To illustrate her point, Zel willed a trigonal tower of blackstone to rise from the sands behind her, its unimpeachable form covered in eldritch evershifting glyphs pulsing with magenta light. She truly played up the glyphs’ unreadability to compensate for the fact she herself didn’t know a single one, and in this realm where her will was reality, it was an impenetrable bluff.

“Oho, you catch on quickly… But not quickly enough for my liking. It is true that Victor and I must do battle for control over his body and soul, and indeed we must become one, but these are the only conditions to see my prophecy fulfilled. If these criteria are met, my legacy shall be carried forth into eternity, and I shall live to see him struck down - that fool who thought to cut short the glorious legacy of I and my comrades. Tian Feng. So I foresaw when I ventured into the Sea of Fog, and so it shall be. Preparing the boy to have the best possible chance in our inevitable clash does not conflict with my desires, least of all because such growth will also make him all the more an ideal vessel for my legacy. There is one other thing about which I would speak with you.”

“Then speak, dead man.”

“Oh, you wound me!” Koschei gasped, feigning being taken aback by the epithet counter to his self-imposed title of “Undying”. He then smirked and raised his staff, and its eye came alive, from it springing forth the image of a great titan with flesh like stone and an empty, cycloptic eye socket within which shone a baleful lilac glow. Its mouth had the likeness of a skull’s grinning visage, gaping open as a horn-like roar blasted out of it. It had the same glow at the back of its throat as the Ankhezian Titans of the Deterrence Fields.

“I would speak of this. The last of my Titans, and the first I ever built: Teutobochus! With seven hearts and a reactor core akin to an artificial Dragonstone, it will never run out of power so long as the Sea of Fog stirs and its hearts beat - just like a real Dragon Descendant. I sent him to Borea with one task: To ensure none - be they Tian Feng, Borean, or Ankhezian - would have the chance to lay hands upon a certain Fallen Star, so that I could claim it for myself and the Triarchy, that we might use it to arm the second generation of titans with arms fit to slay Tian Feng’s giant bioweapons, and from its core produce arms for our elite warriors. The so-called Dragon of Arches - Ten Billion Fathoms - was one of Feng’s creations. He unearthed its Dragonstone from an Ankhezian vault and used its power to mutate uncountable men and beasts alike, using his genocide of our subjects to build a new body for the eye to take root in. That was the main reason for its preternatural size, a means of compensating for the fact its power was the lowest among Five-eyed Dragons.”

“Alright, where are you going with this? And why does Teutobochus only have one eye?”

“Be patient! I swear, you kids… Teutobochus has one eye because I reused the skeleton of a dead Ankhezian Titan, since Nameless hadn’t yet mastered blackstone…” he snapped, defensively grumbling under his breath as he rubbed his chin. “Where was I… Ah, right. I listened in on your conversation with that smith. Perhaps this will make you more willing to let the enantiomorph take place: Once we are one, whoever is in control, be it I or him, shall possess the full authority of the Second King, and with it, command over Teutobochus.”

“A buried Fallen Star and a means to not only excavate and transport it, but to battle Eisengeist on advantageous grounds… This feels a touch too convenient.”

“A giant humanoid with an essentia cannon in its mouth is a terribly versatile tool.”

“Essentia cannon?”

“Come now, of course an anti-dragon weapon must have an answer to a dragon’s breath,” he said, raising his staff once more. In the distance, from the endless desert’s stands rose up a huge dragon with five eyes and four horns. The illusory titan turned its head, its mouth opening well beyond the ability of any human, narrow torch-flames forming around the edges of the hollow and closing in on the center. Whence the dragon opened its own mouth and set forth a deluge of flame towards the giant, so too did from the titan’s mouth erupt a counter. A screaming ray of bright magenta, ripping through the dragon’s flame and carving away its head. Both thoughtforms slumped over and turned to sand, blowing away into nothing.

“It is the Inverse Array, able to funnel the full output of the titan’s Inverse Whirlpool Reactor out through its mouth and amplify it through methods esoteric to even I, known only to the First King. I had originally named it the Dragonslayer Array, but Kama’tok already had a weapon by that name, and he'd based it on the Inverse Sorceress' feats of dragonslaying, hence the… Regardless, the Inverse Array happens to be one of the few ways to cut into glacierglass with any speed, hence why I sent Teutobochus rather than a mining contingent. Now you shall have the opportunity to make use of my meticulous preparation to forge a weapon that… May one day become something comparable to legitimate artifacts from the height of the Ankhezian Empire.”

“I still won’t break the seal before I am certain that Victor will be remain himself,” Zel said.

“I do not expect you to. I shall confess that I had prepared these thoughtforms and this speech in case you intended to permanently separate me from Victor, and I thought it would be a terrible waste to leave them unused. There is one major limitation you must heed: The Inverse Array will drain Teutobochus’ reactor and send it into a low-performance recovery state after it is fired on its Anti-Dragon setting, effectively making the titan unable to fight afterwards.”

After considering everything the wizard had said, both halves of Zelsys said: “Thank you. I will expel you from my dreamscape now.”

He was gone before she could do as she said she would.