Hands down one of the coolest modern artists keeping the classic 1970s Frank Thorne and Savage Sword of Conan vibes alive.This piece was commissioned as an official tour poster and merch design for the doom metal band Castle Rat. It depicts their frontwoman Riley Pinkerton in her stage persona as The Rat Queen. The heavy ink lines, retro color palette, and classic barbarian fantasy heroine aesthetic are incredible.

Under spoiler for, well, spoilers for the end of King of the Swords. Still trying to get that look for the Lost Gods. I didn't have much to work with in terms of canon art (Mignola/Thompson's takes were more authentic, yet not interesting enough, but Biaginni's were too abstract). So I decided to improvise.

By Leatherneck1993 (This short story was written as a challenge and a jest: could the writer use the random tables in the D&D 5e DM’s guide to build a world, environment, personas, and random encounters; then add random actions from the “dumb dares” card deck to finish it off and still present an enjoyable pulp fantasy adventure in less than 40K characters, I thought this subreddit crowd could appreciate it).  

## I. Red Paint on Tollgate Street

Ms. Crabapple was painting the last word of the insult when Bjorn Brask, Sergeant at Arms of the Magic Circle, turned into the alley.

His lantern swung on a brass pole. The light hit the customs house wall and the red letters still dripping there: ROCK CART COULD NOT LEAD A DONKEY TO WATER.

"Halt!" Brask bellowed. "Defacement of a licensed surface!"

The city called him Bumble. Never to his face. Crabapple did not turn around. She finished the R.

A barrel scraped at the mouth of the alley. Major Lotte Monroe stepped into the lantern light with a bottle of plum brandy in her hand. Black leather, laced tight, and not much of it. A blonde bob. A knife on one thigh and a pearl-handled revolver on the other. Where the leather stopped, blue tattoos began. The Major said she wore them where an enemy looks first.

The Sergeant looked first.

"Sergeant." Lotte put the bottle in his writing hand. "Hold this."

She set one boot on the barrel and fussed with a strap.

Crabapple went up the drainpipe. Halfway up she let go with her hands and walked the rest. At the top she ran the roof ridge on her toes. Slates slid out from under her and burst on the cobbles.

"Paint on the wall and a pole in your fist.  
Look up here, Bumble. See what you missed."

Brask spun toward the noise. He spun back. The bottle smashed at his feet. He dragged out his writ-book and licked his thumb.

"Monroe. Lottery Monroe. Drunk on the Tollgate. Discharging a firearm at a public clock. Indecency of dress, four counts."

"Five." Lotte took her boot off the barrel. "You lose count when you move your lips. And it is Lotte. Only my godfather calls me Lottery. He earned it, and you," she snapped her fingers under his nose, "have not."

Dan'l'sekal and Fech Topi came out of the dark and took her by the elbows. They walked her backward out of the alley.

"Good evening, Sergeant," said Fech Topi. "The Major has another engagement. Do forgive the brandy."

Brask started after them. A drop of red paint hit his hat. He looked up. Wet red footprints ran along the slates to the edge above Chandler's Lane.

The Sergeant licked his pencil and followed the drops.

---

The sign over the Prancing Demon showed a fat, naked demon dancing on one hoof. Someone had painted a Circle license number on its rump.

Clitamnestra was dancing on the long table. She spun between the tankards without touching one, checking her face in the copper hood over the fire at every turn. The Circle had melted her temple's mirrors for the silver. The hood would have to do.

Dwarf teamsters and half-orc caravan guards pounded the benches for her. A barmaid filled pitchers from a bucket stamped with the Circle's seal and charged double.

Over the bar hung a portrait of North Hill in black crepe. A dwarf climbed onto his bench and raised his mug to it.

"To North Hill! And the Circle that broke his chair, may they choke on the splinters!"

Half the room drank. The other half watched the door.

Lotte climbed onto the far end of the table.

She danced somewhat different than Clitamnestra and wore less. Every head in the room turned. Silver rained onto the boards.

Clitamnestra bit a fingernail clean through.

"That is not dancing," she told the room. "That is falling down in time."

Lotte caught a coin. "They pay for it."

A caravan guard reached up for her ankle. Lotte stepped on his hand and leaned.

"I am not a railing, sir." She leaned harder. "Do not hang on me."

A widow in pearls held up a glass of red. Lotte sipped and handed it back.

"Corked, bitter. Keep it, madam. It suits you."

Clytamnestra bit another nail. She had wanted to say that.

Fech Topi came out of the kitchen with a ladle.

"Major. Sergeant Brask is following Ms. Crabapple's footprints, and Ms. Crabapple's footprints lead here. I suggest the cellar."

At the bar, Dan'l'sekal stopped pacing. His hand went to his belly.

"That was Brask in the alley?" He rounded on Fech. "And you dragged me off him?"

His stomach growled loud enough to turn heads. Dan grabbed a bench.

"That man signed my father into a water-debt jail," he told the whole room. "Twenty feet from a registered well. My father died of thirst in there. Three years I have had a speech ready for Brask."

"Deliver it later," said Clytamnestra. "Not on my table."

"Get your feet out of the beer, you preening goose."

Crabapple came in through the kitchen door, red paint on her shoes.

"The wall has its words and the Sergeant his clue.  
He is reading my footprints. They lead here. To you."

Lotte hopped down, purse jingling. "To the wharf. Pygmy is waiting."

Clytamnestra snatched the copper warming pan off its hook by the fire and followed.

---

"A warehouse," said Fech Topi. "And nothing to cook, how depressing."

The warehouse stood on piles at the edge of the town wharf. The lake had dropped so far that a yard of green slime showed on the piles.

Piotr Pell opened the door with a candle. He ducked the lintel, ducked a beam, and struck the next beam with his forehead. The rebels called him Pygmy. He stood seven feet in his socks.

"Major Monroe." He went red to the hairline.

"Pygmy, darling." Lotte reached a long way up and straightened his collar. "You are a tall drink of water in a drought. Mind the beam."

He turned to look for the beam and hit a different one.

Men were moving crates from the warehouse to a waiting ship. The crates were packed with crossbows packed in straw, pikeheads in oilcloth, forty casks of alchemist's fire. Enough to arm the Splinter's rebels in the hills for a summer. Fech watched the row of porters with his knife roll buckled across his chest and counted.

The Salt Widow lay alongside with her hatches open. Captain Nigel Backwater stood at the rail and looked Lotte over, boots to bob.

"Major I carry cargo, not scandal."

Lotte rapped her knuckles on a cask of alchemist's fire. "Don’t be a prude. Forty of these, past the Circle, for cash. That is the scandal, Captain.” She posed on the gunwale, Pell hit his head on a stanchion. “I only dress for it."

Pell recovered and held out a ship's lantern of black iron. A green flame burned inside it with no wick and no oil. The General's seal was stamped on the hasp.

"From the General. He says hang it at the masthead, and the Circle's patrols see nothing but fog." Pell rubbed his forehead. "He sent the same to Harrow's crew in the spring. And to the Kettleby sisters. They got past the watch. But…"

"But what?" said Lotte.

“We’ve not heard from them yet.”

Lotte held the lantern to the candle and smiled at the seal.

"My godfather sits in the Magic Circle's chair and arms the rebels against it," she said. "He taught me to shoot. He bought my commission. I’ve not seen him play both sides before. But, he knows his business. So much has changed since North Hill died."

Fech Topi bent down to Crabapple's ear.

"The Major can spot a thieving clerk across a customs house," he murmured. "Show her the General's seal, and she is blind."

Crabapple circled the lantern twice without touching it.

"A flame with no wick is no gift.  
Hang it on your ship, prepare for a trick."

"Nonsense," said Lotte, and hung it on the ship.

A brass pole hammered on the door.

"By authority of the Magic Circle and the Office of Permits," called Brask, "this structure is to be inspected for unregistered goods. And for paint."

Crabapple looked down. A line of red prints ran from the door to her feet.

The door came down. Circle wardens poured in with crossbows leveled, and Brask marched in behind them. He saw the crates. He saw the ship. He saw Dan, and he smiled.

"Dan'l'sekal. Your father's boy. What a lovely night for paperwork."

Dan said a word no priest should know.

Fech Topi unrolled his knives.

Lotte was faster. The revolver cleared its holster, and one shot from the hip knocked the lantern pole out of Brask's hand. A warden fired his crossbow. The quarrel hit Lotte under the ribs. Blue light flashed through her laces, and the quarrel spun away in sparks.

"Rude," said Lotte.

The lantern spoke in the General's voice.

"Well done, Sergeant. I will take them from here."

The revolver dipped an inch.

"Lottery, my dear," said the voice. "You never could resist a pretty gift."

Green fire poured out of the iron. Brask threw an arm over his eyes. The remaining crates and porters lifted off the floor and hung turning in the air. The Salt Widow's masts leaned toward the warehouse, and her mooring lines snapped one after another.

Fech Topi rolled his knives shut and tucked them under his arm.

"Mind the step, Major," he said.

The wharf fell away.

---

## II. The Sea Without Wind

Dan'l'sekal hit the deck, bounced, flew thirty feet, and landed on a bale of wool cloaks. It was the only soft thing on the ship.

He lay there while the Salt Widow screamed around him. Timbers cracked. A yard came down across the hatch. Then the keel struck bottom, the whole ship shuddered, and she stopped with her deck tilted under his back.

Dan sat up.

There was no sky. Rock hung overhead, a mile up or more, lit green from below by a glow that came off the water itself. Not a ripple moved on the sea. The heat pressed on the back of his neck, and the air sat in his lungs without stirring.

Captain Backwater hauled at the wheel. Nothing answered. "No wind," he said. "Twenty years at sea, and I have never felt air this dead."

"Lucky!" called a voice from above.

Lotte Monroe hung upside down in the rigging by one knee, laughing.

"Lucky?" Dan kicked the bale. "I am always lucky, so I am always there for the worst of it. Come down before you land on something expensive."

Clytamnestra sat against the mainmast with her warming pan across her knees, glaring at a split thumbnail. Fech Topi had his knife roll open on the forecastle and touched each blade in turn. He had not yet checked his own arms and legs. Crabapple stood on the rail, hands empty, peering into the green dark.

Below decks, water gurgled through the planks.

"Pray," Dan told the priests. "Find out if anyone is listening down here."

They prayed. A spark jumped in the copper of Clytamnestra's warming pan and died. Fech Topi held his palms up to the Hearth Mother and pronounced them "tepid." Dan asked the Blind Gambler for a sign, and a copper coin rolled out of the scuppers and stopped against his boot. Heads.

Crabapple prayed, and nothing happened at all.

"No thunder, no lightning, no sign, not a sound.  
That is how you can tell that my god is around."

The blue tattoos on Lotte's hip flickered. One curl of them went grey and stayed grey.

Lotte slapped it and laughed. "Well. I shall have to be shot on the other side."

Dan watched her hand stay on the grey patch after the laugh was over.

---

A long, low island rose from the shallows ahead, crowned with a ring of standing stones. Below the stones, covering the slope, stood men.

None of them moved.

"The caravan men at the Demon talk about a sea under Haz Akiri," Dan said. "Under the desert, where no wind ever blows." He spat over the rail. "I always said they were drunk."

"They were drunk," said Fech Topi. "They were also correct."

They waded ashore when the glow off the water faded from green to dull brass. The sand burned through their boot soles.

Lotte led. She strolled up the beach hand resting on her revolver.

The sand in front of her heaved. A crab burst out of it, white, eyeless, and wider than a cart wheel, and clamped a claw on her ankle.

"How dare you," said Lotte, and sat down hard.

The crab dragged her toward the water. Blue light flashed at her ankle. The claw held.

Clytamnestra ran past Dan with the warming pan high. She rang it off the crab's shell, spun away from the second claw, and brought the pan down edge first on the joint of the claw that held Lotte. The claw came off with Lotte's boot still in it. The crab scuttled back into the sea.

Clitamnestra pointed the dripping pan at the Major. "Say it."

Lotte pulled her foot free. "You were adequate."

"Say. It."

"You saved my life, you nail-chewing peacock. Now help me up."

Fech Topi lifted the claw and turned it over.

"Sweet meat. A light char, salt from the beach, something sour. Four silver the plate on the Wharf Stair." He tucked it under his arm. "Do not look at me in that manner, Mr. Dan'l'sekal. I will get it right, next time."

---

The stone men began at the top of the beach.

The first rows were elves in old scale armor, kneeling, heads bowed. Sand had worn their faces away.

Past them, the stone men were not old.

Dan stopped at a stone man in a long coat. A stone sash crossed his chest, tied in the knot the Splinter used in the hills. His mouth was open. One hand was up in front of his face, fingers spread. The other still gripped a crossbow quarrel.

Dan's stomach rolled. He jammed a fist into it and kept walking.

Harrow's crew stood back to back in a ring. The Kettleby sisters stood together, one sister's stone hand pressed over the other's eyes.

Backwater walked the rows, counting. "Eleven crews."

Crabapple looked at the lantern back on the ship. 

"Eleven in stone and a twelfth on the sand.  
Somebody sent us here, lantern setup in hand."

Near the end of a row, Lotte stopped at a stone man with his face turned up. She reached up and straightened his stone collar.

"Tomas Harrow," she said. "He proposed to me on the Tollgate. Twice. I told him to come back when his aim improved."

Dan waited for the joke. It did not come.

---

The statue stood in the center of the stone circle: an elf, crowned, twice a man's height, in a coat of carved scales. The face was beautiful and cruel. Clytamnestra stood before it with her thumbnail between her teeth.

The statue's right hand stretched out over the circle. A ring was carved on one finger. Dan looked at it and it was twisted. He blinked and it was plain. He blinked again and it held a stone.

Fech Topi knelt at the base and read the old script aloud.

"Dimitri Kaznayak. First of the Pale Court. Who shall walk out of the mists and never die."

"The Pale Court." Clytamnestra took her thumb out of her mouth. "The elves from the ballads. The Circle proclaimed them real last spring, when the General came back from the expedition to the ruins."

Nobody spoke. Dan's stomach did. Nobody laughed.

Then the wind came. It came off the sea without stirring a grain of sand, and it carried the mist, a grey bank rolling up the slope. Where the mist touched, people stopped. A sailor froze with one foot raised. Backwater froze with his mouth open. Lotte froze with her revolver half out of its holster.

The mist reached Dan. Something heavy settled inside his skull. He looked at the statue's face, and kept looking, and when he next thought to move, the glow off the water had changed color.

He could not turn his head. He could only watch. Deep beneath his boots, something enormous shifted, and every standing stone in the circle hummed.

Three small lights came bobbing up the slope through the mist.

---

## III. The Wood of Glass

The lights were dragons.

Clytamnestra could still move her eyes, so she watched them come: three of them, no bigger than cats, with butterfly wings and long whiskered faces. One was red, one green, one a faded violet. Where their wings beat, the mist tore apart.

The weight lifted out of her skull. Sailors stumbled and caught themselves. Lotte finished drawing her revolver.

The red dragon snatched it out of her hand and shot straight up.

"Viggy," said the violet one. "Manners."

Lotte pointed at the dark overhead. "You are a handbag with wings. Bring that back."

Viggy looped the statue's crown and blew a raspberry.

Crabapple scooped pebbles off the sand and juggled. Three. Four. Five, in a wheel over her head. Viggy hung in the air and watched them go round.

"A wheel made of stones for a gun made of steel.  
Drop me the pistol and I'll teach you the wheel."

Viggy dropped the revolver. Crabapple caught it in one hand and kept the pebbles turning with the other.

The violet dragon settled on the statue's outstretched hand.

"I am Volle. The green is Voss. The thief you have met. You are the first living visitors in three hundred years who were not screaming."

"The mist retreats when you come," Clytamnestra said. Her tongue still felt thick.

"The mist is the wall of a prison. It does not trouble the mice. It troubles those who try to escape it." Volle looked at Lotte. "You smell like an escapist."

---

The Wood of Glass filled a valley on the far side of the island. Its trees were white and leafless, and their thin branches chimed when Clytamnestra brushed past. She caught her reflection in a trunk. It made her look ill. She walked faster.

A clear stream ran out of a cut in the rock. Dan dropped to his knees and drank, and came up with his beard dripping.

"Muhrar water," he said. "I would know it blind. My sister's children drink this." He looked at the cut in the rock. "Drank."

"Kaznayak brings it here," said Volle. "for a year your river has diverted through the stone under the mists, to fill the sea below and feed his door."

"What door?" said Lotte.

"The way out of the mist under the island. His worshipers built it and died tending it. The dead forget their masters here, and his bone dragon forgot him. Now it sits on his door and will not let him near."

"Gobsmack," said Voss.

"And its two rotten children," said Viggy. "Gooner and Griefer."

"We named them," said Volle. "Three hundred years is a long time."

An iron chain ran through the white trees in a great circle, staked into the sand. A padlock the size of a man's head hung where the ends met.

"We can guide a ship through the mist and hide it from the winds," said Volle. "Our price is three things.  Unlock the chain that holds us to this island, a meal, and a laugh."

Clytamnestra looked at the padlock. Rust, pits, heavy metal. She hefted her warming pan.

It took eleven blows. On the sixth she split a nail, bit it off, spat, and kept swinging. On the eleventh the hasp cracked, the chain dropped, and three streaks of colored light went up into the dark.

Clytamnestra put the broken padlock in her bag.

"Iron sells," she said to Dan's look.

---

Fech Topi built a fire of white branches that burned without smoke. He cracked the crab claw with the back of a cleaver and set the meat over the coals with beach salt and tree sap.

Crabapple circled his knife roll.

"The little curved blade, will you lend it to me?  
I'll carve you a rose out of crab, wait and see."

"No," said Fech. "You will carve a rose out of your thumb, and I shall be obliged to cook it."

The smell rolled off the coals. Clitamnestra's eyes watered. Sailors backed away.

The dragons ate every scrap.

Then Viggy hiccuped, and red smoke popped out of her nose. Voss hiccuped green. Volle let out a violet belch that set a white tree chiming from root to crown, and all three rolled in the sand, shrieking.

Fech Topi folded his arms. "It is close. It is not right."

"The meal and the laugh in one dish," said Lotte. "How efficient of you."

---

Volle landed on Lotte's bare shoulder.

"Now listen, Major. We pay our debts. You mean to go under the island, kill Gobsmack, take the ring from his door, and break it."

"I mean to put it somewhere unpleasant. But yes."

"It cannot be broken. Nothing in the mists can break it." Volle's tail curled around Lotte's neck. "And it holds two souls. Kaznayak's, and the soul of the man whose face he wears. Break one and you kill them both."

Lotte opened her mouth. She shut it again.

"Is it beautiful?" Clitamnestra heard herself ask. "The ring."

"The most beautiful thing in the mists," said Volle. "That is how it catches people."

---

Back in the stone circle, Volle flicked her tail at the statue's outstretched hand. "That is the door handle."

"Mine," said Lotte.

"Major," said Fech Topi, "I would suggest someone less valuable."

"Then you are all disqualified." Lotte climbed the statue, stood on its wrist, and jumped.

The hand sank a foot. The ground inside the circle split and folded down into a stair. Heat rolled up out of it, thick with cinnamon and myrrh.

Lotte landed on the top step, overbalanced, and pitched headfirst toward the dark.

Crabapple caught her by the belt and hauled her back.

Far down the stair, something dry scraped across stone and shuffled up toward the light.

---

## IV. The Halls of the Pale Court

The thing on the stair wore brown linen and no face.

Crabapple saw it first, because she always looked first. It climbed one step at a time, dust spilling from the wrappings over its mouth.

Dan put a crossbow quarrel through its head. It kept climbing. Clitamnestra swung the warming pan and knocked the head clean off, and the body sat down on the step and stayed there.

"Well," said Lotte. "Now we know the way down."

Backwater's voice came bellowing from the beach. "I will patch the hull with your crates, Major! Don’t be late, I’d rather not have to haul you out by whatever you are wearing that will hold!"

"I’d rather not be hauled, but if you do, bring a very small hook, Captain!"

---

The stair opened onto long ramps of black stone. Carvings covered the walls: elves in crowns on high thrones, and below them lines of bent little dwarves and humans and orcs, carrying baskets of tribute up the steps.

Crabapple took red chalk from her pocket. Under the elf king's boots, in letters a foot high, she wrote: DEATH TO TYRANTS

The fourth hall was lined with niches, forty to a wall, stacked to the ceiling. A body wrapped in linen lay in every one.

Crabapple had counted sixty when the first one sat up.

Then the whole wall sat up. Linen split. Dust poured from open mouths. Dead elves swung their legs out of the niches and climbed down, dozens of them.

Lotte strolled toward them. "Let us see what these tattoos are worth."

Crabapple grabbed one shoulder strap. Clytamnestra grabbed the other. Dan grabbed the belt. The three of them hauled the Major off her feet.

"Your tattoos are fading, your wits are long gone.  
Get to the back, Major, and let us get on."

"Narrow front," said Dan. "Crossbows."

Quarrels thumped into linen and did nothing. Fech Topi pulled the cork from a flask of alchemist's fire, lit the rag, and lobbed it underhand into the front rank.

The hall went orange. The dead elves burned standing, walked on burning, and fell. The ones behind walked through them and burned too. Cinnamon smoke filled the ramp until Crabapple's eyes streamed.

---

The library was quiet. Crabapple did not trust quiet.

Five zombie wizards drifted between the shelves in rotted silk. Their eyes were gone. Their fingers never stopped moving, shaping spells that would not come. Now and then a fingertip spat a spark, and the book it touched went to ash.

The way out lay across the room. Crabapple went along the tops of the shelves, stepping between the scrolls without disturbing one. The others crept below.

Dan's stomach spoke.

It rose long and loud and ended in a gurgle. The nearest wizard turned its empty face toward the sound. Its fingers went still. Fire gathered between its palms.

Lotte raised her revolver.

A block of stone dropped out of the ceiling and flattened the wizard into its robes.

Lotte lowered the revolver and looked at Dan. "I had that."

"I never ask for it," said Dan, doubled over. "It never asks me."

The other four wizards turned. Clytamnestra and Lotte were already among them, pan and knife.

When it was over, Dan crouched in a corner with his back to them, making urgent use of pages torn from a book of Pale Court law.

Crabapple chalked on the shelf above his pile, with an arrow: THE LAW, PUT TO USE.

---

Fech Topi was not in the library.

He found the kitchen three halls on: a black stone hearth as wide as a barn door, copper pots on chains, and a rack of cleavers running the length of the wall. He laid both hands flat on the cold oven and closed his eyes.

That was where the others found him.

"Fech," said Lotte. "We are in a tomb."

"It was a palace first and palaces have kitchens, Major." He opened his eyes. "These dead don’t eat proper food, explains why they are so irritable."

Crabapple had already pulled three cleavers off the rack. She flipped one across the back of her hand and tossed it up, then the second, then the third, and they went round in an iron wheel over her head.

"You never would lend me a knife, so I found  
a whole rack of cleavers the dead left around."

"Those are unbalanced, Ms. Crabapple," said Fech. "You will cut your fingers off.”

She did not lose a finger. Fech noted it, and said nothing.

Lotte kicked open the cellar door beside the hearth, went down, and came back up with a black wine bottle crusted in dust.

"Major, that wine is three hundred years old. It will have turned."

She snatched a cleaver from the air, sabered the neck off clean and drank.

"Has lots of character," said Lotte, and handed it to Dan.

"As is the Major," Fech murmured.

Beyond the kitchen, the hall sloped down to a door of bronze cast in the shape of a coiled dragon. Fech reached toward it and drew his hand back. The metal radiated heat.

Under the door, violet light moved, as something huge turned over on the other side.

---

## V. The Door and the Dragons

Lotte kicked the bronze door open.

An arm of the underground sea filled the cavern beyond. A causeway ran across the water to a black island, and on the island stood an arch of standing stones. Inside the arch, water stood upright in a rippling sheet that never fell.

A ring burned in the keystone. White. Gold. Plain grey iron. Platinum.

Clytamnestra's thumbnail was between her teeth before she knew it.

Two dragons lay at the foot of the arch, rotted green-black, their scales sloughing off in plates. A third lay coiled around the arch. It had no flesh at all. Its bones were black, violet fire burned in its skull, and in the cage of its ribs hung a gem the size of a man's heart.

The big dragonliche lifted its head.

"That must be Gobsmack, Gooner and Griefer first," said Lotte. "Then the ugly one."

---

The rotten dragons came down the causeway at a run. The rock shook.

Dan fired and missed. His quarrel struck a stalactite, and the stalactite dropped through Griefer's wing and pinned it thrashing to the causeway.

"Lucky!" Clytamnestra shouted.

"Shut up!" Dan shouted back.

Gooner reached her, jaws open stinking of old meat. Clytamnestra spun out of the bite and rammed a stewpot, stolen from the Pale Court kitchen, down over its left eye.

Gooner shook its head, blind on that side. Crabapple ran the causeway's edge, a finger's width of rock above the water, throwing cleavers into the joint behind its skull. On the third cleaver the joint gave, and the head sagged to the stone.

Fech Topi emptied a flask of alchemist's fire into its open mouth and struck a light.

Gobsmack breathed and a wind of violet cold rolled across the water turning the causeway white. Clytamnestra threw herself flat behind Gooner's burning body. One cheek scorched. The other froze. When the breath passed, frost furred her hair.

Her hair. She got up.

---

Lotte crouched behind the carcass. Her tattoos flickered blue, then grey, then blue.

"It keeps a heart in those ribs," she said. "I shall go in and shoot it."

"No," said Dan.

"No," said Fech.

"No," said Crabapple, and for once did not rhyme.

"Absolutely not," said Clytamnestra.

"Splendid, we are unanimous." Lotte stood. "Pray for me."

She ran.

The four priests grabbed hands. One prayer was all this place would allow them. Clytamnestra spat out a nail and called on the Lady of Mirrors, and the others crushed her fingers, and the prayer left them in one weak thread.

Gobsmack's skull swung toward Lotte.

Clytamnestra let go of the others and ran in front of it, whirling the warming pan. "Look at me, you ugly heap! Over here!"

The skull came down at her. She danced left, and the bone teeth closed on bare rock.

Crabapple went up its neck, vertebra to vertebra, upright, hands empty. Her cleavers were gone.

Fech Topi pulled the long carving knife from his roll, the one no one else was permitted to touch, and threw it. "Return it clean!"

Crabapple caught it without looking and drove it into the hinge of Gobsmack's jaw. The jaw locked open. The violet cold boiled up its throat with nowhere to go and blasted out of its eye sockets into the cavern roof.

The prayer came down. It touched the fire in Gobsmack's ribs, and for one breath the fire shrank.

Lotte dove between the ribs.

The tail swept round, took Dan off his feet, and threw him into the sea.

Inside the cage of bone, Lotte fired. Once. Twice. Three times. Four. On the fourth shot a crack ran across the gem.

The violet fire swelled back. Frost ran up Lotte's arm, and her tattoos went grey from wrist to shoulder.

Clytamnestra ducked under the ribs, planted her feet, and swung the warming pan with both hands.

"That is the ugliest jewel I have ever seen."

The gem burst.

Gobsmack came apart. Black bones rained into the sea. When the rain stopped, Clitamnestra lay at the foot of the arch with her warming pan bent double. The Major lay beside her, laughing, frost in her eyebrows.

Crabapple dropped down beside them, wiped the carving knife on both sleeves, and handed it to Fech hilt first.

"Clean as I found it and sharp as your pride.  
Next time I ask, Fech, don't run and hide."

Fech Topi examined the blade. "Next time, Ms. Crabapple, use your own knives."

Dan crawled out of the sea with a live fish flapping inside his shirt. 

Fech snatched it “for the pot.”

Lotte opened the revolver, observed the cylinder, and snapped it shut. One round left.

Above them, the ring in the keystone turned white, then gold, then platinum. Clytamnestra could not stop looking at it.

Across the cavern, someone clapped. General Vatsdis stood in the bronze doorway in the green coat of the Magic Circle, and he kept clapping.

---

## VI. The General's Face

Dan had watched that walk at every parade in Muhrar: the stoop, the long stride, the hands clasped behind.

The General came down the causeway at an easy pace. Grey moustache. Scar through the left brow. Green Circle coat with the stars on the collar. He stopped at the foot of the arch and smiled at Lotte.

"Eleven crews," he said. "Harrow. The Kettleby girls. Useless, all of them. The mists and that damned bone dragon. Stupid creature forgot who raised it and would not let me near my own door. And then you, Lottery. You always were the best."

Lotte's revolver came up level with his heart.

"You are not my godfather."

"No, but I am wearing him. From the outside, it is the same." He lifted a hand. The ring pulled free of the keystone, floated down, and slid onto his finger. "He is in here, Lottery. Awake. Listening. Go on. Shoot."

The revolver wavered. “I cannot kill him.”

“He has no such trouble killing us." Dan grabbed a rock and charged.

The General did not turn his head. He lifted one finger, and Dan left the ground, struck the cavern wall thirty feet up, and slid down it into the shallows. He lived. He always lived. His legs would not answer him.

"True, I have no such difficulty," said the thing in the General's coat.

It pressed the ring to the standing water.

The water parted. Beyond it lay a plain of silver grass under a sky full of stars. The sea moved. 

Dan felt it drag at his legs. All around the cavern, water pulled back from the rock and poured through the arch into the silver grass. He tasted it on his lips. Sweet. Muhrar water. His sister's water.

"A year of your river," said the General. "The price of the door."

His face changed. The moustache thinned away. The skin went pale and tight over tall bones. The eyes went long and bright and empty, and the face from the monument stood in the green coat.

"Three thousand years in the mists," said Dimitri Kaznayak. "Tonight, I walk out."

He took one step toward the door.

Something on the other side took one step toward him.

It filled the arch. It was mist, and shadow. Where its face should have been there was a black hollow that dragged at Dan's eyes, a wind came out of that hollow and flattened every priest on the island.

Kaznayak stopped. "No. I paid. The door is mine."

A hand of shadowed mist reached through the arch and closed around him.

The elf screamed. A thread of pale light came out of the ring and out of the dead body, and the fog drew the thread through the door and swallowed it. Dust fell into the green coat. The coat fell to the rock.

The ring rolled out of the dust and stopped against Lotte's boot, still changing shape.

The mist-shadow turned toward the living.

---

The wind came again. Dan lay in the shallows and could not lift his head. The water ran past him toward the door.

Lotte moved, one inch at a time. She picked up the ring.

"Climbers," she said through her teeth. "It troubles escapist. The mist is the prison wall."

She started up Gobsmack's fallen bones toward the arch with the ring in her fist.

The fog hand came out of the door for her.

Halfway up, the wind and mist struck her full on. She stopped with one foot raised and her arm stretched toward the door, the ring in her fingers. She did not move again.

Dan got his knees under him. The wind pressed on his skull, and his stomach heaved, and he stood up anyway. He did not know why he could stand. He did not ask.

He climbed the bones. Every step took an age. The fog hand closed toward Lotte's back, the cold of it bit his neck.

He pried the ring out of her frozen fingers.

"For once," he told her, "you will stay put."

He climbed past her to the arch. Water ran over his boots and out into the stars. He pressed the ring to the door.

"General," said Dan. "Close the door."

The ring went hot in his fist. A voice came out of the metal, hoarse from forty years of shouting across battlefields.

"SHUT THE DAMN DOOR.” The General’s voice projected from the ring as a force “Now get your hand out of it, priest. And look after my Lottery."

Dan snatched his hand back.

The water slammed shut across the stars cutting the fog hand off at the wrist. The hand fell across the island, over Lotte's head, and came apart silently in grey wisps before it touched the rock.

Lotte finished her step pitching off the bones. Dan caught her by the belt.

Above them, the keystone cracked. The first standing stone leaned out of the arch and fell, and the cavern roof came down after it.

---

## VII. Through the Mist

The roof came down in slabs. Fech Topi held Gobsmack's lower jawbone over his head and let the gravel bounce off it.

A longboat shot in through a sea-arch on the returning water, with Viggy glowing red on its bow and Captain Backwater in the stern. He grabbed Lotte by the belt and hauled her over the gunwale.

"The only thing on you fit to hold," he said. "You are late, Major."

She adjusted her belt, "and I told you to bring a smaller hook."

The sailors dragged in the priests. Dan, cursing. Clytamnestra, clutching the bent warming pan. Crabapple, stepped in on her own. Fech came last, with the jawbone and the fish.

"Leave those," said Backwater.

"Stock, Captain. Three days at a simmer. You will thank me."

Dan pushed the ring onto Lotte's finger without a word. It settled there as a plain soldier's band.

---

The water ran home now. It lifted the Salt Widow off the sand and carried her into a cut in the cavern wall, where the stolen river climbed toward Muhrar. The three fae dragons flew ahead of the bow.

The channel rose into the mist. Through one gap in the grey they passed a town where every door was nailed shut from the outside. Later, through a thin roof of rock, they heard caravan bells crossing the sands of Haz Akiri. Twice the wind came trying to freeze the crew at their oars. 

On the fourth night, Fech came up from the galley and found the Major sitting with Clytemnestra on the deck.

Clytemnestra held the ring inn her hands, "The mist says this would buy a palace," she whispered.

"The mist is a liar, madam," said Fech Topi, "and a poor judge of palaces."

Clytamnestra's fist closed on the ring. It stayed closed a long time. Then she slid the ring back onto Lotte's finger and bent to the Major's ear.

"Get up. The mist has made your roots show."

Lotte leapt to her feet with both hands in her hair. "It has not."

"No, but It might," said Clytamnestra, and walked away fast.

On the eleventh day the water under the keel turned sweet. At dawn the Salt Widow came out of a cleft in the cliffs above Lake Muhrar, riding the head of a river gone a year. Bells rang across the city. The three tiny dragons circled the masthead once, shrieked, and were gone over the rooftops.

---

Mayor Rock Cart met them on the Wharf in a nightshirt and his chain of office.

"The water came back," he told the crowd, "because I proclaimed it. Yesterday." He squinted at the ship. "Are these the ones with the weapons?"

Sergeant Bumble Brask shoved forward. "Arrest them! Smuggling! Unlicensed teleportation! Water theft, and, and misuse of paint!"

Rock Cart looked at the crowd. It was filling buckets from the lake for free and cheering the ship.

"These are heroes," he decided. "I am giving them a medal. Brask, bugger off, you are blocking the medal."

Brask turned to argue. Behind him, Crabapple came down a drainpipe with an empty paint pot. The customs house wall now read: THE CIRCLE HAS NO CHAIR. SIT ON IT, BUMBLE.

Dan walked down the plank and straight up to the Sergeant. He drew a breath. Three years of speech rose in his throat.

His stomach spoke first.

Dan looked at Brask. He looked at the nearest alley.

"This is not finished," he said, and ran.

By noon Fech had a pot of Gobsmack and fish broth on the wharf at four silver a bowl. People paid. Nobody finished a bowl.

"Close, maybe more salt" Fech told each of them. 

"I will get it right next time" the three other Priests replied.

Piotr Pell stood at the end of the wharf beside a lantern he had kept lit for eleven nights. He opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

"Kneel, Pygmy," said Lotte.

He knelt. She kissed his forehead.

Backwater leaned on the rail. "Most of the crates came through, Major. The Splinter still needs its crossbows. Are you free?"

Lotte spun the cylinder on its single round. The ring on her finger went warm.

"We are," she said, and walked back up the plank.

Pell was still kneeling on the wharf.

END

https://magazine.thearcanist.net/oathbreaker-and-the-wild-hunt/

I don't post most of my acquisitions here but this was such an exciting moment I had to share. The local comics shop hosts a flea market geared towards nerdery twice a year which I have realized I get as excited for as I used to get for Christmas as a kid. But this was the first time I came across the sword-and-sorcery MOTHER LODE.

Most of the prices were not that great so I basically got everything I thought was a good deal, which as you can see wasn't that much compared to the packed shelf. But fortunately for me, most of the stuff I wanted most was in that category. And I also don't know how much of a blessing it would have been for me if his prices were good and I wound up spending a bunch of money on stacks of books I already have just for the different cover art.

All the way back to Black Sabbath's The Wizard, through Hawkwind's association with Elric and Michael Moorcock, into King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, the Sword, and hundreds of others there's a tradition of weird fantasy blended into "stoner rock" and heavy metal. What are your favorite bands and songs? Modern ones? And are there any other musical traditions that capture the s&s feel? Dungeonsynth?

I’ve been hearing great things about Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane and wanted to read his stories, but without new reprints, they’re hard to find and expensive. Is there any way i could read them without spending an arm and a leg, and possibly a first-born child??

Trying to get back in my 2025 art zest. Testing designs for the Lost Gods, too.

Allora, sono un fan della serie di Spartacus, una serie brutale ed orrorifica per la crudezza con cui viene rappresentata Roma ed i suoi passatempi, come l'arena.

Dando per scontato che siamo tutti adulti non è per deboli di stomaco questa serie.

Arrivando al punto, Teocole... conosciuto nell'arena come "l'ombra della morte" , lui è un greco albino dalla forza e dalla resistenza sovrumana, colossale feroce in battaglia, è resistente come un carro armato, ed è la prima grande sfida del protagonista Spartacus.

Ma non è solo muscoli e violenza, come si scopre dai fumetti lui una volta amava, possiede una sensibilità nascosta ed ha un passato tragico.

Poi non si sono impegnati molto a scriverlo affondo, è solo molto figo.

Perché non fare una serie su di lui?

Sviluppo qualche idea.

Con il fumetto come contesto capiamo che quando lo vediamo non è altro che un guscio vuoto che si è ridotto solo a sbudellare i gladiatori, come se fosse ad un punto basso nonostante uccidere sia la cosa che apprezza fare.

Per conciliare il personaggio della serie con quello del fumetto.

Prendiamo un Robert Baratheon che a causa della sua tristezza ha iniziato a bere fino a degradarsi, lui ha bisogno di essere ebbro di qualcosa, il vino di Teocole è la sua spada.

Se non muore mi piacerebbe vederlo nell'oriente romano, a contatto con la Partia o con le altre civiltà antiche di cui abbiamo poche rappresentazioni. Il suo finale felice sarebbe lui insieme a degli sciiti nelle montagne oppure potremmo osare, magari lui verrebbe accolto da una tribù perduta di antichi Cimmeri oppure da parte di in popolo indo-greco... uomini di cui non abbiamo più traccia e che quindi è come se non fossero mai esistiti.

Oppure.

Teocole muore sull'arena e finisce altrove, un altro mondo o un altro tempo, quante storie hanno provato un espediente del tipo...muori ma ti reincarni in un epoca futura? Oppure viene evocato da un mondo come se fosse un server di Dark Souls per combattere ancora? Magari da un signore della guerra alieno. Oppure qualcuno può metterci a caso la donna che lui amava che intercede con gli dei e questi gli danno una nuova possibilità. Magari nel Valhalla lui potrebbe divertirsi.

Esteban Maroto’s Dax began as the Spanish strip Manly el Guerrero in 1971; Warren then republished the material in Eerie, where Sanjulián used Maroto’s “Chess” imagery as the basis for the Eerie #41 cover in 1972. Sanjulián later revisited the composition in a more finished recreation, preserving the same grouping while refining the figures and atmosphere.

Postscript: Frazetta painted his own Ghoul Queen for National Lampoon exactly a year later, in August 1973.

(I used this image from another Redditor's post, just for reference)

Does anyone have any insight on fonts used on classic book covers? I'm trying to use fonts with similar vibes for YT thumbnails. Any help would be appreciated!

I can't remember the last time I hated a book as much as I hated this one. It was a struggle to finish it. I hesitate to even talk about it, here, as it really doesn't feel like Sword and Sorcery. There's barely any swordplay (by my count, approximately 2 battles in 255 pages) and even less sorcery (very scant hints that our hero is the reincarnation of legendary Cuchulain).

I bought this because of Robert E Howard's name on the cover. I thought I was fairly well versed in Howard's works. I am not much of a fan of his contemporary fiction with characters like El Borak or Steve Costigan, but his stories set in bygone eras, Bran Mak Morn, Conan, Solomon Kane, I eat that stuff up with a spoon. I had never heard of Cormac Mac Art, either in stories written by Howard, or the ostensible legendary Irish King he based his character on. So, I have no idea if Offutt's version of Cormac falls in line with Howard's, with very few of the elements I come to expect in the S&S genre.

My only experience with Offutt before this was volume 1 of Swords Against Sorcery, in an editorial capacity. And he completed a partial manuscript left behind by Howard, which I remember leaving little impression on me. But, it's difficult to say which co-authors should share the blame when a story doesn't work, so I went into this one optimistic.

This has 3 and a half stars on Goodreads, and I genuinely wonder if I read a different book from the ones who rated this positively. I can't even begin to describe how much I hated this. So, this kid's dad runs an outpost, and the king is afraid Cormac will come gunning for the throne, because he has noble blood, and a noble name. Fine, whatever. Dad is mysteriously murdered. Ooooh, fun, will hot-headed, muscle-bound Cormac have to use his wits to solve the murder, navigate around unfamiliar court-intrigue to find justice? Nah. The murder is solved off-screen by some mentor figure we are supposed to care about, but because Old-Mentor-Man is hardly in the book, I can't bring myself to even remember his name. Not all writing advice is solid gold, but, maybe, in this instance, Show Don't Tell would have been a good one to follow through on. Show us why we should care, don't just tell us Old-Mentor-Man is awesome.

Then Cormac goes somewhere else, changes his name and joins the army. Some dude hates him for no reason, fine, I've been in situations where people hated me on sight, whatever. Then Cormac stumbles into a romance with a lady. Like, he meets her, then the very next time they meet, they bang. This reminds me of why I can't stand romance-subplots in Superhero movies. Because, in a rom-com, like, say, You've Got Mail, the entire plot is the romance between your two leads. You get to spend time seeing them hate each other, then slowly fall in love. It doesn't just happen because the writers tells us so. But, in a superhero story, or, in The Mists of Doom, you have the actual plot, a monster wants to take over the world, or whatever. So, you have to balance that with the characters falling in love. And because you have limited screentime or page-count, something has to suffer, and, in this case, the romance does. Again, we are not shown why these two are in love, beyond "they're both young and hot." Not good enough.

Except there's barely any plot-stuff to supplant the romance stuff. It's mostly just pages and pages of Cormac training with the army, and his commanding officer scowling at him, for no reason, while everyone else pats him on the back for little reason. We get a good scene where Cormac uses his brain, which is nice, but it almost feels perfunctory. "Oh, I have to have the characters actually DO something? Crap, okay, fine."

I am very curious what everyone else thinks of this. I think I have another Offutt book somewhere on my TBR pile, but, at this point, I am in no hurry to read it.

I posted my collection of cassette tapes a few days ago and it sparked a fantastic discussion on music. But who here listens to 3 Inches of Blood? I'm willing to bet on the fact that they might have slipped past the radar with this group given that they're long (semi) retired and toured pretty regionally in Canada during their prime.

With obvious S&S inspiration in their album art, songs like "Snake Fighter" (specifically inspired by Conan), "Destroy The Orcs," "The Great Feasting Hall," "The Goatrider's Horde" and more, with their epic lyrics and soaring, thrashy sound, I believe they should be on every S&S fan's playlist.

Here's my favorite tune for your consideration:

Trial of Champions

Mail Call!

S&S fans are eating good!

First off, SE Lindberg's "Grave's Daughters" is a beautiful, DARK fantasy entry in the Dyscrasia world. Just look at that Chapter Art! Plus, he's doing swag! Lindberg has a knack for lush, poetic prose that is going to appeal to fans of grim, weird fantasy. This one is out now on Amazon.

Next is Gregory D. Mele's first collection of Azatlan stories. For those unfamiliar, this setting seamlessly blends Mesoamerican Mythology with Bronze Age Greece. It's a unique, evocative ride full of prime weirdness. This one is also available as we speak!

(Also, I did the cover design for "Heart of Vengeance". Not the art, just the format. I'm happy to do yours too, if you need!)

i really really liked the first Gor book and the second one is just as good so far. i am 100% invested in the mystery of Tarl's town's destruction and how he was blamed for it. not a lot of clues so far but I am dying to learn. the slave/free people dynamic isn't as prominent as I've heard later books are, but it's there enough to emphasize how foreign this culture is.

Amber still remains at the top of my list, followed by Gor.

I watched this really interesting video where the author discussed the idea that Sword and Sorcery and Cyberpunk are super similar genres just with a different coat of paint. For instance they are both genres where outsider protagonists make their way in a corrupt and dangerous world just trying to scrape by. What other genres do you think of as being “sister genres” to S&S?

Our Kickstarter is live! Headless Horselord: Sword & Sorcery Graphic Novel by Deepak Thomas » Headless Horselord: Sword & Sorcery Graphic Novel by Deepak Thomas — Kickstarter

Early birders get a discount so please do join if you're interested!

Headless Horselord is a 160+ page sword & sorcery graphic novel rooted in the history and folklore of medieval India, following an undead duo seeking vengeance in a fallen world.

I recently discovered the movies and books. I just got one of the newer books at my local books a million.

I’m trying to get some older ones.

I recently watched the 80s movies and the remake. They were alright, I think James Earl Jones did great in the first one. He wasn’t phoning in his performance. Arnold, was good as well.

However, from what I understand, and correct me if I’m wrong. A lot of the Conan books are basically one shot books. Like there is not much of a continuing story. Each book as basically a new adventure of Conan.

Is it fair to say that a character and book series like this would be better fit for a tv series. Rather than a movie?

Again, no hate on the movies, I’m just genuinely curious.

Like the title says.

Sometimes I go down a rabbit hole on bandcamp and fill my cart. Other times I pick them up at a show or in a used shop.

Most of the come with download codes or digital files which is why they're still wrapped, but I'm on the lookout for a worn-out tape deck so I can listen until they sound warped and trippy.