Sam came to a stand, leaning his weight against one of the poles supporting the tent. With a jerk, He snapped it free, using it to shore up his missing leg.

Sam narrowed his eyes, taking in his situation. He was naked again, minus a leg. There were men with crossbows on guard towers, men with crossbows on the other side of the fence that surrounded him in every direction. More guards poured in as he swept his gaze across the camp. He was in deep shit.

It hadn’t worked for the ungin, but sometimes smarter animals were easier to fool. Sam threw his head back and laughed, putting every ounce of disdain into his voice that he could manage, pulling from the endless well of anger inside him. The guards glanced at each other as the madman cackled. Sam’s laughter winded down, and he swept a tear from his eye as the guards watched him cautiously.

“You must think quite highly of yourselves, to point your weapons towards one of Tyranus’s chosen!” he shouted with a vicious grin.

“Put the commander down and-“

“SILENCE!” Sam boomed, shouting down the guard, who shrank away from him. Can’t let the other guy get a word in edgewise.

“Do you hopeless fools even know where you are?? Five hundred and fifty-three years ago, Tyranus passed over this very spot, wounded from a battle against the corrupt gods themselves!” he shouted. The guard’s crossbows began to dip as they listened to his tale.

“That very cave!” He shouted, pointing behind himself to the mountainside with unerring accuracy. “Was where our lord rested before continuing on his journey to the east. The blood of our lord himself rests on that ground. This holy land has been given to you to manage out of the generosity of his heart, and you spit in his face!”

Some of the men were looking a little nervous now, almost none of the crossbows were aimed at him any longer. Suckers.

“It was in this very canyon that our god struck down one of the demons of the old elven empire, shrugging off round after round of small arms fire before vanquishing it with teeth and flame!”

Sam clenched his hand tight around the pole supporting him as he searched through the millions of crystal clear memories for any that had anything to do with this canyon. To his surprise, he found more than a few. It looked like this place had some nostalgia for the dragon in its youth.

The guards were becoming pale, as his story had the air of authenticity. All of these things had happened, although it had been Sam hunting the wyrmling down back then, and the bastard had gotten the drop on him and roasted him alive.

“Yes, you’re wondering to yourselves how I know all of these things, that you did not! It is because you have been tested. Tested to see if any of you could discern the truth beneath this humble mountainside.”

“And you did not!” he shouted, causing the assemblage to flinch away from him. “As an arbiter of Tyranus, it is my duty to enact his will across the land, and he-“

“Prove it!” Sam heard a shout from the other side of the fence, quickly echoed by more of the assembled mouth-breathers.

“proof?” Sam demanded. Time to think fast. “PROOF?”

“You dare to question the actions of our god, as if you could question the sun in the sky or the earth beneath your feet?”

“No one here doubts our lord,” the lead man said, bearing a sigil of office, slightly smaller than the one on Sam’s back. “We doubt you.”

Sam stood up straight, desperately concealing the grin that threatened to rise to the surface. They were entertaining the possibility that he might be sent by their god. That was halfway to belief. All he had to do was prove that some of the things he said were true, and they’d buy the rest of it.

Ungin were harder to fool.

“I see. I can reveal to you the holiness of this place, and its deeper connection with your god. After unclouding your eyes, you wouldn’t dare to doubt your god’s will any further, would you?”

“We’ll see.”

Sam dumped the limp body of the commander off his shoulders as easily as taking off a winter coat, causing him to slump to the ground. Before they could regain their senses and point the crossbows at him again, Sam spoke loudly, that all of them would hear.

“Take me there, and I will allow the true believers to see what they have been missing about this holy place!” he pointed over his shoulder, to the cave where he’d met the dragon for the first time.

Boldly, without waiting for assent, Sam hop-marched his way to the gate, glanced over his shoulder and sent Ella a wink. The soldiers at the gate were startled out of their inactivity, and opened the iron fence for him, allowing him to hop through unmolested.

“And someone bring me my leg and clothes, Tyranus damn you!”

In a matter of minutes, Sam lead a procession of fifty guards up the mountainside to where he remembered the cave being.

Sam clomped up the side of the mountain, glancing at the geographical features, matching them up with image of the last glance he’d thrown over his shoulder before entering the cave five hundred years ago. Right about… here.

“Here it is!” Sam said, pointing at a featureless stand of shrubs and dirt-choked roots.

“Here what is?” Drake asked. Sam had gotten the measure of the cruel lieutenant of the camp director over the last half hour, and if he wasn’t surrounded by fifty armed men, he would’ve snapped the guy’s neck twenty-five minutes ago.

As it was, he had to pretend to be interested in how great Tyranus’s guidance was, how subhuman and evil the elves were, how good it felt to hurt them.

“Here, can’t you see?” Sam motioned to the gnarled roots and bushes.

“I see nothing.”

“Lend me a torch.” Sam said, holding out a hand. “The cleansing of flame will reveal this holy place.” Goddamn, talking like this is exhausting. How do they do it?”

Drake narrowed his eyes and took a torch for himself rather than giving one to Sam. He received a waterskin full of oil from a soldier and sprayed the bush down before lighting it on fire. The oil caught, and the flames leapt upward, transforming the scraggly brush into a pillar of flame.

“If there’s nothing there, we’ll be adding your corpse to the fire.” Drake said, his mouth set in a grim line.

They watched the flames consume the bushes, cracking the root-woven earth with heat. Once the last of the branches had been burned down to the ground, and only patches of flickering fire remained, Drake turned to Sam with a raised brow.

“Another skin of oil,” he said, holding out a hand. Another oilskin was placed in his hand in a matter of seconds.

“This is why you failed the test,” Sam said, shaking his head, carefully keeping the oilskin in his peripheries. Sam sank down to his knees and plunged his fist through the cracked and burned roots. Beyond the first four inches of mud and roots was empty space.

It appeared that roots had grown to cover the entrance of the cave and trapped mud, to create the image of a solid mountainside.

Sam grabbed a chunk of the scorched and cracked covering and tore it away, revealing a hole into pitch-blackness about the size of a head. Sam glanced up and met Drake’s frown with a grin before he went back to work tearing earthy chunks away from the cave’s opening.

In a matter of minutes, Sam had opened up a man-sized hole in the heat-blasted earth.

“Can I get that torch now?” he asked, to which a soldier stepped forward and placed the wooden handle in his hand, not noticing or possibly ignoring Drake’s scowl.

Sam ducked his head and entered the cave, carefully keeping the torch away from the ceiling. Best not to snuff it out. In the torch-lit cave, Sam saw a thick bowl of dust covering a dead man’s bones. His bones.

“What is this?” Drake breathed, following behind him. “The crypt of some giant?”

“This is where our god fought against one of the elven machine of war, in the flesh of a man.” Sam said, trying not to lose his cool and laugh at Drake. The skeleton was massive, true, but it was no bigger than Sam himself. Somehow the zealot was viewing the skeleton through subjective eyes. Probably comparing him to the dragon he’s familiar with.

“I don’t see any evidence of our lord being here,” Drake said with a frown. He looked around the cave, which only went back about fifteen feet into the mountain. “Matter of fact, this cave couldn’t contain his majesty.”

Sam felt like scraping his mouth out as the flattering lies rolled off his tongue. “Even our god was young once.” He dipped his hands into the wrist-deep dust and ran his fingers over the cavern floor, until his fingertips caught something smooth.

Sam pulled a brilliant red scale the size of his palm from the dust, watching drake’s eyes go wide with amazement. Hook, line and sinker.

Drake put out his shaking hands and Sam placed the scale into his palm. “You see now, what you were missing?”

“Yes.” Drake whispered.

“Not yet you don’t.” Sam said, leaning forward toward the skull half-buried in the sand.

“What do you mean?”

“You see the outside. You know that Tyranus was here, but you don’t know..”

Sam punctured the brittle skull with two of his fingers, probing the cranium until he retrieved the Implant, pulling a shiny chip the size of a folded dollar bill, writhing with faintly glowing tendrils.

“What your god wants you to do.”

“What is that?” Drake swallowed and leaned away from the unnatural device.

“It’s a relic of the old gods, corrupting this ancient battleground. It is an evil thing the ancients used to bind demons to their service. It can only be destroyed by our god himself. I will return it to him.”

“I see.” Drake said, nodding.

“Do you understand my mission now?” Sam asked, staring into the sadist zealot’s eyes.

“I do.” He nodded. ”What does Tyranus require of us?”

“That’s right, round all of them up,” Sam said, sipping wine from one of Marcus’s goblets. The director of the camp still hadn’t woken up, and Drake had been generous enough to restore all of Sam’s possessions and provide him with some much-needed nourishment.

“Tyranus requires their sacrifice to reach the next realm of divinity. When he adds their lives to his own, the flow of power from him will redouble and our people will finally throw off the shackles of oppression.” Or some such. Sam took another sip of wine.

The soldiers were busily shoving the population of the camp into the so-called factory. The Factory itself was a massive construction of steel buried in the mountainside opposite Billy’s little hidey-hole. Sam was going over the memories of the facility. It had been a testing facility, where the eggheads of the past, like professor Carl Simon had studied the elves, trying to unlock their secrets.

The elves were herded through the narrow corridor, their feet tromping over the metal grates set into the floors. The room that Sam sat and watched them flow into was massive, filled with pristine white paneling, and an empty platform opposite two dozen seats with restraints. The rest of the room was filled with technology from five hundred years ago. There were jeeps, howitzers, radios, all kinds of things that would make Tyranus’s army more effective, stacked against every corner of the building.

There were no guns, however. It seemed like Billy didn’t want people shooting guns at him. It was unlikely someone would be able to steal a howitzer without the dragon noticing, and even less likely they would be able to hit him with it.

Not only that, but why would you want your slaves producing guns? That seems like a bad idea. One way or another they’d sneak bits and pieces out until they had a handful of guns to overthrow the camp with.

Better yet, why would Tyranus want to advance human technology and launch them into the actual industrial revolution? Better to keep them unknowingly reliant on him for every military advantage they had. Normally that would be a problem when the leader died, but the dragon’s life expectancy was greater than most nations. Sam didn’t even know if a dragon could die of old age.

“Hmm…” He said, glancing at the center of the room. There were matching runes in elvish around the restraining chairs and the empty platform. Looks like they were sucking power from the elves’ Yuenan to fuel a magical reaction that would duplicate whatever was placed on the empty space. That was why his Yuenan had periodically shrank while he was trapped by the collar, he’d been strapped in and drained while he was unconscious.

Neat. If Sam still had the VAMPR, he’d be able to make some duplicates, and he and the elves could blast their way out of this place. Hell, if he still had the gun, a lot of things would be different.

He tapped his fingers against his arm, watching the passing elves for Faera and Ella, the only two living elves that he knew besides Theold. When he saw Ella go by, he snaked a hand out and yanked her out of the tide of elves. The guards glanced up at the sudden motion, but when they saw the scowl on Sam’s face, they went back to their business.

Ella watched him with hesitant eyes, unwilling to place too much hope on one person.

“I need you to get everyone to calm down and be ready to act. You’re one of their leadership, yeah? That’s what I heard?”

She nodded.

“Good, you’ll know it when you see it, just make sure you’re ready to move.”

“Are you...Are you really Sam?”

“I’m a lot of people, sweetcheeks.” he said, gently pushing her back into the line.

“Get moving, rats!” Sam said in a stage-yell as he winked. “Thank lord Tyranus that your miserable lives end today and you become part of something greater than yourself!” The surrounding elves sent him looks of dismay as they walked.

No matter how long Sam waited, he didn’t see Faera in the crowd steaming past him.

After half an hour, Sam stood in front of the entire population of the elf camp, walking up and down the assembly from his vantage point atop the duplicating platform. He glanced at the corners, where less than a dozen men stood watch over more than five hundred. Five hundred beaten, malnourished, weak, sickly elves.

His peg leg sent out a sharp clang on the metal platform as he paced.

“Some of you might know me as S4M. The scourge, oldest of Tyranus’s followers, blessed with long life through obescience to his great power. If you don’t recognize me, that’s fine, I’ve been beyond the veil working in our lord’s great name the last five hundred years.”

The oldest elves scattered through the assembly showed looks of extreme confusion. They knew who he was, and they knew he was lying. He saw it dawn in their eyes: If he was lying, this entire assembly might be a ruse.

“You and I have been chosen to be the last sacrifices to honor our glorious god…” Sam glanced over at Drake, who was hustling up beside him.

“The doors are locked and barred from the outside.” Drake said. “One way or another they’ll-“

Sam punched him in the throat.

“Thank god that’s over.” Sam seized Drake by the neck and tossed him to the ground.

“I guess that’s the signal,” Sam heard Ella’s mutter. He caught a brief glimpse of her shaking her head in the front row before he turned toward the remaining soldiers. Some drew their swords while others simply stared, uncomprehending.