(This is story #5. Previous: “Paladin“.)
He waited until the wizard was alone.
The woman might have been his first choice, but then he saw her eyes. There was something dangerous about her. He couldn’t say what exactly, just that it put him off wanting to be alone with her. And he didn’t want to risk the strong one with the sword, for obvious reasons. But the little one in the black robes? Perfect target.
Continue reading(This is story #4. Previous: “Ghost“. Next: “Outlaw“.)
“We’re all gonna die!”
Amos grabbed the young soldier and hauled him back toward the flickering torch. “No, we’re not. Now run, for Gideon’s sake!”
The soldier scrambled back up the steep rocky tunnel, his bloodied sword clanging dully against the walls as he stumbled and gasped.
Amos glanced around one last time to make sure he had gotten the entire squad. One man had died, but the others were still alive and running back up the tunnel. Amos knelt by the one fallen soldier and studied his dirty face. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. But I promise you will know justice, even in death.”
A screech and roar echoed up from the cavern below. Amos rose to his feet, lowered his visor, and lifted his shield. “By the might of Gideon!”
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Having conquered his upstart cousin and acquired the soul-devouring sword Stormbringer, young emperor Elric sets out to explore the world to learn wisdom and justice so he can transform his people from amoral decadents into virtuous paragons. But his journey does not start out well.
This is the second book in the linear progress of Elric’s story. Our hero is alone in the world, and while searching for the virtuous city of Tanelorn he stumbles upon the corrupt city of Quarzhasaat instead. Deprived of his healing herbs and not having devoured any souls recently, fragile Elric stumbles out of the desert and lies dying in a hovel, tended by an opportunistic boy named Anigh.
Definitely not a good start.
Continue reading(This is the first in the short story series. The next story is “Dusteater“.)
“Do you have any idea who I am?!”
Malachi teetered on the edge of the wall. Behind him, the desert floor spread out to the horizon some hundred feet below. In front of him, thirty blue-cloaked soldiers raised their spears and bows along the wall-top path, closing in from right and left as the sun glinted off the silvery domes and spires of Sahar. Malachi waved the soldiers back with one hand as he clutched his blue tome to his chest with the other, with one finger pinched inside to hold a certain page. He grinned. “Trust me, you’re outnumbered.”
Continue reading(This is the third story in the series. Previous: “Dusteater“. Next: “Paladin“.)
Jude floated above his skull.
He always floated above his skull, unable to drift more than an arm’s length from the brown, spotted bone. Not that he had arms. Or bones. Coyotes made off with most of the big ones, and vultures took the middling ones. The small ones crumbled to dust long ago.
As the last light of day faded, Jude felt himself emerge from oblivion, fading back into reality. The rocky red desert came into view, the same as it did every night. The sentinel cacti loomed over him, bristling with pale yellow needles slowly twisting in their roots in search of water.
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Elric of Melnibone is often introduced and discussed in contrast to Conan the Cimmerian, so I will bow to that most noble tradition now. Robert E. Howard‘s Conan is an American fantasy hero of great strength and courage, powerful mirth and brooding, who wanders the world in search of adventure and fortune, critical of decadent civilizations, slaughtering monsters and attracting women wherever he goes. Michael Moorcock‘s Elric is a British fantasy hero of weak constitution, dependent on magic and drugs to survive, an albino emperor reluctant to wield power or punish his enemies, a conflicted philosopher trying to invent morality while serving the Lords of Chaos, and always pining for his betrothed lover Cymoril.
So… they’re different.
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I’ve always had a soft spot for eastern European folklore and mythology. I grew up on Norse and Greek myths, and later Egyptian and Celtic. But Slavic myths were harder to stumble upon (when I was young and you had to look in books at the library), so references to Baba Yaga and the original vampires were quite tantalizing.
Now I’ve read much more and discovered much more, and it only gets better and weirder. Koshchei is a wonderfully bizarre character, a traditional Russian villain known for his immortality and penchant for stealing young women from their lovers. While various tales differ, the main constant is that he has ensured his immortality by hiding his soul in an egg, which is inside various creatures and objects. The hero must then find his soul in order to defeat him.
But we’re not here for that today. Today we’re talking about the Hellboy story of Koshchei the Deathless. The character of Koshchei has appeared in Hellboy stories before, but in this standalone volume, Koshchei and Hellboy are sharing a friendly drink in Hell and Koshchei is sadly recounting the tragedies of his life, the loss of his friends and adoptive parents, and his enslavement to Baba Yaga.
In this telling, Koshchei was a man with relentless ambition who ensured his immortality and then found himself under the command of the great witch Baba Yaga, who had her own vendetta against Hellboy. Eventually she agrees to release Koshchei if he slays the last dragons, which he agrees to do in order to safeguard the world. But after solving obscure riddles, finding strange allies, and defeating terrible monsters, he finds himself no more free, no more enlightened, and ever more despairing of his strange and twisted existence.
It’s the quintessential type of Hellboy story that I love, dark and sad, a quiet little story about witches and dragons, love and loss, magic and family. I find it captivating, reading about monsters that are sad and introspective, fading from the world, losing their identity and purpose.
Don’t you?
Hey everyone, I have created an OSR version of my Dungeon Age adventure “Saving Saxham“. This basically means I removed all of the D&D Fifth Edition (5e) mechanics from the setting, monsters, and treasure, and created new creature stat blocks similar to those found in other OSR-friendly content.
“Saving Saxham” is Pay What You Want (PWYW) on DriveThruRPG, so please go grab it for free and let me know if the OSR stat blocks work for you, or if there are any changes you think would be helpful.
I will be creating OSR versions of my other adventures in the days to come, and in the future it will be standard for me to release them in both formats at the same time.
Cheers!
(This is the second story in the series. Previous: “Wizard“. Next: “Ghost“.)
“A wizard comes.”
The rasping voice faded into the throbbing shadows as Damaris glided forward into the endless night. The soft vapors of creation churned around her ethereal limbs. She watched a pair of enormous blood-red tendrils undulate through the clouded void, far out beyond the curve of the crimson moon, and she yearned to know what it felt like to be so vast, weightless and free, unconstrained by the needs of baser flesh, both alien and eternal.
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Hi there readers, the new Dungeon Age novel and novella have been out for a couple weeks and I’d love to help you guys get some reviews out there. So I am offering free ebooks to anyone who offers to post a review on Amazon.
Just send me an email at joe@josephrobertlewis.com and I’ll send you Dungeon Age: Beneath the Dying Land and Exiled: Beyond the Metal River for your reading enjoyment!
