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.

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.

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.