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I slip back into the straps of my sheath, tightening the buckles across my chest. When I grab the axe from the table, Dorothy finally blinks, caught by the movement.

“Tell me about it,” she says.

I return the axe to my back and the heaviness of it is an immediate comfort.

“We don’t have time.” Our hours are numbered. We should be moving.

“This is arguably the most important fact about this entire thing. I need to know about it.”

I sigh. “It was forged by my father. He was a westerner, a miner and a blacksmith. He was a product of his upbringing, a man with calloused hands and a body that eventually broke down from the endless hammering and digging required of someone whose sole purpose was to work. Eventually, he had to stop both, and that’s when he got curious about metals and metal alloys.”

As she listens, Dorothy grabs two glasses from a cabinet in the kitchen and fills them with a swill of rum.

“I imagine at some point he must have been surprised at how eager his mind was to do the work of thinking. I’m not sure he was ever given the chance to look beyond the utility of his body until his body could do no more. But he had spent his life surrounded by metal. He knew it well. And for as long as anyone could remember, the mountains in the west contained veins of a metal called emeralium.

“It had a green hue when at its purest and it was rare to find. Because it was so rare, no one dedicated time to finding it. There was too little of it to forge weapons. Generally, it was only used for jewelry and sometimes the decorative elements of ironwork. But my father started experimenting with metal alloys and decided to risk what little emeralium he had by smelting it with steel. What he created was my axe and two days later, he was dead.”

Dorothy’s eyes widen.

“As the story goes, he was found dead in his shop. There was no physical harm to him and nothing that indicated drugs, alcohol, or any other ailment.”

“What was your theory on it?”

I shrug. “I was just a boy. I’m not sure I had a theory at the time. But my mother did.”

“Glinda,” she says.

“Yes.”

“What was her theory?”

I join Dorothy at the counter and take up the glass in my metal hand. “Her theory was the metal alloy created a weapon that could kill the gods and the gods killed my father so the knowledge would be lost. Any notes he had taken had disappeared.”

“Why not destroy the axe too?”

“There is a prevailing theory in Oz that if you’re magical, that which destroys you cannot be destroyed by you. It’s a theory on divine balance.”

“I see. So you took the axe?”

“Oddly enough, I was the only one who could lift it, touch it, possess it. Others tried and failed. The only time someone could handle it was if I gave them permission.”

“Did you use it?”

“Only for wood chopping.” I smile to myself, thinking of the days spent in the woods surrounded by the scent of pine and fresh split wood. I always loved the forest. I felt most at home there. But just as quickly as the memory comes, it fades because there is no emotion, no care left to hold on to it.

I tip the glass back and swallow down the rum.

“Has it ever been used to kill a god?”

The glass rings out when I set it on the counter. “Not by me. Not by my hand.”

“Was there a time you did not possess the axe?”

There it is.

“Yes,” I answer.

She has not taken a drink of her rum, but she swallows anyway. “Was it just before the gods disappeared?”