Educating people on the foundations and basic uses of magic had been one thing, an amusing and oftentimes rewarding task I had undertaken with a fair amount of interest, simply because it allowed me to refine and reaffirm my own understanding of the subject. As the ancients used to say, to teach a subject is the best way to master it, or something like that.

Educating giants was, well, it was different. With Naya, the only giant I was truly working on at the moment, there were moments of success but those didn’t feel as rewarding, especially not when considering the many moments of frustration I had to endure to make things work. What I considered even worse was that my success, especially the early ones, demonstrated a fairly large problem with my approach.

Namely, that giants were a fantastically unbalanced species when it came to their cognitive abilities. When I projected thoughts and images about physical tasks, guiding Naya to become a stronger and better fighter, the results were nothing short of phenomenal. When I tried to show her practical things, like a better way to set up her fire, using images of Sigmir teaching me those skills on Mundus, the results were, at best, mediocre. Not terrible but a far cry from the sheer brilliance Naya demonstrated when it came to anything combat-related. Lastly, when I tried to teach her about philosophy or anything largely spiritual, that’s where the failures started.

Naya accepted the raven I used to communicate with her, but anything else was considered either enemy or prey in her mind, and her responses matched that closely. Trying to get her to deal with other beings outside of her fight or flight mode was an exercise in futility, to the point that I wondered if I would ever be able to communicate with her directly. If I ever wanted to, that is, at the moment, I was doing my very best to have the raven act as a messenger from another being, trying to imply that said being was Sigmir. If it worked, Naya, and the giants I wanted her to lead eventually would embed faith in Sigmir deeply into their social and possibly even racial heritage, to the point that they might consider Sigmir their creator-deity.

Which might even work, given that I was getting convinced that these giants had never been human, nor Shattered for that matter. I had no idea how they might have come about but the observations by Luna, Lia and me all pointed to a similar conclusion. These individuals had somehow appeared here, or perhaps they had been transformed from some normal animal, such as a bear, but humans had no involvement in it. Which was, quite frankly, incredibly weird to consider, especially as we had been unable to find any sort of divine influence on them either, so there wasn’t some god out there who had placed them here for their own reasons. Nor had my scrying constructs been able to detect anything like the World Tree we had seen near the village filled with dryads and elves; there was no source of extraordinary power in the area.

The only thing I could think of was the Nexus we were headed for but, for one, that Nexus was still fairly far away and, for another, I had no idea if that would even work. The Nexuses were, as far as I knew, merely convergences within the Astral River where a tremendous amount of Astral Power surged up from deep within the planet and the Astral River, creating a conflux of power.

I could imagine that a Nexus might generate some simple, purely elemental creatures. Some sort of glacially slow-moving blob of Liquid Moonlight akin to the slimes in older video games for a Nexus based around Ice, or maybe a living, moving wildfire for one aligned to Fire. But how would it be able to create anything as complex as these giants without some sort of blueprint? Creatures this complex should be the result of millennia of natural selection, though something with their physique would only work in conjunction with Astral Power or some other supernatural force. Otherwise, their bodies just didn’t make sense, with their, well, gigantic size, massively sturdy physique and incredible strength.

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Alas, magic was a thing and, in this case, magic created some fairly impressive specimens, allowing them to become as large as they were. If only magic also included some form of society, though maybe it was for the best it didn’t. If it had, I wouldn’t be able to try to convert them to Sigmirism, or whatever I would eventually call their religion. Would I be considered the first faithful of said religion for worshipping SIgmir in many, many ways, or would I be part of Sigmir’s myth, the Adam to her Steve, so to say?

Regardless, I considered it close to impossible that a Nexus created the giants without some form of outside interference or blueprint. Said interference might come from the system, and thus be as unguided as it could be, but that was the option with the least outside interaction involved. Otherwise, there was some entity out there who had decided that these giants should be here and, unless I completely missed my guess, said entity was somewhat associated with Mundus. Runes, as far as I could see from a very, very limited sample size of two, changed style depending on their world of origin, meaning that the runes I had learned on Mundus were distinct from runes I might have learned on a different world.

Though it was also possible that runes weren’t distinct to worlds but to species, meaning that my runes were linked to my Firnelven heritage and thus indirectly to giants, which would, in turn, invalidate my idea entirely. With that possibility in mind, I decided to direct my focus elsewhere.

Namely, I tried to see if I could improve Naya’s interest and comprehension of non-physical topics by introducing magic to the mix. The problem was that any physical task could be guided fairly easily by showing her images of Sigmir acting as a teacher, either using my memories of her or by imagining my beloved acting out the role. Magic, on the other hand, was an entirely different pony. Without some form of verbal communication, I couldn’t even begin to have Naya use her Astral Power, let alone channel it outside of her body.

If anything, I thought I might have a better chance to guide her on the path of Divine Magic, but without Sigmir out there, already able to accept those prayers in her name, I wasn’t about to try.

So, the focus remained on physical lessons and slow but steady attempts at turning Naya into a slightly more cerebral creature. It was a process that would take a long, long time, even with the system and magic involved and speeding things up. Usually, it would take numerous generations of selective breeding, actively seeking to encourage social and interactive traits in the produced offspring; however, I wasn’t willing to wait that long, at least not if I could find a faster option.

And I certainly wasn’t about to stay in this area of the forest for a task that would take decades, maybe even centuries, depending on the giant’s maturation process.

Meaning, while I could continue my lessons with Naya, I also had to observe the various other giants and make a list, trying to determine which of them would be suitable to take along. Those, I was planning to guide towards the Nexus. Hopefully, I would be able to establish a territory in the area for them, allowing them to spread out initially. However, I was actively planning to turn the solitary giants, focused on their own little territories, into a social species. Even if that might be a fairly tricky task, I considered it a necessary one.

Otherwise, if they all remained solitary, I would likely be unable to guide them all into worshipping Sigmir and establish her as a divinity. Additionally, while a ring of solitary creatures living around the Nexus was a somewhat valuable defence, having a slowly growing empire of giants settled around the Nexus and revering it as the home of their divine creator would make a much better defence. Especially if I could guide them into coexisting with dragons, few beings would voluntarily try to assault an empire composed of giants and dragons, living in the frozen north.

It was a wonderful image, an entire civilisation, giants and dragons, living together under the guidance of their divine creators, an empire dedicated to learning, the arcane and their divine couple. Granted, I would have to add in some form of worship to Lady Hecate, to keep Luna happy, and obviously, there had to be other vampires for Lia, but other than those, I could almost see it in my mind’s eye.

Now, I just had to bring the fantastic images to life.