For a Pod Full of Dollars

 

“Fifty Thousand Dollars.”

The words oozed from Rayfe Tassk’s mouth as a grin spread across his swarthy, mustachioed face. He pushed a translucent plastoid sheet through the holo-adverts swirling across the tabletop toward the being seated opposite.

Skeks Sudzdozyn grasped the sheet in long, blue fingers and scanned it with bulbous, unblinking red eyes. 

“What’s a dollar?” he asked.

Six Heads for Gullahm-Khullgosh in Whetstone #4.

 https://whetstonemag.blogspot.com/2021/12/whetstone-issue-4-now-available.html

Download your free copy of Whetstone #4 for free and enjoy the mind boggling Six Heads for Gullahm-Khullgosh, along with other sanity blasting Sword and Sorcery!

Coils

So I basically took chapter from a longer story and turned it into a CAS inspired bit of  "flash fiction".

Check it out after the jump.

Tower of Ornelia in Savage Realms Monthly #5.

 My story Tower of Ornelia, is included in the latest Savage Realms Monthly:

Savage Realms Monthly: June 2021: A collection of dark fantasy sword and sorcery short adventure stories (Savage Realms Monthly Dark Fantasy Sword and Sorcery Adventure Magazine Book 5)

by Amazon.com Services LLC
Learn more: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B099FJZLNX/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_NR1R5XC9265186H6GK0J

Sigyn Volume 2 Paperback available.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092CBMKQZ/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_8S77A3RT7WRWE0SR906Z

Come and get it, True Believer!

Savage Realms #2

One of my tales has made it into this fine publication. 

https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Realms-Monthly-collection-adventure-ebook/dp/B08Y5775T6

The Embrace of Masa-Mangtow

 

What follows is a fragment of an account of a sea voyage by Hippias of Syracuse. It currently exists only as a Latin translation of an older Greek source. 

I.

Aranthur, one of the various sea-warlords who have run roughshod across the world of late, had carved himself a small kingdom among the lands to the west. These included a chain of islands that lay beyond and south of Gades. Unable to explore these islands himself, he procured the services of the famed explorer and cartographer, Erastus of Argos. Erastus in turn called upon me, Hippias of Syracuse, to undertake the voyage with him. Holding Erastus in high esteem as a mentor, and hungering to venture once more to unknown regions, I accepted his invitation.

The Stalkers of U’Ad

 

 

I. Waylaid!

    I stood at bay, the still-warm carcass of my slain dromedary at my back, surrounded by a half-dozen dwarfish Qllgir hill men; they brandished long, wickedly-curved knives and their eyes were hidden behind lenses of darkly stained glass. I tore the keffiyeh from my head and spat at them.

    “Dogs! Come forth and have done with it!”

On the Three Millionth Day. Kindle edition.

Get it while it's radioactive.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085NB8Y3S/ref=cm_sw_r_other_apa_i_0sAzEbGSW549K

Sigyn of Kindle

Get your e-book here.

I've rewritten Sigyn out of the Hyborian  Age and into a quasi-historical bronze age. Reaching the pinnacle of vanity, I've self published with Kindle. At least it's cheap.

The Matrix of Khouzouhept

I
  Kaa-Vulth, deposed Emperor of Tazzozz, grinned as he surveyed the surreal vista laid out in the bowl-shaped valley beneath him.

Bane of the Man-Serpent.

    Kaa-Vulth had battled past guardians human and inhuman, and cheated death at every turn.
    Now, he at last breached the inner sanctum of Man -Serpent. The he would pit cold steel against the eldritch sorcery of an ageless evil.

The Track of the God-Ape

It is, I‘m told, natural for one to grow nostalgic as one ages. Like many others I look back with wistful fondness upon my youth and childhood. But I have also found myself immersed in reminiscences that are not connected with any events of my lifetime. Visions I would dismiss as daydreams or phantasms were it not for their vividness and the absolute conviction I have that I lived these events as surely as I attended grade school and enjoyed my first kiss. One such vision that forced itself upon me is a memory from when I was Diyang-Buru of the Stork Folk.

Man-I-Pede

….What follows is claimed by Mr. Conrad to be a transcribed from a radio transmission he was party to during his time working with the I-Tech group. Conrad asserts the transmission was one of several made by a “General Blair” from an extrasolar planet named “Ghonshu”.  

I-Tech maintains that Mr. Conrad was engaged in no unusual projects during his employment, and Pentagon sources deny that any “General Blair” was reported missing during the timeframe Mr Conrad claims these various incidents occurred.

...It was probably about sixty, eighty feet long, ten, twelve feet in diameter. It had a hard shell like a lobster.Hard to say what color it was, everything has a bluish tint under Ghonshu’s weird, tiny sun. it had rows and rows of smooth, flabby arms, like a baby’s arms, each with fat, fingers with slimy bulbs on the tips. I want to say it had the head of a man, but that’s not accurate. The head was huge, the size of a VW beetle, bald, mottled and sprouting wart-like growths. It had a long tangled beard that seemed to have moss or fungus growing in it. It’s eyes were wide and rolled about crazilly. It’s mouth hung open and drooled over yellow peg-like teeth. It was gibbering the whole time. Sometimes it might have spoke words. It stunk too. Like mildew and rotting vegetables, but worse, and stronger.
    It had a big metal ring through it's nose, like someone might have led it around like a cow at some point. Best not to think about it.
 

    It sounds comical as I recall the thing, but it was no joke at the time. The locals shot arrows into it and hit it with axes and hammers and whatnot, that just seemed to anger it.

    Finally I had to use five more rounds from the M16 to put it down.

 

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.

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.

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.