AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Kai hefted his axe and tightened his knees in answer around the horse’s flank as they dove.
Before long, the Frost Giant came into view, lumbering like a slow-moving mountain. The blizzard circled him like a living cloak. Giant elk antlers sat atop his hoary head. His bulky, boulder-like body was covered with thick white fur, dusted with ice and snow.
The three eyes in front narrowed in a hateful glare, while his mouth stretched lopsidedly around protruding teeth, two bottom incisors as thick as horns, jutting past his upper lip almost to his nose.
With every stomp, the earth beneath his gigantic feet trembled. Trees were split or crushed under his bare soles, or were felled by the idle swing of his spiked club.
He was clearly in a foul mood, if the furious roar he sent in their direction upon spotting their approach was any indication. His breath was so powerful, Nightmare flapped his wings mightily just to stay on course.
As the jötunn inhaled to gather another breath, Eir dove fast and furious into the brief lull.
“Now!”
Kai pushed off of the horse with a powerful kick and was immediately airborne. He threw his axe with both hands while Eir let fly her spear.
Mid-air, Kai unsheathed the long sword from his back holster and gripped it upside-down, blade pointed like a dagger toward his target.
Meanwhile, the axe and spear met their mark as the Frost Giant roared with pain, two eyes taken out at once, blood gushing all over his face.
With two of his four hands, he covered his two blinded eyes, while another swung his club wildly to ward off attack.
That was when Kai’s sword struck into the giant’s chest, his falling momentum and weight dragging the blade down a few feet in a deep, vertical cut. He dangled there a moment before kicking off of the giant’s body with a somersault and pulling his sword free.
Eir flew close to catch him as he fell, another spear at the ready.
But an errant swing from the giant’s club glanced her steed, knocking him clear off his flight path with Eir in tow.
With a wild whinny, the horse tumbled head over hooves with Eir, falling with a resounding crash into a snowbank, wings crushed beneath him.
Meanwhile, Kai had to improvise to stop his own freefall. He used his sword as leverage, digging it into anything that would hold, tumbling down the giant’s body like a loosened pebble from a jagged ravine.
Until finally, he crashed to the cold, hard ground, the breath knocked out of him for a blinding, agonizing moment. Good news was, his bones seemed intact, his immortal strength and stone-hard frame transcending his human form.
He tried to stand and look for Eir. He could feel her close by. Injured but not mortally.
Her shout came to him in a haze.
He must have knocked his head in the fall. Everything was spinning around him, the sky and ground changing direction, one down while the other was up. He could not make heads or tails.
A great shadow descended upon him, as if the sky was falling, and he put up his hands reflexively to ward it off.
Little good it did, however, when the jötunn’s hairy foot was stomping him into the ground.
~ * ~* ~ *~ * ~* ~ *~ * ~
Eir staggered unsteadily to her feet, watching in horror as the Frost Giant’s foot came down on top of Kai with a resounding, earthshaking boom.
No man could have survived that. There was a crater in the rock-hard, frozen earth from the force of the monster’s stomp.
The jötunn looked stunned himself, his one good eye in front widening slightly in disbelief, as if he was surprised by his own strength, or how easily it was to defeat his tiny foe.
But then, his features contorted in a teeth-baring grimace as he stretched his mouth wide in a deafening howl.
Before Eir’s eyes, a row of thick thorns, each one as large in circumference as her waist, rose beneath the giant’s foot. The longest one in the middle spearing directly into his sole, all the way through the top of his foot.
The giant pulled his mangled limb off of the row of spikes with an agonized roar, the sound of flesh tearing so loud, Eir heard it from where she stood.
As the jötunn staggered back, a bronze dragon reared up from his crouch, turning to face the giant with jaws wide, tail coiled and ready to strike, letting out its own thunderous roar.
