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“You’re missing the point.” Bolas dropped the playful mockery in favor of a darkly infinite certainty. “I am the end of your tale.”

Tezzeret frowned, and clouds gathered overhead, spitting jagged lightning.

He cleared his throat, and the Metal Island trembled with earthquake.

He lifted his hands, and the eldritch energies of the etherium around him supercharged his layered shields until he blazed with power, brighter than the sun itself. “Do we need to have this conversation all over again?”

The dragon bared his fangs. “Want to see a trick?”

“No.”

“One little trick. You’ll love it. I promise.”

“Watch mine instead.” Tezzeret made a fist, and from the sand shot upward girders of etherium thicker than a man’s chest that in an instant had curled around the dragon and braided themselves into an impenetrable cage that flared with every color of power. “Don’t try to draw mana, and don’t touch the bars. I tell you this for your own protection.”

The dragon shrugged carelessly. “You showed me yours. Let me show you mine.”

“Save it.”

“But it’s a really good trick. Here, watch,” Bolas said, and vanished.

Utterly and completely, as though he had never been there at all.

Instantly Tezzeret slapped his hands together in front of him, interlacing his fingers. The bars of the etherium cage became razor-sharp blades and crushed themselves into a jaggedly solid mass.

But among them he found no bloody chunks of dragon.

The dragon’s footprints were gone from the etherium sand, and no trace of even his previous presence could be detected by any magic Tezzeret could command.

He looked over his shoulder at Baltrice and Jace. The Webs of Restraint that had bound them were gone, and both of them were stirring from their magically enforced unconsciousness. Rubbing her eyes, Baltrice pushed herself dizzily up to a sitting position. “What’s going on?”

“Something bad.”

“Where’s the dragon?”

“I don’t know. That’s why it’s bad,” Tezzeret said. “Get ready to fight.”

“I’d rather not,” she said, even as she climbed to her feet and shook her shoulders loose. Flames kindled in her hair and licked down along her arms. “This is not exactly a big red-mana kind of place.”

“You’re welcome to go find one.” Tezzeret extended his arms, and the sand beneath his feet poured upward along his legs, trunk, arms, and head until he was fully encased in shining etherium armor.

Baltrice made a face. “That stuff again. Think it’s gonna work this time?”

“We’ll find out. Meanwhile, you’ll want to protect Jace.”

“Jace?” Her eyes clouded over. “Yeah, I better. Hey, boss, you awake?”

Jace groaned and rolled onto his side. “What happened?” he said faintly. “Did we make it? I was having the weirdest dream…”

Baltrice looked at Tezzeret. “This would be a really good time for you to take your doohickey out of his brain.”

“I disagree,” the mechanist replied, as Nicol Bolas flickered back into existence right in front of him.

The dragon reared, forelimbs and wings spreading wide, and brutally intense flame rained down upon the artificer. Baltrice barely managed to raise shields around her and Jace. From what she could see, Tezzeret’s armor seemed to be working just fine. He didn’t appear to notice the hellfire raging around him. He made a quick motion of his right fist, as though delivering a punch to an invisible opponent.

And the dragon exploded.

Even without flame or blast, the detonation was spectacular. Enormous chunks of dragon flesh trailing black blood sailed through the air. One great wing whirled out over the sea like a thrown dinner plate and splashed into the water. His hind legs gouged long divergent furrows through the etherium sand; his tail crashed into the trees far along the beach. His head got caught in a high juncture of the etherium spars that made up the Metal Sphinx and dangled there, his eyes still glaring balefully down upon the humans below.

“Hot festering crap!” A flash of fire burned away the thick gobbets of dragon blood that had smeared across Baltrice’s shields. “Did you really just do that?”

“Yes.”

“You just killed Nicol festering Bolas!”

“No.”

Right atop the steaming pile of internal organs, Nicol Bolas flashed back into existence. He stretched forth his talon and annihilating energy poured forth, setting the air itself on fire. The power blasted Tezzeret backward and down, sliding into a deep, steep-sided pit of white-hot etherium sand. The fringes of the back blast alone chewed into Baltrice’s shields so fast that she had to grab Jace and dodge back along the plinth to keep them both from being roasted alive.

The dragon kept pouring the blazing torrent of power into the pit as though he couldn’t be bothered with trivial things such as conserving mana. He blasted Tezzeret with levels of energy that should have killed him along with the artificer, as power of this magnitude could be maintained only by pouring his life into the assault along with every scrap of mana he could gather. The intensity of the attack liquefied the sand, turning the pit into a cauldron filled with molten etherium, into which Tezzeret sank like a sounding stone.

And out from which he arose once more, lifting smoothly into the air as though borne aloft by the power that should have destroyed him.

His armor didn’t even look hot.

He clasped his hands in front of his face, and the dragon’s blast was instantly extinguished. He pushed his doubled fists straight downward like a man hoisting himself out of a pool, and the great dragon himself pitched helplessly headfirst into the molten etherium.

A volcanic eruption of flame and burning metal from below blasted upward around Tezzeret without noticeable effect. The effect on the dragon was more spectacular, as his entire head instantly flash-burned to ash, and his neck roared with flame and burned all the way down to his breastbone.

“Wait…” Baltrice said, scowling. “What in the hells?” How does plain old white-molten metal burn his whole head to ash when a few minutes ago her best shot couldn’t even make the bastard blink?

Tezzeret again displayed no sign of jubilation. He drifted sideways over the huge smoking corpse of the dragon and took up a position on the left forepaw of the Metal Sphinx.

And waited.

Behind him on the plinth, Jace clutched at Baltrice’s arm. “Something’s wrong…”

“Oh, you think? What was your first festering clue?”

“No…” His other hand went to his forehead. “No, it’s the dragon. The dragons.”

“Yeah, that’s what gave it away to me too,” she said, yanking Jace with her to take cover behind the Metal Sphinx’s elbow.

This time two Nicol Bolases appeared simultaneously, on either side of Tezzeret. One simply lashed out and grabbed the artificer, while the other bent his neck to bite the mage in half.

“I’m telling you,” Jace insisted fiercely. “These dragons-these Bolases-they aren’t really Bolas.”

“So what? They’re nothing we want to tangle with.”

“Baltrice, listen-I’ve touched his mind before. And these dragons-they look like him, they might even wield some of his power, but they don’t even have minds. At all.”

“You can read them? Or, y’know, not read them or whatever? What about Tezzeret’s doohickey?”

Jace shook his head. “Maybe it doesn’t work here or something, but that’s not important-”

“Hells it isn’t-that’s what we came here for, which means it’s time to go.” She peered around the vast etherium elbow for a quick look at how Tezzeret was doing.

Both dragons who had restrained him had been reduced to redly glistening skeletal remains, their flesh having melted and dripped away, puddling beneath their bones in huge pools of meat syrup. But now four dragons came at him, two with magic and two with claws and teeth, and to Baltrice’s experienced eye, it looked like Tezzeret was starting to feel the pressure. More and more he seemed to be focusing on defense, and his counterstrikes were no longer instantly lethal.