Secret Histories feats (The Man With The Golden Torc)

The Hand of Glory, an item originally introduced in the Nightside series, gets some further explanation here:

I reached through my golden side with my golden hand, easy as plunging my hand into water, and took out the Hand of Glory I’d been sent by the family Armourer, just for this mission. The Hand of Glory is a human hand cut off a hanged man right after he’s died, and then treated in certain unpleasant ways so that the fingers become candles. Light these candles, in the right way and with the right Words, and the Hand of Glory can open any lock, reveal any secret. The family makes these awful things out of the bodies of our fallen enemies. We do other things with the bodies too, really quite appalling things. Just another reason not to get us mad at you. -The Man With The Golden Torc

A higher-dimensional entity (likely a psychenaut, similar to the one from Hex and the City) appears in Drood Hall, smashes several highly-advanced magical and scientific protections, and then rips the flesh off a dozen people in a moment in order to give itself a physical form:

I felt something approaching from a direction I could sense but not name. It was a Presence, something so vast and alien and utterly other that its terrible nature actually eclipsed and overwhelmed the Heart. It drew closer and closer, straining to materialise inside the Sanctity, trying to force its way in from some other dimension of reality. It seemed to be closing in on us from every direction at once, and just the sense of it was like shit smeared across my soul. Like a mountain of maggots, or the smile the razor blade leaves as it slices through a suicide’s wrists. It was almost upon us, and it hated us, just for being human.
The wood-panelled wall to my left groaned loudly as it bulged inwards, the old wood stretching impossibly, forced out of shape by some unnameable pressure from Outside our three-dimensional reality. The floor rose up at its centre like some monstrous boil, and the ceiling bulged down. All the walls were crying out now, straining inwards towards the Heart. Something was forcing its way into the Sanctity, from some higher or lower dimension, from some place we couldn’t even hope to comprehend. And one by one, all the many layers of protection the family had set in place around the Heart shattered and blew apart, like so many cheap firecrackers.

Family magicians were in the room now, crowding around the Heart, chanting spells and brandishing ancient talismans, trying to set up new defensive parameters. Family scientists worked right there beside them, operating esoteric constructions of weird technology, some of which looked like they’d dragged right in from the testing labs. All kinds of energy fields crackled on the air, but still the awful Presence surrounded us, descending on us from everywhere at once.

And finally, it broke through. Something was just suddenly there in the room with us; or rather, Nothing was. There was a Gap, an Absence, a horrible Void just hanging on the air before the Heart. I couldn’t see or hear it, but I could feel it on a level that had nothing to do with senses. It was as though some terribly old, perhaps even prehuman part of me recognised it. A great sucking pit of the spirit; a hole in reality itself. It pulsed, like some great malignant heart, and then it reached out and sucked the flesh right off those members of the family nearest it.

We lost a dozen men and women in a moment, meat and blood torn from their bones, whole organs flying through the air and into the Void to make it a body, to give it shape and form in this world. The bloody pulp of organs and muscles slammed together, flesh slapping upon flesh, building a body whose shape made no sense, to house and hold the awful thing that had forced its way in from Outside. Bloody bones lay scattered across the floor, unwanted, along with a dozen golden torcs. People were puking and retching everywhere, even as they backed away.

“Armour up!” James yelled. “Everyone! Now!” -The Man With The Golden Torc

Much like the psychenaut from Hex, weapons and magic simply don't work against this thing. This includes Drood armor:

“Stop it!” James yelled. “Don’t let it touch the Heart!”

The Sarjeant-at-Arms had already opened fire, blazing away with both guns at once. James strode forward, pouring bullets into the bloody shape from close range, and I was right there with him, firing my needle gun. Everyone else in the Sanctity opened fire on the mass with whatever weapons they had, crowding forward, ignoring their own safety to protect the Heart. Magicians unleashed curses and damnations, and scientists fired strange energies from stranger weapons…and none of it did any good. The bloody shape absorbed our bullets, and everything else, with equal indifference, pressing slowly but inexorably towards the Heart. Golden armoured hands that could punch through walls or shattered steel flailed at the pulpy mass, and it just ignored us. One armoured man stood defiantly in its path. The scarlet shape sucked him in and spat him out the other side. He thrashed weakly on the floor, screaming like the newly damned. -The Man With The Golden Torc

An elven arrow manages to punch through Eddie Drood's armor:

A dragon and its rider came flying straight at me, only a few feet above the road. I wondered at first if he was planning to ram me, but then I saw him fitting an arrow to his bow, and I smiled. An arrow against my armour. Yeah, right. I reached for the switch to activate the electric cannon and blow him out of my way. The elf lord loosed his arrow. And while I was still reaching for the switch, the arrow punched right through my windshield and through my glorious golden armour, and buried itself in my left shoulder. I slammed back in my seat, crying out in shock and pain, and actually let go of the wheel for a moment to grab at the arrow shaft with both hands. It wouldn’t budge. The car skidded across the lanes. I tugged at the arrow again, crying out in agony, but I couldn’t move it. The extra pain cleared my head like a shock of cold water in the face, and I grabbed the steering wheel and brought the Hirondel under control again. -The Man With The Golden Torc

Some of the things Molly Metcalf has done in the past:

She once changed the magnetic patterns of force over London, just so that all the migrating birds would have to pass over the Houses of Parliament and crap on them. She once worked a subtle magic on certain bed fleas and venereal crabs, making them her eyes and ears so that she could spy on the very important personages who patronised a brothel that specialised in the rich and famous. As a result she learned many interesting things, and blackmailed her victims ruthlessly. As much for the fun of it as the money. One of her victims had to stand up in Parliament and recite the whole of “I’m a little teapot, here’s my spout,” during the prime minister’s question time, before she’d let him off the hook. Given who it was, I quite approved of that one…

And of course there was the time she bribed a group of disgruntled earth elementals into causing massive earthquakes in the bedrock beneath the British mainland. Apparently she wanted to split the United Kingdom into three separate island states: England and Wales and Scotland. I only just stopped that one in time. And she was an enthusiastic part of the Arcadia Project, a gathering of top-rank magicians dedicated to changing the rules of reality itself, to bring about a new world constructed a lot more to their liking. Fortunately for the world and reality, magicians have the biggest egos outside of show business and rarely play well with each other. Half of them ended up turning the other half into various kinds of livestock, and Molly lost her temper and called down a plague of frogs on the lot of them.

People were clearing frogs out of their gutters all over London for weeks after that. -The Man With The Golden Torc

Molly and Eddie reminisce about some of their past fights, giving us some rather nice feats in the process:

“You’ve tried to kill me often enough, in the past,” I said. “Remember the time you blew up the whole Bradbury building, just to get me? The look on your face when I walked unharmed out of the ruins! I thought you were going to pop an artery.”

Molly nodded, smiling. “Do you remember the time you stuck me through the chest with three feet of enchanted steel? Only to discover that like all good magicians, I keep my heart safe and secure somewhere else? I thought you were going to have a fit.”

“We’ve lived, haven’t we?” I said dryly, and she laughed briefly. -The Man With The Golden Torc

Molly's scrying pool is powerful enough to see into the Drood Hall, which shouldn't be possible due to the protections surrounding the latter, and is something only the ghost of Jacob Drood has managed to do this far:

Molly sat down beside her pool again, gathering her long white gown around her, and I crouched cautiously down beside her. The whole thing was a scrying pool? It had to be twenty feet across, easy, which would make it hellishly powerful. Molly slapped the flat of her left hand onto the surface of the waters, and the ripples spread out, pushing the lily pads to the borders of the pond. The crystal clear water shimmered, and then blazed bright as the sun, dazzling my eyes, before clearing abruptly to show me a vision of a man and a woman, in two different rooms, talking on the phone. I leaned forward as I recognised them. The man was the British prime minister; the woman was Martha Drood.

“You can See into the Hall?” I said, my voice hardly more than a breath. “That’s not supposed to be possible!”

“It’s all right,” said Molly. “They can’t see or hear us. But listen now, and pay attention. You need to hear this.” -The Man With The Golden Torc

Mr. Stab, the Greenverse's Jack The Ripper, is an immortal. Bullets pass right through him:

The artificial creature smiled for the first time, and there was no humour in it, only a terrible satisfaction that at last he would get to do what he was made to do. He raised one hand, and a gun muzzle poked out of a slit in his wrist. He sprayed Mr. Stab and then me with machine gun fire but couldn’t hurt either of us. Bullets ricocheted harmlessly off my armoured chest and seemed to pass through Mr. Stab as though he was nothing but smoke. -The Man With The Golden Torc

Stab gets hit by an atomic blast, sending him flying into a wall hard enough to shatter it:

Solomon Krieg shut off his flames and frowned deeply, as though concentrating on some difficult problem. Fat sparks of static electricity appeared spontaneously around his head, like a halo of electric flies. They spat and crackled, growing fiercer and more powerful, and then struck out at Mr. Stab like a hammer blow of unleashed energies. The blast picked him up and threw him twenty feet or more before slamming him into a concrete wall with devastating force. The whole wall crumbled into ruin under the impact, burying Mr. Stab under a pile of rubble. -The Man With The Golden Torc

It doesn't do shit:

While Krieg was safely preoccupied, I hurried over to search the rubble for Mr. Stab, but he was already rising to his feet, entirely unhurt, fussily brushing dust from his coat and opera cloak. He stooped down to retrieve his top hat and placed it on his head at a jaunty angle. He might be the worst serial killer in history, but the man had style. -The Man With The Golden Torc

After getting blasted with atomic energy hard enough to scatter her into pieces, Girl Flower re-manifests As a whirlwind of her own components:

Girl Flower threw herself at him, screaming something obscene in old Welsh. Atomic forces erupted from the golem’s scarred forehead, hitting Girl Flower and blowing her apart into a shower of rose petals. They churned and circled in midair, and then transformed, becoming a razor storm of a thousand cutting owls’ claws. They hit Solomon Krieg like a deadly hailstorm, ripping and tearing at his pale flesh, but still he stood his ground and would not fall. -The Man With The Golden Torc

Mr. Stab kills a bunch of soldiers, all while no-selling all of their weapons:

Mr. Stab stepped forward to stand at my side, a long scalpel gleaming thirstily in his hand. Nothing the soldiers did could touch him, and he cut down all who came within his reach with an elegant disdain. Standing in the midst of blood and slaughter, he was in his element at last. -The Man With The Golden Torc

Girl Flower can regenerate her form over a period of days:

“His time will come. Any suggestions on what we do next?”

“I open a spatial portal of my own, and we all get the hell out of here and scatter into the night.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” I said. “Where’s Girl Flower?”

“Oh, she’ll put herself back together again, over the next few days, in some place where she feels safe.” She looked at Mr. Stab. “Can I trust you to look after Sue? I have to stick with the Drood. We have revenges to plan.” -The Man With The Golden Torc

A brief retelling of how Eddie Drood and Molly Metcalf brought down the Bradbury Building in their first encounter:

So; we both burst into the doktor’s lab at the same moment, scaring the hell out of the guy, and then stopped short to glare at each other. I knew Molly by reputation, and of course she recognised the golden armour at once. We both struck out at each other with every weapon we had, unleashing energies and forces that would have been immediately fatal to anyone but us. Doktor Koenig cried out hysterically in German and tried to protect his precious equipment with his own body. The whole thing escalated very quickly…and we brought the house down. The Bradbury Building just crumbled and fell apart under the impact of the forces we unleashed, and the whole place collapsed into ruin and rubble. Molly and I came out of it entirely unscathed, of course, but Herr Doktor Koenig was gone, and all his equipment with him. He got blamed for the explosion, but it was still hardly my finest hour. Certain people in my family were very scathing.

And that was how I first met the wild witch Molly Metcalf. -The Man With The Golden Torc

An explosion that obliterates a cottage doesn't get past Eddie's armour or Molly's protective shield:

The spell hit something inside Paul Anderson, expanded out of all control, and blew up the cottage we were standing in. At first I really thought Molly and I had done it again, but when the smoke cleared the three of us were all standing safe and sound in the ruins of the cottage. Me in my armour, Molly inside her protective shield, and Paul Anderson in blackened and tattered clothing but with a whole new look on his face. Molly seized the moment to attack me, determined that the Droods would not control and influence this Pendragon reborn. I fought back, of course, and while the two of us were distracted, the new Pendragon just walked away, into the night. -The Man With The Golden Torc

Molly has a charm of a miniature motorcycle, which she can turn into a working, full-sized motorbike with her magic:

“What do we do now? Hail a taxi?”

“I wouldn’t. You can never be sure whom the drivers are really working for. I’ve got a better idea.”

She bent over and hiked up her dress, revealing a dainty silver charm bracelet around her left ankle. She snapped one of the charms free and held it up: a delicate little silver motorcycle. Molly muttered a few Words in a harsh language that must have hurt her throat and breathed on the charm. It wriggled eerily on her palm, and then leapt off, growing rapidly in midair until standing on the slope before us was a Vincent Black Shadow motorbike. A big black beast of a bike, and a classic of its kind. I was impressed.

“I’m impressed,” I said to Molly. “Really. You have excellent taste in motorcycles. If a tad nostalgic.”
“Don’t talk to me about modern bikes,” said Molly. “No character.” -The Man With The Golden Torc

Or, rather, a facsimile of one:

The Vincent was really hammering along now, the passing world just a blur. Molly was laughing out loud, whooping with the joy of speed. I was more concerned about what would happen if just one of the bullets happened to hit the Vincent’s fuel tank. I mentioned this to Molly.

“Don’t worry!” she yelled back. “This isn’t really a motorbike. It just looks like one.”

“Not a real bike? Not a real Vincent Black Shadow?”
“Come on,” said Molly. “What did you expect from a charm bracelet?”

“Just as long as it doesn’t turn back to a pumpkin at midnight…” -The Man With The Golden Torc

Molly knows a "tangle" spell for binding multiple people:

Strength flooded suddenly through me as Molly’s magics stamped out the last of the drug’s effects. Sensation flooded back through every part of me, and my thoughts were clear and sharp. I looked up at Molly, caught her eye, and mouthed the word Now. She grinned back at me and lashed out at the watching armed men with a simple tangle spell. All twelve of them crashed to the floor at once, their muscles spasming helplessly as witchy lightning crawled all over them, spitting and crackling. The spell hit Archie Leech too, but she just staggered backwards, fighting the spell with the strength the amulet gave him. -The Man With The Golden c

After Eddie rewinds time to save her from being killed, Molly remembers what happened beforehand:

“I’m a witch,” Molly said slowly, holding my eyes with hers. “I see things, and remember things, that others can’t. I remember lying on that floor, dying…and then you rewrote history, changed the world itself, just to save me. And risked your own life doing it. You couldn’t have been sure the armour would cover you in time to save you from their guns. Why would you do that, risk that, to save me?” -The Man With The Golden Torc

The Blue Fairy (yes, that's his real nickname) explains what a Confusulum is and how it works:

“A Confusulum,” the Blue Fairy said patiently. “Don’t ask me what it is is, because I’ve no idea. That’s the point. It doesn’t actually change anything, just confuses the hell out of everyone. It works on the uncertainty principle that nothing is necessarily what or where it seems to be. I found the first one years ago, quite by accident, and it scared the crap out of me. Everyone needs some certainties in their life. I threw it back in, but something about it stuck in my mind. The Droods’ family defences are based around certainties: friend or foe, permitted entry or not, that sort of thing. But the Confusulum will take all those certainties out of the equation. The Hall’s defences will be so confused they won’t know whether they’re operating or not, whether you’re permitted entry or not, even whether you’re actually there or not. They’ll be so confused you’ll be able to walk right through them while they’re still struggling to make up their minds. By the time anyone at the Hall notices that their defences have just had a major nervous breakdown, you’ll be in.
“The Confusulum isn’t one hundred percent guaranteed; its uncertainty even applies to its own nature. So there’s no telling exactly what its effects will be or how long they’ll last. But since I’m the only one ever to encounter a Confusulum, you can be sure your family have no specific defences against it.” -The Man With The Golden Torc

The Blue Fairy fishes through the dimensions and eventually catches on to one of these. This is what it looks like:

His line jerked suddenly, sending slow ripples across the surface of the glowing pool. The Blue Fairy let out a long breath and began to slowly reel his line back in. He took his time, keeping a light but constant pressure on the line, staring so intently he wasn’t even breathing anymore. And finally he brought something up out of the golden pool.

I couldn’t tell you what it was, exactly. It clung to the hook, writhing and twisting like a living thing, even though I knew on some deep instinctive level that it wasn’t alive and never could be. It changed size and colour, shape and texture, from moment to moment, its dimensions snapping in and out and back and forth. It looked like all the things you see out of the corners of your eyes when you’ve just woken up and you’re still half asleep. -The Man With The Golden Torc

In order to bind one of these to the 3-D plane,  someone has to impose a singular nature upon it, forcing it into one shape:

“Quick!” said the Blue Fairy, his face contorted with concentration. “I brought it here for you, Eddie, so it’s up to you to give it a shape in this dimension. Impose a single nature on it, so it can survive here. The link you make will mean it will serve you and only you. But do it quickly, before it becomes something we can’t bear to see with only human eyes.”

I concentrated on the first image that came to me. It just popped into my mind: a simple circular badge I’d seen in an old head shop in Denmark Street years ago, a white badge bearing the legend Go Lemmings Go. And just like that, the twisting unnerving thing on the hook was gone and the badge was resting on the palm of my hand. It looked and felt perfectly normal, perfectly innocent. I pinned it carefully on the lapel of my jacket.

“All the things you could have chosen,” said Molly. “Everything from Excalibur to the Holy Hand Grenade of Saint Antioch, and you had to choose that. The workings of your mind remain a complete mystery to me, Eddie.” -The Man With The Golden Torc

This doesn't seem good:

None of us had noticed that the Blue Fairy had inadvertently allowed his line to drop back into the glowing pool. He cried out abruptly as something below grabbed the hook and tugged hard on the line. The Blue Fairy was almost pulled forward, and the line whirred through the reel until it ran all the way. The Blue Fairy was jerked forward again but hung on grimly.
“What have you got?” I said. “What were you concentrating on?”
“I wasn’t thinking about anything! I didn’t catch this; it caught me!” -The Man With The Golden Torc

We all looked on as the Blue Fairy wrestled with the fishing rod, the taut line jerking back and forth across the pool. It snapped abruptly, and the Blue Fairy stumbled back. And something huge and long and inhumanly strong burst up out of the golden pool, reaching for him. It was a single tentacle, dark purple in colour and lined with rows of suckers full of grinding teeth. More and more of it burst up out of the pool, snapping back and forth.
“Get out of here!” yelled the Blue Fairy. “I’ll handle this!”
“Don’t be a damned fool!” Janissary Jane yelled back at him. “You can’t handle this on your own!”
“It came through my blood,” the Blue Fairy said grimly. “So only I can put it back down. Go. You’ve got things to do. Things that matter. This…is my business. No damned thing from the vasty deeps is going to get the better of me in my own home! Will you all please get the hell out of here, so I can concentrate? And Eddie, make your family pay! For what they did to you, and what they did to me.”
More and more of the tentacle was forcing its way into the room, yards and yards of it, straining against the edges of the pool that contained it. The Blue Fairy threw his fishing rod aside and sketched ancient signs and sigils on the air with dancing hands, leaving bright incandescent trails on the air. He was chanting in Elvish in a form so old I couldn’t follow one word in ten. Magic spat and crackled all around him, and for the first time, he was smiling. A cold, inhuman smile. -The Man With The Golden Torc

Eddie uses the Confusulum to "confuse" reality  into thinking Molly still had all of her power:

“Look, can it help us with our most urgent problem? Namely, how we’re supposed to get to the Hall? All the usual and unusual ways out of London are bound to be closely monitored now, either by your family or Manifest Destiny, and I don’t have nearly enough energy left in me to summon a spatial portal. If only I hadn’t had to smash the Manx Cat to save your life. I could have drawn a lot of power from that statue.”

“So this is all my fault, then?”

“Everything is your fault, Drood, until proven otherwise.”

“All right,” I said patiently. “Let’s start with that. Confusulum, can you help Molly get her power back?”
Oh, sure! said a happy voice in my ear. Easy peasy!
The badge on my lapel pulsed with an otherworldly light, and all around us the world became uncertain. The Confusulum exerted its unique nature and confused the issue so much that the universe itself wasn’t sure whether Molly had her power or not. It was as though someone had nudged the universe in the ribs so that it skipped a beat, and just like that…the world was subtly different. Magic spat and crackled on the air all around Molly as power surged through her, and she laughed aloud with sheer exhilaration. She swept her hands back and forth, and shimmering trails of energy followed her hands. Molly’s face was flushed with an almost sexual excitement, and she looked incredibly alive, full to bursting with all the energies of the wild woods.

I thought she’d never looked more beautiful.

(There were side effects to the change. Posters in the shop windows were suddenly different colours, or had different names. Red roses bloomed in the gutters. And a sheep walked solemnly backwards down the street.) -The Man With The Golden Torc

He then uses it to confuse reality into thinking both he and Molly are in Drood Hall, completely bypassing numerous defenses in the process:

She scowled. “All right, maybe I do. So, how are we going to get to the Hall?”

“We use the Confusulum,” I said. “If it can confuse the whole universe about whether you have magic, it can confuse the world about where we really are. Right, badge?”

Oh, sure! No problem! I just live to confuse the issue! You know, you think very clearly for a three-dimensional entity!

So the Confusulum exerted itself, the world threw up its hands and said, Oh, have it your way then, and Molly and I appeared just inside the Hall’s grounds. Vast grassy lawns stretched away before us, with the house looming up ahead on the horizon. It was early evening now, the light already going out of the day. The sky was full of lowering clouds, and the air was hot and heavy. I looked quickly around, but there didn’t seem to be anyone about. I was half crouching, tense with anticipation for alarms going off and defences activating, but everything seemed calm and quiet, the peace of the evening undisturbed except by the singing of a few drowsy birds and the whickering of the unicorns in their stables. The peace didn’t fool me. The Hall and its grounds were seriously protected at all times by quite appallingly vicious scientific and magical means. All of which, it seemed, were currently utterly bewildered by the Confusulum. I straightened up and nodded slowly.

I’d come home. -The Man With The Golden Torc

It can confuse machinery. In this case, it confuses several automated weapons systems:

Molly and I actually covered quite a distance before half a dozen robot guns rose suddenly out of the ground from their hidden silos. Big, ugly, brutal weapons, they swivelled back and forth as their fire computers struggled to target the intruders whose proximity had set them off. Molly and I stood very still while I rested one hand on the badge at my lapel. The Confusulum did its thing, and the guns swivelled jerkily back and forth, increasingly confused and upset by conflicting impulses. So in the end the stupid things decided that since they were the only things moving, they must be the intruders. And they shot the hell out of each other. Muzzles roared, bullets flew, and one by one the robot guns exploded messily in bursts of fire and smoke. None of the bullets came anywhere near Molly or me.

“So much for sneaking in,” said Molly as the last echoes of gunfire died away.

“Shut up and run,” I said. -The Man With The Golden Torc

More of the Confusulum confusing the Drood Hall defenses:

We gave the gryphons a few last pats, and then pushed them firmly away and sprinted across the open lawns towards the house. In the growing dusk, we should look like just two more moving figures. If the family were bracing themselves for an attack by the kind of thing that had broken into the Sanctity, they shouldn’t be looking for merely human targets. I could feel the grounds’ defences trying to kick in: all the hidden trapdoors and deadly weapons, all the scientific and magical devices in their underground silos, but none of them could lock on to Molly or me as long as we were protected by the Confusulum. Force shields snapped on and off all around us, magical energies manifested and dispersed in a moment, and none of them could touch us. The grounds’ defences were baffled. But there were still far too many people around, too many Droods between us and the Hall. Someone would be bound to challenge us soon. -The Man With The Golden Torc

Molly summons a dragon from one of her bracelet charms:

“We need a diversion,” I said to Molly. “Something big and dramatic, to draw people away from the front of the house.”

“No problem,” said Molly, breathing just a little hard from the running. “Watch this.”

She muttered under her breath and gestured sharply, and suddenly a huge dragon was hovering over the Hall. A massive creature, with a long golden-scaled body and vast, flapping membranous wings. It shrieked horribly as it descended on the Hall, a horrid horned head thrusting forward on the end of a snakelike neck. It was impossibly big, half the size of the house, and it tore great holes in the outer wall of the east wing with casual blows from its clawed hands. It breathed fire across the landing pads on the roof, sweeping away all the vehicles there in one great blast of flames. It screamed in triumph and slammed into the Hall with one great shoulder so hard that the whole building shook.

“Will that do?” said Molly.

“Where the hell did you find a dragon that size?” I said. “I am officially impressed, Molly. Honest. But that is my home, and I would rather like to have some of it left at the end of the day! Does the word overkill ring any bells with you? Are you sure you can even control it?”

“Of course,” said Molly. “I once took a thorn out of its paw. Relax, Eddie, it’s not a real dragon. Just another charm off my bracelet.”

“So the damage it’s doing to the Hall isn’t real either?”
Molly frowned. “Well, yes and no.”

“Let’s get inside quick,” I said. “Before the family works out what’s happening.” -The Man With The Golden Torc

The Armageddon Codex is housed in its own pocket dimension:

The family keeps the Armageddon Codex in a pocket dimension for extra security. Only the Armourer and his designated successor can even approach it, let alone access it. The Codex contains the family’s most powerful weapons, too dangerous to be used unless reality itself is under threat. Normally you have to fill out reams of paperwork before you’re even allowed to approach the Matriarch with a request. The Armourer was trusting me a lot, to let me take Oath Breaker. He wouldn’t do that, for all his sympathy, unless he was already convinced that there was something seriously wrong with the family. -The Man With The Golden Torc

A good description of some of the things stored inside the Armageddon Codex:

She still stood very close to me as we followed the Armourer through the Lion’s Jaws and down its throat into the Armageddon Codex. Which turned out to be just another stone cavern but with terrible weapons hanging in rows upon the stone walls, like ornaments in Hell. Some hung on plaques; others stood in special niches carved from the bare stone. None of them were identified; either you knew what they were and what they could do, or you had no business touching them. I knew some of the weapons by sight and reputation from my extensive reading in the library.
There was Sunwrack, for putting out the stars one at a time. Beside it was the Juggernaut Jumpsuit. And there, the Time Hammer, for changing the past through brute force.

The Armourer noted me studying the hammer and nodded quickly. “Studying that gave me the idea for the reverse watch I gave you, Eddie. A lot of thought went into that. I hope you’re taking good care of it.”
I just nodded absently, still fascinated by the terrible weapons arrayed before me, things I’d never dreamed I might someday see in person. There was Winter’s Sorrow, a simple crystal ball full of swirling snowflakes. It might have been a paperweight or a child’s toy. But all you had to do was break the crystal, and it would unleash the Fimbulwinter: an endless season of cold and ice, all across the world, forever and ever and ever. Molly reached out a hand to touch it, saying, “Oh, cute!” And the Armourer and I both yelled at her and dragged her away. We sent her back to stand at the entrance, and she went, sulking. And then, finally, there was Oath Breaker.

It wasn’t much to look at. Just a long stick of ironwood deeply carved with prehuman symbols. An ancient weapon, older than Torc Cutter, older than family history. Older than the family, probably. We have no idea who created it, or why. Perhaps they used it, and that’s why there’s no record of them anywhere. -The Man With The Golden Torc

Oath Breaker apparently "undoes all agreements"  down to the atomic level. Whatever the hell that means:

“But…it’s just a stick,” said Molly. She’d sneaked forward to join us again. “Is that it? I mean, is that all of it? Does it change into something else if you strike it on the ground? Or do you just plan to beat people over the head with it?”
“This is Oath Breaker,” I said. My mouth was very dry, even while my hands were sweating. “It undoes all agreements, all bonds. Right down to the atomic level, if necessary.” -The Man With The Golden Torc

A brief passage regarding Drood history, as well as the origins of the Heart:

In this time, Drood history began. Fierce men in ragged furs, with blue woad daubed on their snarling faces, ran howling through the trees. My ancestors, the Druids. So fierce, so savage, they shocked even the hardened Roman legionnaires. They fought; tribes against armies, bronze against steel. And yet at first the Druids won, forcing the invading Romans all the way back to their waiting ships, and then slaughtering them in the shallows until it seemed the whole ocean ran red with their blood. The survivors sailed away; but they came back. The Romans came again, and again, until finally they triumphed through steel and tactics and weight of numbers. Because they were an army, and we were just scattered tribes who often hated each other as much as we did the invaders.

The Romans feared the Druid priests most of all, and wiped them out, destroying their spoken knowledge and traditions along with their savage religion. And so it might have gone…until the Heart came, and everything changed.

It did not fall from the sky, as the official story says. It did not fall like an angel from heaven, or a meteor from outer space. It downloaded itself from another dimension, a different kind of reality. Imposing itself upon our world through an act of sheer will. The impact of its arrival killed every living thing in the vicinity and flattened all the trees for miles around. The ground shook for days, and strange bright lights and energies burned in the skies. But the Druids, though sensibly cautious, were scared of nothing and sent emissaries to the Heart.

Those Druids would become the very first Droods. -The Man With The Golden Torc

And finally they came to the great clearing of dead and blasted earth in which the Heart lay. A diamond as big as a hill, brilliant and beautiful; and alive. It spoke to the Druid shamans who came to it, and they worshipped it as a sign from the gods or perhaps even one of the gods themselves.

The Heart was quite content for them to do this. It was lost and far from home and weakened by its long journey. It had come to our world fleeing something else. Something the Heart was still very much afraid of. So it proposed a bargain to the Druid shamans. It would make them powerful, make them as gods among their own kind, and in return they would revere and protect the Heart against all enemies. In this world…and without.

The Heart gave the Druids their living armour, and they became more than men.

Originally, the shamans only used the armour to protect the tribes against the dark powers and forces of evil who walked more openly in the world in those days. But the armour made these Droods very powerful, and all power tends to corrupt…The greatest threat to the tribes were the invading Romans, but the shamans were wise enough to know that not even the golden armour could hold off the Roman armies forever. So they went to the Romans and made a deal. Rome would rule…through the Droods. And thus the tribes would be protected from the worst of Rome’s power. When, five centuries later, the Roman Empire finally declined and fell, and Roman authority left Britain, the Droods just kept going. Operating secretly, to protect the tribes from all threats, from without…and within. -The Man With The Golden Torc

The origins of the golden Drood armour, and how it's made:

But what was the armour, this glorious golden living metal? Where did it come from? And what price did the Heart demand to make those first few Droods so much more than human?

A Drood stood before the Heart, presenting a pair of twin babies to the massive diamond. One of the babies was snatched out of the Drood’s arms by an unseen force, and it hung on the air before the Heart, kicking and screaming. And then it was suddenly sucked into the Heart’s shining surface and disappeared inside. Its screams cut off abruptly. And around the neck of the baby still held by the Drood, a shining golden collar appeared. The vision showed other sacrifices, other sights, down many years, until the secret of the family’s armour was plain.

All the Druids exposed to the energies of the Heart underwent predetermined genetic changes, and from that point on all Drood children were born as identical twins. Soon after birth, one child was given to the Heart, which absorbed its body and its soul, so that the surviving twin might wear the golden armour and serve the family. When I wore the living metal, I was surrounding myself with all that was left of my sacrificed twin. The brother I never knew. Every time I armoured up, I was wearing my brother like a second skin.

How many twins, how many lives, had been sacrificed to the Heart, down the long centuries? How many innocent children denied their chance at life, so the Droods could be more than human? -The Man With The Golden Torc

The Heart has been gathering the souls of the sacrificed Droods for centuries, using them to make itself stronger:

The vision showed us more. It got worse.

As more and more babies were given to the Heart, the other-dimensional being grew brighter, stronger. The souls of the sacrificed children were held and sealed within the Heart, trapped there to generate the power that created our armour, that powered our magics and our sciences, that made our family strong. -The Man With The Golden Torc

The Heart itself straight confirms that it came from a higher dimension:

“You can talk?” I said. A bit obvious, I know, but I was honestly shocked. The Heart had never spoken to any Drood that I knew of, not since it made the original bargain with my Druid ancestors.

“Are you really so surprised to find that I’m a living, thinking thing?” said the Heart. “Not all intelligence is based in meat.”

“Did you really come here from another dimension?” said Molly, just to make it clear she wasn’t being left out of anything.

“From a higher dimension,” said the Heart. “What can I say; I always did have a thing for slumming.” -The Man With The Golden Torc

Oath Breaker is powerful enough to destroy this thing:

“Why have you never spoken before?” I said.

“I have,” said the Heart. “But only to the ruling Matriarch of your tribe. By long tradition, each Matriarch has to agree to continue our long-standing bargain. Bind her family to me, body and soul. And in return, I grant you all just a little of my power. I speak to you only now, Eddie, because you carry Oath Breaker. Nasty little thing. I’ve been trying to persuade your family to get rid of it for generations.”

“Because it could destroy you,” said Molly.

“Of course,” said the Heart. -The Man With The Golden Torc

When the Heart takes control of Eddie's armour, we see several things that Molly can do with her magic...all of which have no effect on the armour whatsoever:

Molly realised she couldn’t reach me and stood her ground. Her face became calm and coldly resolved. She conjured up a roaring storm wind that came howling in out of nowhere, sweeping the air before it like a battering ram. It tried to pick me up and blow me away, but my armour grew heavy spikes out of the bottom of its golden feet and anchored itself to the wooden floor. The wind battered harmlessly against my golden exterior, failed to find any purchase, and dropped away to nothing. The armour took a step forward.

Molly conjured up handfuls of hellfire and threw them at me. Flames from the deepest part of the Pit, designed to sear both body and soul, and still they couldn’t touch me through the golden armour. The flames scoured and blackened the floor around me, and the air shimmered in a vicious heat haze, but I felt nothing. The armour took a step forward.

Monsters appeared out of nowhere to block my path. Huge, awful creatures, with armoured hides and lashing barbed tentacles and wide snapping mouths full of razor teeth. But the armour walked right through the illusions to get to Molly. She backed away, dismissing the illusions with a wave of her hand, and conjured up a bottomless pit between her and me. The effort brought beads of sweat to her face. The armour leaped easily over the gap to stand before her, propelled by the unnatural strength of its armoured legs. Molly called up a shimmering screen of pure magic to stand between her and me. It snapped and crackled on the air, supported by her iron will. The armour placed a single golden hand against the screen and pushed slowly, remorselessly, with all the armour’s boundless strength behind it.

Until the screen shattered and broke and disappeared, and Molly fell back, crying out in shock and pain. Because in the end Molly was human, and the armour wasn’t. -The Man With The Golden Torc

The "strange matter" from before is actually some sort of sentient being. (Yeah...)

“Eddie, you’re alive…”

“I know! Isn’t it great?”

“How…Eddie, there’s a collar around your throat. And it’s silver.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s the strange matter. Apparently there’s been something of a misunderstanding…”

“To put it mildly,” said a new voice. “I was beginning to think I’d never get through to you in time.”

The new voice was large and powerful and very sane, and it thundered through the Sanctity. It emanated from me, but it wasn’t me speaking. The Heart cried out in rage and despair, but it sounded like a very small thing compared to the new voice. The strange matter, speaking through me. -The Man With The Golden Torc

Said being has been chasing the Heart through the higher dimensions for several millennia:

“Time for the truth at last,” it said. “Know now the true history of that foul and evil creature you know as the Heart. Criminal. Sinner. Thief. Coward. Murderer. It came here because it was running scared. Because it knew I was close behind it, coming to capture it and take it back to where it came from, for judgement and punishment. For all the awful things it has done in so many dimensions. The Heart has been on the run for millennia, passing through dimension after dimension and preying on whatever it found there.

“I am the shaman of my tribe, much like your Druid ancestors. We protect the innocent and punish the guilty, and we never give up.

“I’d almost lost track of the Heart. The trail had gone cold, and I had searched so many places. And then a small opening appeared between the dimensions. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before: vague and unfocused, quite primitive really. It was the Blue Fairy using his gift at random to go fishing and see what he might find. Intrigued, I allowed him to catch just a small piece of myself and take it through into his primitive backwater dimension. And there was the Heart! Hidden away, in the back of beyond where no one would think to look. I could sense its presence, but its exact location was hidden from me. So I manipulated the Blue Fairy into passing the small piece of me onto the most powerful group in this dimension, the Drood family. And sure enough, once I was brought here, I was able to locate the Heart. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough of me to break through the defences your family had put in place around the Heart.

“So I waited. And soon enough the Blue Fairy went fishing again, and I allowed him to catch more of me. And then I manipulated him, and the Drood traitors, and finally the elf lord, all so that he would fire an arrow of me into you, Eddie. So that you could bring me here, into the presence of the Heart. Inside all its protections. I never meant to cause you such pain, Eddie. All the suffering and weakness were caused by my strange matter clashing with the Heart’s collar. What you might call a short circuit. The human body was never meant to contain such diametrically opposed other-dimensional materials.” -The Man With The Golden Torc

The Droods only die when their torcs are removed because that was the Heart's intention:

“Why didn’t I die when Molly cut the torc from me?” I said.

“Droods only die when separated from their torcs because that’s what the Heart wanted,” said the voice. “It couldn’t risk any of its toys getting loose. But that’s all over now. The Heart can’t hurt you anymore, Eddie. Not while I’m here to protect you. And it won’t be able to hurt your family anymore, once it’s been destroyed. And though I’ve chased the Heart for so very long…I think it’s your privilege to put an end to the Heart, Eddie. If you want it.” -The Man With The Golden Torc

Oath Breaker shatters all of the bonds holding the other-dimensional Heart together, destroying it completely and releasing all of the souls it contained:

“I want it,” I said, and I drew Oath Breaker from my belt and turned to face the Heart.

“You can’t do this!” it screamed. “I made you what you are! I made your family powerful! I put you in charge of this stupid little world! You don’t dare hurt me! I’m your god!”

“Bad god,” I said.

I raised Oath Breaker over my head and brought it smashing down on the huge diamond. The ancient weapon took on its simple brutal aspect and undid all the forces that bound the other-dimensional being together. The Heart screamed shrilly, its light flaring in great staccato pulses, and then the massive diamond exploded soundlessly. It shattered into millions of lifeless fragments, falling to the floor like sand until nothing was left of the Heart. There hadn’t been much to it, after all. The Heart was hollow all along.

And with the Heart finally destroyed, all the souls that had been trapped within it for so long were finally set free. They manifested briefly on the still air of the Sanctity, one after another, flashing on and off, countless shimmering forms exploding like so many soundless fireworks in one last display of joy at their freedom before finally passing on to whatever comes next. Molly cried out in delight, clapping her hands together.

And at the very end, one small soul came to me. My twin. My brother. He hung on the air before me, just a baby, only a few days old, and then he expanded suddenly into adult form, my size, my age. He looked…like the face I see in the mirror every day, only without all the lines driven into it by pain, and loss, and duty. My brother considered me for a long moment, and then he smiled at me, and winked, and was gone.

And that was that. -The Man With The Golden Torc

Molly makes a woman's clothes disappear:

“We know you,” said a female voice from deep in the crowd. “But what’s the infamous Molly Metcalf doing up there with you?”

There was a general murmur of agreement, quickly cut off as Molly snapped her fingers and the woman in the crowd squeaked loudly as all her clothes suddenly disappeared. Molly smiled sweetly upon the crowd.

“Any more questions? I just love answering questions from the crowd.” -The Man With The Golden Torc