“Well, I can’t do much about it now,” Cayce said. “Hask may have already done it. He probably also destroyed himself, you, and me in the process.”
Vaan shook his head. “Hask did extraordinary damage to the impostor’s body, but that will never be enough. You must use the Hand of Righteous Retribution to finish this once and for all.”
“Me? How? I don’t know any of the ritual he was performing to make it work. And didn’t he say it could only be drawn twice?”
“Hask is a fool,” Vaan said bitterly, “but I needed him to bring the sword—it truly is powerful enough to slay the beast if properly employed. Yes, the Hand of Righteous Retribution has been drawn once, in anger as the ritual demands. Hask believes it can only be drawn once more, in wisdom. For anger is the spark that begins retribution, but wisdom is the only path to true justice.”
“I don’t have wisdom,” Cayce said. “I hardly have anger, to tell you the truth. All I feel right now is fatigue and fear. Plus, I haven’t been righteous in a long, long time. Somehow I don’t think I’m the one to summon the full power of the sword.”
“The Hand is a weapon that anyone can use at any time, provided they allow its enchanted energy to build up between uses. The restrictions Hask follows are merely an ancient ruse perpetuated by priests and generals to prevent the Hands wielder from running rampant with it.”
Cayce paused. “It’s a lie?”
“A long-held and well-guarded lie. But I was able to learn the truth behind it… as you have done. This counts as wisdom, Tania Cayce, which should put your mind at ease when you take up the sword. Listen to me now: I will give you more wisdom, complete wisdom, and you will set me free.”
“I will?” Cayce was growing increasingly uncomfortable. “I don’t even know where we are right now.”
“We are still in the cave. I have taken you here to tell you the dragon’s final secret, the one that will destroy him once and for all.”
“So, we’re actually lying unconscious in the cave, cooking in the light of Hask’s vengeance sword.”
“In a manner of speaking. You are in no mortal danger, but time is precious. I must tell you how to defeat the machine beast.”
“How can you do that with the geas still in place?”
Vaan smiled helplessly. “Behold: the origin of our misery.”
The hilltop shimmered and ran like melting wax. When the scene solidified, Cayce was back in the dragon’s treasure trove, only now it was well lit, meticulously ordered, and immaculately maintained.
“My people were enslaved,” Vaan’s voice said. In the vision, Cayce saw the familiar form of a huge blue-and-white scaled dragon. He sat regally on the chamber platform atop a carefully constructed mound of diamonds and platinum coins. Dozens of tiny pixies danced in the air around the great beast, showering him with reflective dust.
“Zumaki of the Bottomless Pool was not a harsh master,” Vaan said. “He was an old dragon, and he had already amassed enough treasure to sustain him and entertain him for the rest of his long life. In his dotage, however, he found a new kind of bauble to delight his eye: pixie glamour.”
Silent as a sleepwalker, Cayce watched as a score of tiny blue men and women circled the great dragon, singing a joyful song as they filled the air with illusory magic.
“But glamour and wish fulfillment can be a burden on the strongest of wills,” Vaan said. “As the mind is indulged, the body and spirit suffer. Grander, more absorbing fantasies become compelling, even compulsory. The longer you indulge your innermost desires, the harder it is to live in the real world.
“Zumaki was an old dragon, and a powerful one. He had the power to imprint his mind on lesser ones, to force his will upon the weak and undisciplined. So his mind was especially resistant to the corrosive allure of glamour. If the machine dragon hadn’t come, Zumaki would have probably lived another hundred years and died of old age before he ever felt the negative effects of our magic.”
The scene before Cayce changed. The glowing lights of the treasure trove dimmed as a half-wrecked, smoking horror dragged itself into the chamber.
“It was a fak mawa,” Vaan said. “A living engine of destruction in the shape of a dragon. They came by the hundreds during the Machine Invasion, and this one came to us bearing wounds from some titanic battle. During that battle, its opponent had torn it to pieces and seared almost half of its body away. We never knew how long it wandered after sustaining its terrible injuries. Months? Years? Decades? It was never truly alive, but by the time it reached Zumaki’s mountain it was more than half-dead.”
The pixies fled from the broken, sputtering machine. Zumaki, his expression dull as if he’d just come out of a deep sleep, hissed at the metal horror. Power sparked in his eyes, and Zumaki focused on the machine’s half-ruined head.
“I believe now it was some kind of infiltrator,” Vaan said. “Designed to get close enough to living things to infect them with its machine virus. Once infected, it could absorb their bodies into its own.”
Zumaki’s throat swelled, and he spat a jagged ball of energy at the machine dragon. The impact blasted the metal monstrosity across the chamber. Zumaki crawled up the walls of his treasure trove and skittered across the ceiling, closing in to finish his opponent off.
“My master could have survived,” Vaan said. “If he had simply burned the fak mawa to cinders from a distance or brought a piece of the mountain down upon it to mash it flat. But Zumaki was an intellectual being, and a curious one. He decided to try his power on the machine beast to see if its mind could resist his.”
The vision of Zumaki fixed his eyes on the twisted metal hulk and slowly extended his head down. As he approached, a cloudy stream of blue energy rose between the two dragons, linking the live beast’s eyes to the fading machine’s. The connection completed itself, and Zumaki drew glittering blue light from the mechanical dragon into himself.
Suddenly Zumaki stiffened. The flow of arcane energy shifted from the ceramic-scaled beauty to the fak mawa. A tendril of black metal with a vein of gold through its center stretched up from the machine dragon’s body. It curled above Zumaki’s head then plunged down into the top of the live dragon’s skull.
The blue energy flowing from the fak mawa was now mirrored by a steady stream of black metal and golden oil surging up into the live dragon’s brain. The two great beasts struggled at either end of this dread circuit, each trying to consume the other while resisting his own consumption.
Vaan continued. “Even in defeat, Zumaki triumphed. Though the machine dragon destroyed my master’s beautiful mind, Zumaki’s power and personality imprinted on the fak mawa. My master’s brain became black slag and glistening oil, but his mind endured.”
The vision expanded so that Cayce’s entire view consisted of the fak mawa and Zumaki of the Bottomless Pool. The machine dragon twitched and sputtered, casting sparks and gobs of golden oil across the treasure trove. Its body began to unravel and molten pieces of black metal flaked off and fell to the floor, dissolving the stones below.
Above the horror of the disintegrating fak mawa, Zumaki sighed and closed his eyes. The great old dragon listed backward, but tethered as he was to the machine, his body could not fall. Cayce heard an awful grinding noise that quickly became unendurable, then the poisoner’s apprentice winced as Zumaki’s head exploded, leaving a blood-black smear across the cavern ceiling.
“In death, they defeated each other.” Vaan recited his tale’s end as a dolorous prayer. “In death, they became one, both more and less than each had been. In death, they combined to become something far more terrible.”
“But they are still linked. Even in this life-death—perhaps because of it—they are still connected, still vulnerable to each other. Destroy Zumaki’s skeleton with the same stroke that destroys the fak mawa’s body, and I will be free. My people are all gone. Only I remain. Only I was spared to preserve the hybrid beast’s vanity, to preserve the fiction that he is still the master I once served. He will never allow me to leave, for I would take that illusion with me.” Vaan’s voice grew low and haggard. “Go I must, one way or the other. Anything is preferable to an eternity of servitude to a mindless impostor.”