exist, but here it was in front of her, shimmering.

It didn’t quite appear like it was wholly there, Eden noticed as she lifted her hand up as if to touch it.

Gourfist stirred. What might’ve been a slight movement to him was thunderous to Eden. She started to run, thinking he had awoken.

She looked back. He still seemed to be in the same position as before. Perhaps he had just adjusted his enormous head. His beak alone was bigger than Eden.

He was terrifying, but while