Stealing from Wizards
Date Published: 11-04-2025
Excerpt
He had been looking for the dragon somewhere in the room. But the dragon was the room. Kuro had to spin to take her all in.
Her body circled the cavern three times, a serpentine form interrupted only briefly by four muscular limbs. What he had initially believed were crystalline formations on the walls of the cave were her scales. Each one was like a cut gem: a scalloped, polished, iridescent jewel—shimmering like the veil in the light of the glowing gold. Together, the overlapping scales formed a mosaic of blues and greens, whites and reds, like swirls of ocean currents wrestling with flowers in the wind.
Her head, he was not prepared for and found himself disbelieving it even as he gazed into her astonishing eyes. Her irises were a landscape of gold, copper, and bronze ridges around vertical slitted pupils of perfect black, bottomless wells of darkness. Scaled lips were pulled back to expose a menacing grin of curved, pointed, interlocking teeth, each easily as long as he was tall. Twisting elegant horns gave her a crown of ivory spirals, and a frill of extra-long scales about her neck looked almost like a lion’s mane made of cut glass.
She was magnificent, monstrous, beautiful, and incomprehensibly large.
Unlike the stuffed and mounted dragon heads he had seen displayed by wizards—tiny, ugly, vicious in comparison—her face was full of life and expression. She appeared amused, curious, perhaps a little mischievous.
“I understand wizards to be quite dangerous,” she said, her thoughts crashing through Kuro’s mind like a stampede of elephants.
Then, faster than anything that large had any right to be, she pounced, her face stopping mere feet from him, her muzzle occupying his entire field of view. “Should I be afraid?”
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