Witchbreaker (Dragon Apocalypse) by James Maxey Page A

out, carrying a basket filled with dried meats and cheeses, provisions she’d packed for her expedition. The two forest pygmies had dark green skin the color of moss and were naked except for bright red gourds they wore over their penises. Their green hair was pulled back into braids. Each carried a short spear tipped with a stone point. They moved as quietly as cats, craning their necks around to make sure no one had seen them.
    They both looked right at Sorrow as if she wasn’t even there. They turned their backs to her and began to walk away, then, in unison, froze and slowly looked back over their shoulders. Both of their mouths fell open at exactly the same time.
    Sorrow felt like being tall and she became so, rising up on her tail until she loomed above them by several body lengths.
    “Drop the basket and no one gets hurt,” she said.
    They dropped the basket, though whether they understood her words was debatable. They began to shout in a language she didn’t recognize, their voices deep and booming despite their diminutive stature. Both reared back and threw their spears. Sorrow swayed out of the path of one missile, but the second spear struck her on one of the scaly bands where her knees had once been. She flinched, but the spear bounced off.
    Sorrow ran her fingers along the impact point to make certain she was okay. She couldn’t even feel a scratch. In addition to being tall, she was also spear-proof. At least, parts of her were.
    When she looked up, she found that the two pygmies were at least a hundred yards away, leaves and dirt flying as they fled headlong over the graves before finally vanishing in the underbrush.
    Sorrow picked up the basket and removed a hunk of beef jerky. She chewed it slowly as she contemplated what would’ve happened if the spear had flown a yard higher. She suspected that, unless she could find a way to reverse the changes to her body, she would have to get used to people’s first reaction being to throw things at her.
    After washing the jerky down with water from her canteen, she slithered back to the hilltop. Despite the massiveness of her new form, her motions were surprisingly silent. The whisper of her smooth scales sliding across one another was much quieter than her footsteps had been. She also took note of her speed. Though she didn’t feel like she was moving terribly fast, she made it back up the hill as swiftly as if she’d sprinted. She would have preferred not to be a hideous reptilian abomination, but she tried to take some comfort that her new body had its strong points.
    Of course, while the new parts of her physical form were stronger and tougher, she was still greatly concerned about the safety of her old, non-spear-proof human parts. Fortunately, the dragon’s shattered coffin provided plentiful raw material to ameliorate her vulnerabilities. Glass had a reputation for brittleness, but during her years of working with the substance she’d learned it could be spun into long, thin, interweaving fibers that could be sealed inside a matrix of smoother glass. This woven glass was practically shatterproof, much lighter than iron, and quite tough.
    She found a large piece of black glass and held it above her head. Her fingers sank into it as it liquefied, turning into slow moving black molasses that seeped down her arms and flowed over her shoulders. Inspired by the diamond pattern of her lower half, she willed the threads to form overlapping scales of black glass. In a few moments, she’d turned the glass into a suit of jet black scale armor that matched her bodily scales in gloss and shape. There was just barely enough material left to form a dark, gleaming helmet to conceal her face. Only her hands remained bare; her magical abilities required her to touch the substances she commanded.
    She returned to the mirror she’d made earlier. It was almost impossible to tell where her armor ended and her scales began. With her face hidden, she looked even less