The Dragon Kings' Forbidden Witch

For a moment, there was absolute silence on the training grounds.

Kaelen stood motionless, his practice sword raised, his eyes burning with something that was not entirely sane. When he spoke, his voice was layered...human words overlaid with something deeper, something primal.

”Again,” he said.

But it wasn’t the word that made everyone freeze.

It was the way he said it. Not as a king speaks to a soldier. But as something else spoke. Something ancient. Something hungry.

The other warriors began to slowly retreat, backing away from the two men in the center of the training ground. They didn’t run because running would be disrespectful, might provoke the king further, but they moved steadily toward the edges of the field, putting distance between themselves and Kaelen.

Captain Rhen, understanding that he had no choice, moved to recover a new practice sword from the rack nearby. His hands trembled as he gripped the wooden hilt. He knew, with the kind of certainty that comes from decades of martial experience, that something catastrophic was building.

He just didn’t know what.

They clashed again.

This time, Rhen pressed forward, unwilling to simply defend. If Kaelen was truly losing control, then perhaps maintaining the illusion of a normal training session was the best way to manage the situation. Perhaps if they continued to follow the normal patterns of combat, the king would exhaust himself and return to his normal state.

It was a desperate hope.

But it was all Rhen had.

Kaelen met the captain’s strikes, and for a few exchanges, it almost seemed like the training might return to normal intensity. Back and forth they moved across the training ground, their wooden swords meeting again and again, the impacts echoing across the field.

But then Kaelen’s next strike came with such tremendous force that it didn’t just block Rhen’s counterattack.

It shattered that wooden sword too.

And this time, Kaelen’s body began to change.

It started subtly....so subtly that Rhen almost didn’t notice. The king’s skin seemed to shimmer, as if heat was radiating from him, distorting the air around his body. But it wasn’t heat that Rhen was seeing. It was something else. Something that belonged to the realm of magic rather than the physical world.

”Your Majesty....” Rhen began.

Kaelen’s hands began to elongate.

It happened slowly at first, but then faster. His fingers stretched, the bones restructuring, becoming longer and more articulated. His fingernails began to darken, to harden, to curve into something that was no longer a nail but was becoming a claw.

The other warriors saw it too. One of them let out a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a prayer.

Kaelen’s entire body began to shimmer now, the distortion visible to every eye on the training ground. Veins of light....silver light, pale and cold, began to trace across his skin like cracks spreading through glass.

His clothing began to tear.

Not from the size of his body, which was still human, but from something else. Something was pushing through his skin...thin, delicate at first, then spreading, expanding.

Scales.

They began at his shoulders and spread downward across his chest and arms. Tiny at first, barely visible, but growing larger with each passing second. Silver scales, pale and lustrous, catching the morning light and refracting it into a thousand pinpricks of brilliance.

Kaelen’s roar, when it came.....was not a human sound.

It was a sound that belonged to something ancient and primal. A sound that came from somewhere deep within the earth, from somewhere that predated human civilization, from somewhere that dwelt in the oldest stories and the deepest fears.

The sound of a dragon.

His face began to shift. His jaw elongated, reshaping itself, his teeth growing sharper and longer. His eyes....already strange, became fully inhuman, the pupils narrowing to slits, the iris taking on a luminescence that seemed to burn from within.

His spine arched, and massive wings began to unfurl from his back, tearing through his clothing as they emerged. The wings were enormous, easily twice the span of his human body, translucent and delicate-looking despite their obvious power. Veins of silver ran through them like the branches of a tree, and the membrane between the bones seemed to glow with an inner light.

The transformation continued, accelerating.

His legs became thicker, more muscular, restructuring into something built for power rather than bipedal balance. His feet spread and hardened, becoming more claw-like, built for gripping and grasping. A tail began to extend from the base of his spine, long and powerful, ending in a sharp point.

And through it all, his body continued to grow.

Not dramatically, but noticeable. Where once he had been a tall human man, he was now becoming something significantly larger. His shoulders broadened. His chest expanded. His frame restructured itself to support the massive wings and the emerging dragon physiology.

The transformation, which had seemed to take forever but had probably lasted only seconds, completed with a final wave of silver light that exploded outward from his body like a shockwave.

When it cleared, standing in the center of the training ground was not a king.

It was a dragon.

He was beautiful and terrible to behold.

His scales were a pale, icy silver that seemed almost white in the early morning light. They covered every inch of his massive body, overlapping slightly, providing armor that was both elegant and impenetrable. The scales caught the light and threw it back in prismatic patterns, making it seem as if he was constantly surrounded by a corona of silver luminescence.

His wings, when he spread them fully, were nearly as impressive as his body. They stretched outward, perhaps forty feet from tip to tip, the translucent membrane catching the light and turning it into a spectrum of pale colors....silvers and blues and hints of violet.

His body was built for speed and precision rather than brute strength. Where Draeven’s dragon form would likely be built for raw power, Kaelen’s was designed for elegance and efficiency. His limbs were relatively slender but obviously muscular. His claws, which had emerged fully from the transformation, were wicked sharp and capable of piercing armor.