Shadows Out of Time

Once on the surface again, Crom-Ya was dismayed to see the companion he had left topside had now become a shapeless heap of strange flesh. The victim must have drawn the attention of one of the jungle dragons, and he had no defense to offer. Nor could the poor thing flee the great reptile with its churning legs and eager fangs. So much for his guess that the cone race possessed some natural protection or repellant!

Momentarily preoccupied reflecting on the matter, Crom-Ya failed to notice the headlong ambush of a dragon, probably the same one. Its jaws grabbed up his conical form and bit it in half. His last incarnate thought was to hope Rang-Thulan would keep his word.

Any Port in the Immortal Storm

His transition from the Hyborian Age to that of the Great Race had seemed instantaneous, but now he felt duration. He felt somehow that his soul was traveling to its point of origin. And perhaps it was his imagination, but he began to see flashes of a scene containing the familiar shapes of men. As he grew closer, the figures grew clearer. He believed he was seeing the inside of a large and ornate tent. There, cross-legged in a silent trance, was Rang-Thalun, but the wizard was not alone. He sensed that the Pictish shaman was attempting to guide the floating soul of Crom-Ya back home to its body, like a beacon across the sea of eternity. He knew that his freedom was near at hand!

But he was wrong. He began to hear the guttural voices of two Picts, whose words revealed they were subordinates dissatisfied with the plans they must have overheard their master muttering in his trance. Plans about not only keeping the Cimmerian prisoner alive but elevating him to the position of Warlord of the Pictish Horde, a rank one of these men coveted. The other wore a modest head dress marking him as a priestly subordinate, a breed ever bent on ruthless schemes of advancement. The pair were apparently partners in a deadly plot.

Powerless to intervene, the spirit of Crom-Ya watched as the warrior plunged his dagger into the throat of the Cimmerian’s inert form, while the priestling seized the Black Stone and used it as a bludgeon to crush the skull of Rang-Thalun.

Crom-Ya knew he was twice-doomed, as he was no more drawn toward his body, which was now rendered useless to him anyway. Must he drift forever aimless through a cosmos of phantoms? His speed had slowed, but in a few moments something catapulted him though time. Briefly he had a glimpse of the future, the aftermath of the events he had just witnessed. What he now saw was compressed together as if he were remembering a set of past happenings seen long ago. He saw the Pictish Empire, so newly made, crumble under the incompetence of their new Warlord and the lack of RangThulan or any leader like him. There was nothing anymore to hold the clans together, and they quickly went their separate ways, returning to vendettas and petty conflicts between them. It was all to be expected.

And then that world was left behind him. He drifted now, like a message in a bottle lost in the vastness of the ocean. He slept through an unknown number of ages till at long last he felt his vagrant essence descending to solid earth. He found himself taking refuge in the person of a muscular young man with close-cropped black hair, sitting at a device upon which his sturdy fingers tapped and tapped at great speed. He imagined he saw a resemblance between the man and himself, as if they shared a common blood inheritance many generations apart.

The man paused as if suddenly dizzy, but then hunched over his machine and returned to his tapping with renewed vigor and inspiration. Crom-Ya could see he had by no means displaced the fellow’s native mind, though he seemed to share the man’s consciousness somehow.

His host looked up from his finger-drumming to answer a voice from the doorway.

“Bob, your dinner’s getting cold!”

The man seemed reluctant to break off what he was doing, but at last he did. At the sparsely laid dinner table, the man named Bob was talking excitedly.

“Ma, Pa, I think I’ve had that breakthrough I’ve been waiting for. A new character popped into my mind. He’s the damnedest bastard that ever was!”

In successive days, then months, Bob Howard wrote, or rather typed, furiously, almost like a machine himself. He spoke the words aloud as he put them on paper. Many of his new adventure tales achieved publication, and to great reader acclaim. Once a friend asked him, as readers always do, where he got his ideas.

“I didn’t seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. I tell you, it was as if the man himself had been standing at my shoulder directing my efforts. I didn’t create him by any conscious process. He simply stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me to work recording the saga of his adventures.”

The Rocks of Leng KEITH TAYLOR