The Path of Giants, B.T. Narro [the speed reading book .TXT] 📗

proposal. He had probably seen the way his daughter had looked at me at the end of this and decided it was better not to push it.

Soon enough, I was leaving Granlo on my horse, glad to be out of that place for good. The cold winter wind went straight through the hole in my shirt. I should’ve moved out of the way of his attack. I didn’t know why I’d wanted to put on a show.

Maybe I was just bored. This has been a long trip, I thought. But wasn’t I just wishing for boredom not that long ago, when I was dealing with Cason? That’s right, I was.

Thinking back, I had enjoyed the boredom at first. But now I was sick of it, craving some excitement. One last stop, this one to Kataleya’s home.

It wasn’t so much that I was excruciatingly lonely, but I did sorely miss my friends. I really could’ve used Kataleya’s company during this time. I was a little angry at her that she had chosen to go ahead of me. We were friends first before we slept together. I missed that side of her. She didn’t have to take it away.

CHAPTER THREE

I couldn’t reach Livea that day, so I made camp and practiced lifting myself a bit before trying to get a good night’s sleep. I fell asleep almost immediately after I was done.

I thought I was dreaming sometime later, but it didn’t seem like a dream at all. It was like I was awake but couldn’t move, like I wasn’t in control of myself.

I suddenly felt like someone was near me, an attractive girl I had never met before. I tried to speak to her, but I couldn’t seem to do it.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

I couldn’t hear her words. I felt them. They were spoken cautiously.

I couldn’t hear her voice. I felt it. She had an alluring tone, strong and purposeful.

I didn’t think I had the power to reply, so I was surprised when I heard myself answer. “Jon Oklar.”

“Are you looking for me, Jon?”

I suddenly knew things about her I shouldn’t. This was the witch. She was beautiful, powerful, but afraid. I knew I shouldn’t answer her. This was some sort of spell I was stuck in. Did that mean she had come upon me while I was sleeping? Was I vulnerable?

I tried to wake up but couldn’t. I felt myself becoming more aware of her. I saw long and thick black hair, then an innocent face with pouty lips and dark, striking eyebrows. She had long lashes and a delicate nose. I thought it weird to perceive her as beautiful before I’d even seen her, and that’s when I realized that her appearance must be part of her spell. The doll face I was seeing could even be an illusion.

I tried not to answer, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. “Yes, where are you, Hadley?”

“Are you going to arrest me?”

“No,” I was glad to tell her. “We want your help in this war.”

“I am not a fighter.”

“But you are a witch?”

“I do not harm the innocent.”

“You can prove it,” I said.

“How?”

There was a fog in my mind. I couldn’t figure how to answer her. I didn’t even know why I had told her she could prove it. How was she supposed to do that?

“With your mana,” I answered.

It felt like this voice wasn’t my own. I didn’t understand where it was coming from. I didn’t understand any of this, in fact.

That’s when my thoughts started to become clearer. I was asleep after all, but I was falling out of this dream. I tried to dive back in, but I didn’t know how.

Then I was fully awake. I sat up. It was still night out.

“Hello?” I tried.

I heard nothing.

I couldn’t see much in the dark night, so I fed my dying fire. It shed more light on my surroundings, but only my horse was near. I shut my eyes and tried to reach out to the witch. I knew it wasn’t only a dream. It had felt too real. But what was it, exactly? I had never heard about an experience like this one.

I found myself wanting to find her and protect her. This was not natural.

I let my mana go through my body to search for signs of a curse, but it found nothing. I decided to search through Hadley’s bag more thoroughly than I had before. There had to be something in one of these pouches that might explain what had happened.

It took a long while to go through every pouch, but there was just a variety of what I thought to be ingredients for curses. I didn’t come across anything that exuded any form of power.

There seemed to be something about the bag itself, however. I could almost feel her presence again when I held it close.

I rummaged through the now empty bag, feeling for anything that might be hidden in the sewing. Sure enough, I felt a lump at the bottom of the bag where there shouldn’t be one. I cut away the fabric, revealing a hidden layer. Cautiously, I reached down and grabbed what felt to be a stone of some kind. I pulled it out for a look in front of the fire.

It looked like a red diamond to me, very rare and expensive. It was large as well, a nice weight to it. But there was something more to the red diamond. I could already feel it before casting Identify on it.

My spell seemed to be telling me something, but I couldn’t decipher what it was. I had no natural talent for ordia, which was used for enchantments and spells like Identify, which specified what kind of enchantment an item possessed. More complicated spells of ordia could coat the caster in an illusion. I could reach the notes needed to make my own, but it didn’t seem to work for me. I had planned to practice more, but all the time