Conan of Venarium

Spring slowly moved into summer. In that northern land, days grew long and almost warm. The sun rose in the far northeast and set many hours later in the far northwest. Some of Cimmeria's perpetual mist burned away. The sky was a water)', grayish blue, but blue it was nonetheless. Even the conifer-filled forests seemed—less dour, at any rate. Ferns growing by the bases of the tree trunks added splashes of brighter green to the scenery.

Silent as the beasts he stalked, Conan slipped through the woods. When he came to the edge of a small clearing, he froze into immobility. His eyes scanned the open space ahead to make sure he disturbed nothing before he ventured out from the concealment a pair of pines gave him. Not even a savage Pict from the rugged country west of Cimmeria could have walked more lightly on the land.

Once out in the clearing, Conan froze again, watching, listening, waiting. Something seemed to call him, but not in a way to which he could set words. He frowned, then went on. Whatever it was, he would find it.

He frowned again on the far side of the clearing. He had been through these woods many times, yet he did not recall this particular track. Shrugging, he silently strode along it. It took him in the direction he wanted to go. That it might also take him in the direction it wanted him to go never entered his mind.

Some little distance down the trail, he stopped, his head turning this way and that. The frown that harshened and aged his features grew deeper. Birdsongs were scarcer now than they had been in springtime, when returning migrants vied for mates. Still, he had been able to hear the calls of doves and finches and the occasional distant, strident shriek of a hunting hawk.

Not here, not now. Silence had settled over him, soft as snowfall. His eyes flicked now to the left, now to the right, now up, now down. The forest looked no different from the way it had before he set foot on this treacherous track. It looked no different, but somehow it was. That muffling drift of silence lay thick upon the land. Even the buzz of flies and the hum of gnats were softly swallowed up and gone.

"Crom!" muttered Conan, as much to hear his own voice— to hear anything at all —as for any other reason. The grim god's name seemed to reverberate through the trees, carrying farther than it had any business doing. But Crom would not help him if he came to grief. He knew that only too well. The god might have helped breathe life into him, but, now that he had it, keeping it was his own lookout.

He nocked an arrow before pressing on down the trail. He could not have said why, save that the unnatural silence oppressed him. Against silence, what could an arrow do? Nothing Conan could think of, yet having a weapon instantly ready to use heartened him.

On he went, his perplexity mounting at ever}' stride. These woods felt more ancient than the ones with which he was so intimately familiar, as if the trees had been brooding here since the dawn of time. He scratched his head, wondering why and how such certainty filled him. Again, he could not have said, but fill him it did, more so with each step he took.

That feeling of age immemorial soon began to oppress him worse than the silence, to raise in his breast a dread nothing natural could have caused. He needed a distinct effort of will to halt, and another, greater, one to turn around and seek to go back. When he did, ice walked along his spine. The track that had led him forward vanished behind him. It might never have been there at all. When he turned again, though, it still ran straight ahead of him.

"I'll go on, then," he said. This time, the tree trunks and branches might have drunk up his words; he barely heard them himself. Crom might have held some power in this primordial wilderness, but Conan himself had none, or so it seemed.

That might have been the judgment of the wilderness, but it was not Conan's. Defiantly, he pressed ahead. The path went past an enormous fir—easily the largest Conan had ever seen, and one he would surely have known well had it grown anywhere near Duthil — before turning sharply to the left. The blacksmith's son followed it, but then stopped in his tracks in astonishment at the sight of what lay ahead.

The gray stone ruin might have sprung from the dawn of time. It was, without a doubt, a temple dedicated to some god, but which? Not Crom, surely; he had neither shrine nor priesthood. Perhaps some mystic convulsion has sent it spinning down the centuries from its own proper era to that in which Conan lived. It might have been a temple from the great vanished island of Atlantis, from whose few scattered survivors the Cimmerians drew their descent. Of that, however, Conan knew next to nothing.