Wings out of Hell

Painting by Bob Rothwell.

www.deviantart.com/ustranga

Prologue

Excerpts from the Karkana Fragments, a collection of fifteen partially complete clay tablets housed at the Tokyo National Museum. 

It is claimed by some scholars they were translated to Greek from an earlier, proto-greek language from scrolls dating from 10,000 years B.C.E.:

    … Thus did Nanossuss of Koth with fivescore and twenty spearmen drive headlong into the massed throngs of the Red Brotherhood upon the beach at Velathra.

    Outnumbered twenty to one, and roughly treated by the archers loosing their arrows from the decks of some five hundred triremes thronging the bay, they smashed the pirate rabble and laid them low.
The retinue of Nanossuss slew until their spears were broken, then belabored the corsairs with sword and axe. The waves were stained deep crimson and the beach cluttered with all manner of human detritus.

Anything you can do John Saxon can do better

Anything you can do John Saxon can do better.
So you can do Karate. So what, John Saxon is better than you.

So you are a Terminator robot. Big deal, John Saxon is better at it.

So you are a bootleg liquor hauling redneck. John Saxon is better and he's not even trying to be good at it.

So you survived a nuclear apocalypse in suspended animation and woke up hundreds of years later in a bizarrely mutated world. Who cares, John Saxon did too and he's doing a lot better than you.

In summary, John Saxon is the best.

In the Garden of the Toad

    François Arnauld, late of Saint-Domingue, drained the last of the wine from his bejeweled goblet; heedless of the overflow dribbling down his long, unkempt beard and further staining the white linen robe that shrouded his bulbous form. The heavy oak chair he wallowed in creaked in protest as he shifted his flabby bulk. Wiping first his mouth then his sweaty forehead with his dirty sleeve, He proffered the empty goblet to a white-robed Creole girl at his side, who dutifully refilled it. François leered at her from behind the darkened spectacles he habitually wore and bared his blackened gums and rotting teeth at her in a perverse grin.

The Yellow Robed Fiend

(from the war diary of Lt. Guy Linley, United States Army)
August 7, 1899. Cotabato Valley, Phillipines:
They came over the eastern wall last night in a rush, led by a wild eyed devil in ragged yellow robes. The bastard was ferocious as a mad dog and some of the boys gave way and ran from him. I came within pistol range as he was dismembering a private from ohio with his great curved knife, I fired 2 rounds into his upper back and as he turned from his grisly work to face me I fired two more; one of which tore apart his lower jaw and another into the neck which ruptured the large artery. He stared at me for a moment, his face horribly disfigured and the lifeblood gushing from the neck wound, then he fled back to the jungle, scrambling over the 6 foot foot wall in a blur of yellow robes and splattering blood. That broke the attack but crazed chanting continued throughout the night.

August 11:
 Another attack last night, they did not make the walls this time but I spotted the yellow robed man again near the tree line. He had wrapped his lower face in a scarf but by his bearing I know it was the same man, he did not take his eyes from me during the entire episode. I ordered Cpl. Williams to sniper him and I clearly saw the man stagger from the impact of the bullet, however he stayed on his feet. Williams prepared to fire a second round but yellow robe faded into the jungle before he could get a bead on him.
Something is not right here, how yellow robe survived the 4 rounds I put into him is beyond imagining. The .38 long colt is a much maligned cartridge but it will surely kill, and this man should be dead considering the amount of his blood still staining the eastern wall.

August 17:
 Severed head of Williams found near main gate this morning, eye sockets and mouth stuffed with yellow rags. How Williams was killed outside the walls of the fort is impossible to guess. The only logical answer is that he left the camp willingly, there is no way he could have been taken by force unless we have traitors among the scouts.

August 18:
Talked some of the boys who were close to Williams, they told me he had been sleepwalking and was found standing at the wall the last 2 nights before his murder. He proved very hard to wake and mumbled that the yellow robed man was whispering to him from from the jungle.

August 19:
 Some bastard left a yellow rag in my coffee cup this morning. When I find the fellow behind this prank a few days locked in the tool shed should convince him this is no joking matter.

August 21:
 Dreamed of Yellow Robe whispering to me last night, couldn't understand the words but I know he wanted me to come into the jungle.

August 22:
 Sleepwalking last night, dreamed Yellow Robe was calling to me and I attempted to climb the wall. Fought with Morris and 2 others when they tried to restrain me, apparently Morris was forced to give me a crack with a rifle butt to render me completely unconscious. 

August 25:
More dreams last night, but this time I saw where yellow robe wants me to go; it was a clearing somewhere deep in the jungle, yellow robe's followers were wildly dancing around a bonfire while that devil hacked apart some hapless villager and screamed a barbarous incantation at the stars. Williams was among the revelers, his headless body dancing in that same unholy ectasy.
Tonight I will handcuff myself to my cot and give the key to Morris, yellow robe may call but I will not enter that jungle.

(Note: Guy Linley disappeared the night of August 25, 1899. A trail of blood led from his quarters to the eastern wall of the encampment, he had apparently bitten off his thumb to free himself from handcuffs. Missing and presumed killed in action, Linley's thumb was shipped to his home in Bowling Green, Kentucky and given a proper burial.)

The Widow Ayers

“But the devils cannot interfere with the stars.”  

― Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum

I

   I will own that even now in my dotage, I am neither wise nor of particularly strong character, but after bearing witness to the events I am about to relate to you, I came to the conclusion there is naught on God’s earth that can frighten me again. One does not look upon the face of primal, naked horror and come away unchanged.

The Saturn Transgression: Part Two

The Saturn Transgression

II

Picoseconds before the crimson plasma bolts would have obliterated the Celestial Bounty; Suds activated the hyperdrive that shunted the freighter into a parallel dimension where the speed of light is more easily surpassed. Tassk watched briefly as space warped and elongated beyond the transpasteel bubble of the turret, then climbed back to the interior of the ship. To gaze upon the writhing chaos that was hyperspace was not conducive to one’s sanity.

The Saturn Transgression: Part One.

The Saturn Transgression

I

Rayfe Tassk took one last drag from his cigar, and then flicked the smoldering butt over the alarmingly corroded safety rail of landing platform B77. He watched it drop for a few feet before it disappeared in the boiling Venusian cloud cover below. A mild twinge of vertigo assailed him and he stepped away from the edge, walking casually back to the battered metallic ellipsoid that was his home and livelyhood, the light freighter Celestial Bounty.

Fenwulf and Alfhild

   In an age undreamed of…

    Alfhild felt the familiar heat and shudder in her throat and behind her eyes as she picked up the small wolfskin cloak from the packed earthen floor of her family’s hut.

    “Wolves. Ymir damn them all!”

Cthulhu Mythos Obscurities

In the story "The Shadow out of Time" H.P. Lovecraft mentions "a general of the great-headed brown people who held South Africa in B.C. 50,000" as one the Yithian's mental abductees.
Perhaps HPL's inspiration for this was Boskop Man aka Homo Capensis, a separate species of ancient humans theorized to have a much greater brain capacity based on some big skulls found in South Africa in 1913 (the idea has since been discredited). Was HPL imagining them in his mythos as a prehistoric empire since they had a general smart enough to get mind switched with a Yithian cone creature?

Not much online about Boskop Man since it's now considered just some unusually big skulls and not a separate race of early man but here's an image and a couple of articles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskop_Man

https://steemit.com/history/@getonthetrain/boskop-man-ancient-humans-with-extraordinarily-large-skulls-how-smart-were-they

Ruminations of a Bronze Age Nerd

A Steel Hand is a totally badass prosthetic but is it really practical?

The Last Decree of Ban-Fayan

“I will not do this thing.”
“You will. It is my decree as princess of Shu-Chen. It is your mandate to comply.”
Thus was the exchange between two women who occupied the opulent throne room of the royal palace of Shu-chen.

Ruminations of a Bronze Age Gamer part 3

The fighter and wizard already knew Indel was behind the door, but that ass.

The Grasping Coils

Prologue 

    The dark, bald-pated man finished encircling himself and a companion in a ring of rock salt, his saffron robes stained with sweat. In one hand he grasped a black candle, in the other an obscenely formed mandrake root. Wetting his dry lips he turned to his compatriot, a swarthy, mustachioed man clad in black silken finery.

Meanwhile in an alternate Universe

Too bad the show only lasted one season.

Ruminations of a Bronze Age Gamer part 2

Having your pelvis crushed by a giant sea serpent:
  11 hit points
Being rescued by a super hot warrior chick in a chainmail crop top and wet tshirt:
 PRICELESS

Fifteen Thousand Years Hence.

    It is said the Ancients, in their hubris, split the world with the fires of their sorcery, angering and drawing forth the Old Gods who slept beneath the mountains, the waves, the ice.

    Others have it that the Ancients, in their loneliness, called out to the cosmic gulfs in friendship, only to summon doom from the maddening spaces between space.

    Whatever the cause, the Ancients and their works were thrown down, and the seas swallowed old lands and vomited up new ones, and things long dead lived again.

She-Fiends of Yaramaj

She-Fiends of Yaramaj

Being an account of the violence that plagued that city, as recorded by Kostio, subprefect.

The First Incident

    It was in the third week of my assignment to the city guard of Yaramaj that the first incident occurred. The incident was unusual only in the fact it was brought to our attention at all, and that the one reporting it was such an outlandish individual. She was a green-eyed giantess of a woman, with flaxen hair bound it two great braids that reached to her waist, clad in a rude tunic sewn from a tiger’s pelt.

Gonshu.

Beneath and behind azure Xathar rears the citadel of Ibak.
Beneath and below azure Xathar strive the e'Kos, the Glrnar, the Ulfire men.
Beneath azure Xathar their blood runs and pools, obsidian black.
Beneath azure Xathar the denizens of Gonshu doth writhe and grasp.

And all their nightmares are as dreams of paradise.

Notes on Dagon and the Deep Ones

The first Deep Ones were created by the  Antarctic Elder Things millions of years ago as a byproduct of immortality experiments on terrestrial lifeforms, most were destroyed  but some escaped into the wild and multiplied. This explains the Deep Ones unnatural longevity and their genetically programmed aversion to the Elder Sign.

Dagon and Hydra were part of this "first batch" and so they are tens of millions of years old, huge, vastly intelligent, and have who knows what kinds of mutations. There may be others of the "first batch" in suspended animation in the undersea ruins of Elder Thing cities.

Deep Ones breed among themselves but it rarely produces viable offspring (otherwise the ocean would be teeming with immortal Deep Ones). Due to their unnatural nature they can breed with many other forms of life often producing the strange oceanic horrors of legend but their preferred breeding stock has always been humans because the offspring is intelligent and generally transforms into something very similar to to a pure Deep One. In eons past Deep Ones bred with various primitive hominids but the results were not acceptable to their ideas of racial aesthetics and generally destroyed, that said there are probably remote clans of apelike Deep Ones still out there somewhere.

Shortly after their escape from the Elder Things, Dagon and the other first batch Deep Ones fled to the area around sunken Rlyeh because the Elder Things avoided it, feral Shoggoths also dwelt in the area for the same reason and so an alliance was formed, over time the Deep Ones learned of the shoggoths vulnerability to hypnotic suggestion and began to exploit it. The shoggoths are not complete slaves to the Deep Ones but they generally are easily manipulated by hypnotic suggestions and a reverence for Dagon.

Dagon, the Deep Ones, and their allied shoggoths worship Cthulhu. Although Cthulhu's telepathic emanations are blocked by water being in close proximity to Cthulhu's tomb and the surrounding monuments holding theGreat Old Ones mental emanations allowed Dagon to make mental contact with him on some level. During the brief times when Rlyeh was temporarily thrust above the water Dagon spoke directly to his master gaining even more occult knowledge and becoming more devoted.

Over time the Elder Things died out and the Deep Ones could safely leave the Rlyeh "reservation" and they established cities based on the ruins of many of the Elder Thing cities. But Rlyeh is a holy place to the Deep Ones and they often make pilgrimages to the sunken city hoping to sense the presence of their lord and master.

Ruminations of a Bronze Age Gamer part 1

Whenever I look at this box art I want to be that guy who's taking a reading with the scanner thing, I'm betting he's the only one who has a fucking clue.