Synopsis:
In the scorched ruins of Istara, Conan, a fierce Cimmerian mercenary, rescues noblewoman Natala from a brutal siege, pursued by a scarred Kushite warrior into the merciless deserts south of Koth. Guided by Natala's cryptic knowledge of Xuthal, a fabled city of lost dreams, they stumble upon its eerie jade-green walls, pulsing with otherworldly light. Hope turns to dread as Xuthal reveals itself as a trap, alive with sinister will and guarded by a sorrowful force. Joined by Thalis, a cunning Stygian outcast with her own vendetta, they confront Kherm, the city's Dream-Master, whose grief-fueled sorcery binds its dreamers in eternal slumber. As Thog, a cosmic horror from the Outer Dark stirs beneath, Conan's sword, Natala's resolve, and Thalis's forbidden arts are their only hope in a labyrinth of shifting stone and spectral foes. Every step risks unraveling Xuthal's fragile dream, and with it, its horrors.
Prologue: The Siege of Istara and the Flight South
The air in Istara, Prince Almuric's last stronghold, choked with the coppery reek of blood and the shrieks of dying men. Conan, fighting as a mercenary captain for Almuric, felt the familiar battle-rage boil in his veins as the lines shattered. He watched Almuric fall, a flamboyant fool yet brave to the last, buried beneath a storm of black-fletched arrows. Amidst the carnage, Conan's wolf-keen eyes caught sight of Natala, daughter of a Brythunian envoy. Her fine silks hung in tatters as grim-faced Kushite warriors dragged her through the slaughter. One brutish warrior, his face branded with a ritual scar that crawled like a living centipede across his cheek, met Conan's gaze with feral hatred.
With a roar that drowned the battle's din, Conan carved a crimson path through the press, his greatsword a whirlwind of death, and wrenched Natala from their iron grip. "Hold tight, girl!" he bellowed, hoisting her onto his powerful shoulders as he fought clear of the city's burning corpse. The scarred Kushite lunged in pursuit, murder blazing in his eyes, but a collapsing battlement, undermined by the siege engines' relentless hammering, buried him beneath tons of stone. Conan never looked back.
Their escape became a desperate flight into the sun-scorched wastes south of Koth. Weeks bled together, marked by dwindling supplies and the pitiless sky's brass vault. Natala, stripped of noble comforts, revealed an unexpected core of tempered steel. Her father, a keen scholar beneath his diplomatic mask, had shared his studies with her freely. She recalled long hours in his dusty library, not merely listening but actively deciphering fragmented Stygian stelae, her nimble fingers tracing faded glyphs that whispered of forgotten ages and perilous ruins. It was from those shared hours, surrounded by the scent of ancient parchment and mystery, that she now drew both comfort and nascent skill.
One evening, huddled by a meager fire whose shadows danced like spectral watchers, she spoke, her voice raw as sandpaper.
"My father... he possessed maps, fragments really, whispers of lost cities. One among them: Xuthal." She paused, savoring the forbidden syllables. "He called it the 'City of the Last Dream,' accursed and hidden from mortal eyes." Memory brought a chill despite the desert's lingering heat. "He never found proof, only tales of a place where reality itself wore thin, and of a guardian consumed by ancient sorrow."
As the name left her lips, a fleeting vision assaulted Conan's mind: immense, cold structures beneath an alien sky, a pressure against his temples like iron bands, accompanied by a whisper so faint it might have been wind keening through dead cities: "Mine... all that remains of her world..." He dismissed it with a grunt, attributing the vision to weariness and the desert's cruel tricks. His hand settled briefly on her shoulder, a rare gesture of reassurance. "We survived Istara's fires, girl. We'll face whatever comes."
Natala nodded, but firelight reflected in her eyes revealed a new hardness, a grim focus. The courtier's softness had burned away, replaced by the steel of a survivor.
Chapter 1: City of Whispering Stone
The desert was a shimmering hell of brass and fire. Conan squinted against the merciless sun, his lips cracked and bleeding. Beside him, Natala croaked a single word: "Water..." He shook the empty canteen, its hollow rattle a death knell. He'd poured the last precious drops between her parched lips hours ago.
Then, through the heat-shimmer, something glimmered on the horizon. Conan's eyes, honed by years of desert warfare, narrowed with suspicion. These were no mirages born of sun-baked stone. The distant spires pierced the wavering air with unsettling geometric precision, their stillness an affront to the desert's eternal dance. An atavistic warning crawled down his spine, older than words, a primal sense of wrongness radiating from those silent, alien shapes.
"A city?" Natala breathed, her voice threading hope with a dread that echoed Conan's sudden unease. "Could it be... Xuthal?"
As dusk painted the sky in bruised purples and bleeding reds, the city resolved from legend into terrible reality. Massive walls of smooth greenish stone loomed before them, surfaces eerily translucent like jade, radiating a faint internal luminescence that made Conan's skin crawl. He thought he glimpsed patterns shifting within the stone depths, like veins pulsing with alien life, or perhaps distant constellations traced in sorrow. No guards manned the walls. No banners snapped in the wind. An unnerving stillness hung over everything, a silence so profound it felt like a held breath. Only a faint, almost subliminal thrumming broke that silence, emanating from the stones themselves like a distant heartbeat.
Conan hammered his fist against the colossal gate. The sound was swallowed whole, absorbed by the unnatural stone. With silent, disturbing ease, the gate swung inward, revealing a vast courtyard beyond.
Sprawled in the dust lay a man clad in faded purple silk, a curved sword near his outstretched hand. His skin stretched taut over sharp cheekbones, sallow as old parchment, and a faint sweetish odor clung to him: overripe fruit mixed with something metallic and wrong. Near his hand lay a small, intricately carved miniature, shaped like some impossible star-ship. Conan approached warily, saber drawn and ready. He touched the man's flesh. Cold as tomb-marble.
No visible wounds marked the body, yet the man's eyes were sunken deep, the flesh around them bruised as if from endless sleepless nights. As Conan's fingers made contact, an unnatural cold emanated from the corpse. A wave of profound melancholy crashed over him, vast and cold as a dying star, then vanished as swiftly as it came. He scowled, tightening his grip on his sword. Sorcery, his barbarian instincts warned, or this cursed place driving men mad.
Before them loomed a towering edifice, its facade carved with a vast mural, surprisingly well-preserved for its obvious age. It depicted a world of graceful crystalline cities beneath twin suns, inhabited by slender, ethereal beings of haunting beauty. Then the scenes shifted, showing fiery destruction: a dark, coiling hunger swallowing stars whole, and those same beings fleeing in ships that mirrored the alien toy beside the fallen man. One panel showed a colossal shadowy entity with a single baleful eye, a pinprick of ruby fire burning in a vortex of shifting blackness. Its form writhed with undulating, amorphous limbs of living nightmare. These ethereal figures bound this horror with chains of light and will, imprisoning a being of primal, devouring hunger.
Natala traced one of the glyphs with trembling fingers. "This script... archaic, but I've encountered similar forms in Father's collection. It speaks of a 'Star-Thief,' bound by the city's founders to prevent cosmic annihilation." Her hand shook slightly. The air itself hummed with disquieting energy, a subtle vibration resonating through boot soles and bone. A whisper brushed past Conan's ear, too indistinct for words yet carrying a tone of possessive warning: "Disturb not the dream... my last sanctuary... my child sleeps here, safe from the waking void..." The name Kherm echoed in his mind with chilling clarity, accompanied by the sensation of being watched by something ancient and despairing.
Beyond the fallen man, towering edifices of green stone thrust skyward, their domes and minarets unsettling in their alien geometry, as if designed by minds that thought in dimensions beyond mortal comprehension. At the courtyard's heart stood a well, promising water and perhaps answers.
"The well first," Conan growled, his throat a desert of its own. As he turned, Natala's scream split the unnatural silence. The "dead" man had risen to his feet, eyes blazing with eerie puppet-light, curved sword whistling toward Conan's unprotected back.
Chapter 2: The Dreamers of Xuthal
Conan spun with feral grace, his saber meeting the attack with a clang that echoed unnaturally in the silent courtyard, as if the very stones drank the sound. Steel rang against steel in a deadly rhythm. The attacker fought with dream-like clumsiness, his movements subtly wrong, telegraphed yet possessed of unnerving persistence that made clean evasion difficult. Conan, noting the Xuthalite's poor footing on the uneven paving, used a jutting stone to his advantage. A feint drew the man forward, a sidestep brought Conan inside his guard, and then his heavy blade bit deep into corrupted flesh.
The man hissed, amber eyes widening with inhuman surprise. "Kherm... forgive me..." he sighed, the sound less of pain than a fading connection severed, the unnatural light in his eyes guttering like a snuffed candle. A whisper, cold and laden with ancient grief, brushed against Conan's mind like icy fingers: "Another of my children... lost to the waking void's cruel hunger... why do they seek to wake her from her perfect dream?"
"His mind, Conan!" Natala cried, fear and dawning understanding, sharpening her voice to a blade's edge. "Their spirits dwell elsewhere! Something controls them like puppets on strings!" Snatching a loose paving stone, she struck the Xuthalite's knee with desperate strength. He wailed, a thin reedy sound of metal scraping stone. Conan silenced him with a swift pommel-strike, then heaved the unconscious form over the well's rim. A distant splash echoed from far below.
"No witnesses," he growled. A subtle chill permeated the air, a fleeting sense of icy disapproval pressing against their minds, then receding like a wave. Natala shivered despite the heat. "Did you feel that? Like a vast, desperate sorrow attempting to hold onto something infinitely precious."
Conan felt it too: a psychic pressure seeking to instill despair, a voice whispering in his mind of loss and the futility of all struggle. He shook it off with a wordless snarl, his barbarian will a fortress against such insidious attacks.
"We need water," Conan said, though the oppressive sense of being watched lingered like cobwebs against his skin, stirring an unease that transcended even his usual wariness of sorcery. "And answers to what manner of trap we've stumbled into."
Inside one of the massive structures, they discovered a vast chamber hung with tapestries depicting otherworldly landscapes beneath bizarre alien skies. The green stone walls bore inlays of gold worked into intricate, unsettling patterns that seemed to writhe at the edge of vision. Natala examined another mural, this one showing the colossal shadowy horror from the entrance. Its many amorphous limbs coiled in impossible configurations, and its single eye, now depicted as a pit of smoldering embers reflecting a universe of ancient pain, dominated the composition. Glyphs she struggled to decipher labeled the entity.
"Thog," she breathed, the name feeling alien and heavy on her tongue, as if speaking it might summon the thing itself. "The Slithering Shadow. The Star-Thief of legend made manifest."
As the name left her lips, the air grew cold enough to see their breath. The shadow in the mural seemed to ripple like oil on water, and a faint scent touched their nostrils: decay mixed with something akin to charred stardust and the cold vacuum between stars. A wave of ancient, insatiable hunger emanated from the stone depiction, making Natala recoil instinctively. Conan felt it too, a primitive urge to flee screaming into the desert, the very stones humming with silent warnings. From the chamber's shadowed corners, he glimpsed movement: dark oil seeping from the walls, vanishing when observed directly. Always accompanied by that faint thrumming, like Thog's very breath pulsing through the city's veins.
A sudden lance of pain split Conan's temple, and for a heartbeat vision overcame reality: a child's toy, the cherished star-ship model, clutched in a despairing hand, then a universe of cold empty void swallowing all warmth and light. He blinked, the vision dissipating, replaced by a dull ache and Kherm's name echoing once more. This time the voice carried possessive anger: "They seek to unravel all that remains... my little star-sailor... the last memory of her laughter echoing through eternity..."
"These glyphs," Natala continued, her voice hushed with scholarly excitement despite the fear, "they reference a 'Heart-Stone,' described as an anchor against the 'Outer Dark.' Thog, imprisoned beneath the city's foundations, held by this artifact. And Kherm... he serves as its guardian, or perhaps its master, using the stone to sustain Xuthal's unnatural existence." She indicated a smaller adjacent symbol. "And this glyph: 'Breath of Life,' some essence or elixir designed to bolster guardians and dispel encroaching shadows."
Natala paused, then added with growing certainty, "Father had theories based on fragmentary evidence. He discovered a Stygian text, incomplete but suggestive, speaking of 'Ka-Stones': anchors of reality supposedly brought by star-wanderers in ages before even the Serpent-folk ruled. These stones could bind entities from the Outer Dark, trap them in prisons of solidified reality. He wondered if Xuthal's stone might be one such artifact, perhaps flawed or corrupted by long ages and desperate use."
Fresh imprints marked the cushions scattered across the floor. A cloying perfume hung heavy in the air: black lotus mixed with ancient metal and something indefinably wrong. "Someone occupied this chamber recently," Conan muttered, his hand never straying far from his sword hilt.
The palace revealed itself as a labyrinth of silent halls and echoing chambers that seemed to shift when not directly observed. As they ventured deeper, they passed an archway opening onto a dimly lit hall beyond. Inside, dozens of Xuthalites lay motionless on silken couches, their bodies unnaturally still. Their forms shimmered faintly, and around them flickered dream-constructs: fragments of impossible landscapes, creatures defying natural law, scenes of serene joy or stark terror, all shifting and reforming like smoke.
Their skin gleamed pale and waxy, stretched over emaciated frames, bodies wasted to little more than breathing skeletons. Around some dreamers, the constructs wove visions of unearthly beauty: lithe figures draped in translucent silks shimmering like captured moonlight, their movements a languid dance promising eternal ecstasy. The air pulsed with silent invitations, a siren's lure that made Conan's hand tighten on his sword, his barbarian soul recoiling from unnatural sweetness masking deeper rot. A few sleepers twitched, faint moans escaping cracked lips, faces contorted in unseen nightmares despite the placid dream-images flickering around them.
It was a tableau of decadent oblivion, the sweet heavy scent of Black Lotus cloying enough to choke. Conan grunted, expressing a Cimmerian's instinctive distaste for such unnatural passivity, for men who would surrender life for pleasant dreams. One of the dreamers stirred, its spectral hand reaching out, almost brushing Natala's arm. Conan instinctively pulled her back, his warrior's reflexes faster than thought.
"Careful. This place serves as a trap for the mind and grave for the body."
Suddenly, a grotesque insectoid creature, woven from shadows and flickering dream-light, detached itself from one of the sleeping forms. It lunged at Natala with a chitinous screech that set teeth on edge. Conan's blade flashed in a silvery arc, cleaving the dream-construct in two. It dissolved into wisps of acrid smoke, leaving behind the scent of ozone and something like burnt honey. The dreamer from which it had sprung moaned louder, thrashing briefly before subsiding back into unnatural stillness.
In another chamber, they discovered a table laden with exotic foods and goblets filled with crimson liquid that caught the green light like captured rubies. Natala hesitated, her scholar's caution warring with desperate thirst. "Conan... the Black Lotus, source of their dreams and their decay. Its scent saturates this chamber... makes my head swim with phantom sensations."
Conan's stomach growled like a caged beast. "If it's poisoned, we die with full bellies instead of empty ones." He drained a goblet in one draught. The liquid was tangy and surprisingly invigorating, warming his throat and belly. As the crimson liquid touched his tongue, a fleeting vision danced before his eyes: silken limbs entwined in lotus-scented haze, whispers of pleasure promising sweet oblivion. His Cimmerian will clamped down like iron, shattering the illusion, though heat lingered in his veins like a siren's lingering call.
Beside him, Natala's cheeks flushed, her breath quickening as the Lotus's perfume wove fleeting fantasies: soft caresses in forgotten courts, music and laughter she'd thought lost forever. Her scholar's discipline anchored her, pulling her back from the seductive edge. He attacked the food with gusto, his barbarian appetite overriding caution. Natala, after a moment's hesitation, joined him, though she ate sparingly, eyeing each morsel with suspicion. For a moment, as rich flavors spread through her mouth, pleasant lethargy washed over her: a desire to simply rest, to let the soft dream-images of Xuthal claim her tired mind. She shook her head, forcibly pushing the feeling away.
Despite the food, weariness settled over Conan like a lead cloak, a subtle dream-like haze attempting to dull his warrior's edge. He fought it off with a scowl and force of will. Natala grew restless, pacing the chamber's perimeter. "This place feels fundamentally wrong, Conan. Too quiet, yet somehow... alive, watching us with malevolent patience."
A soft slithering rustle emerged from an adjoining corridor, accompanied by a faint chilling sound: wind chimes made of ice singing in a tomb. The very walls seemed to hum in response. Conan surged to his feet, saber ready, muscles coiled for violence. In the gloom beyond, another vast chamber opened before them. On a raised dais, a robed figure lay in elaborate ceremonial garments. Sleeping? Or dead? Impossible to tell from this distance.
Then the shadow detached itself from deeper darkness. Huge and amorphous, a blot of living blackness coiled and uncoiled, its edges writhing like smoke given malevolent purpose. Its single eye was a void that seemed to drink all light, rimmed with hateful bloody luminescence that pulsed with alien hunger. Primal dread prickled the back of Conan's neck; the air grew colder by the heartbeat, a faint discordant piping echoing from the stones themselves. The oppressive atmosphere thickened, carrying a charnel stench mixed with the cold vacuum of lifeless space.
Natala stifled a scream, her hand flying to her mouth. The shadow flowed toward the dais with hideous purpose, engulfing the sleeping form in its writhing mass. Then it receded, a hint of monstrous multi-limbed head briefly visible in the darkness, before melting back into shadow as if it had never been. The dais stood empty. A single glistening drop of dark fluid stained the silk where the sleeper had lain.
Even Conan felt a profound chill penetrate his barbarian hide. "Crom's devils," he breathed, the oath torn from him. "What manner of demon was that?"
Before Natala could answer, a soft human footfall sounded behind them, deliberate and unhurried.
Chapter 3: Thalis of Stygia
A woman stepped into the chamber, tall and arrestingly beautiful, her ivory skin gleaming beneath jewels that pulsed with green luminescence. Midnight hair cascaded over bare shoulders, her only garment a jewel-encrusted girdle clinging to generous hips, accentuating the sinuous sway of her curves with each deliberate step. Dark almond-shaped eyes held languid amusement, though beneath that lazy facade lurked a predatory glint sharp as any blade.
"Well, well," she purred in flawless Stygian, her voice a velvet caress seeming to stroke Conan's senses like phantom fingers. "Unexpected guests wandering my domain. And one of them is a Cimmerian, no less." Her full breasts moved unrestrained with each breath, rosy tips and pebbled nipples catching the faint light in deliberate provocation that mocked the chamber's oppressive gloom.
Conan's heated gaze raked over her lush figure hungrily, lingering on her bare breasts with frank masculine appreciation, but his hand remained near his sword, wary of sorcery's tricks and honeyed traps. The sheer perfection of her womanly form left him momentarily transfixed, pupils dilating with carnal desire his barbarian nature made no effort to conceal. Natala's breath caught, her scholar's mind warring with sudden irrational inadequacy before her resolve hardened like tempered steel.
Natala bristled despite her disadvantage. "Who are you to claim dominion here?"
The woman smiled, revealing perfect white teeth. "I am Thalis. And you, little Brythunian sparrow, possess fire beneath those scholarly robes. I appreciate that." Her gaze flicked to Conan with renewed interest. "You fascinate me, barbarian. Few find their way to Xuthal through the desert's killing embrace. Fewer still remain... awake and aware once they cross the threshold."
As she spoke, her hand idly brushed her hip, where serpent tattoo coils, intertwined with a stylized black lotus, became partially visible. She gave a slight bitter twist of her lips as fingers grazed the ink, a fleeting expression hinting at a past she didn't cherish. "Some marks cut deeper than skin," she murmured, almost to herself, cold anger flickering in her eyes before vanishing behind her mask. "Especially those carved by priests who fancy themselves gods incarnate, like Nebthu of Stygia, who believed a 'gift' such as I should be... broken to his will, reshaped into his perfect tool."
"We encountered one of your Xuthalites," Conan growled, his voice rough as grinding stone. "Attacked us like a puppet on strings. Called on a master named Kherm before he died. Seemed more automaton than man."
Thalis's sculpted eyebrows arched with genuine interest. "Kherm? The Dream-Master himself took notice of you? His will despises disturbances in his grand, sorrowful theatrical production. He clings to his fading world with a grip bordering on obsessive madness." She glanced toward the empty dais where shadow had fed. "And you witnessed... more than mere puppets, I see?" A flicker of genuine fear crossed her features, quickly masked. "Ah, Thog the Slithering Shadow. It grows restless in its chains. Its hunger remains constant and insatiable, and its presence frays the edges of Kherm's carefully constructed reality like moths eating silk. Kherm prefers the beast quiescent; Thog's full awakening might unravel Kherm's power entirely, shatter the fragile dream of Xuthal he desperately preserves against entropy's tide."
She paused, choosing words carefully. "Thog represents more than mere hunger. It possesses intelligence, ancient and cruel beyond mortal comprehension. It enjoys the fear, savors the unraveling of sanity and order. It toys with Kherm as much as it obeys his commands, a subtle mockery of his control. Sometimes the very stones of Xuthal weep an oily ichor not of Kherm's making, or the dreamers scream from nightmares even Kherm cannot soothe. These are Thog's little rebellions, reminders that leave Kherm railing impotently in the deeper chambers."
"Thog?" Natala whispered, her voice tight with scholarly excitement and visceral dread. "The Slithering Shadow from the Outer Dark, the thing from the murals..."
"The god of Xuthal," Thalis corrected, her voice dropping low and somber. "Or perhaps its unwilling prisoner, bound by chains of necessity and desperation. The city's founders wove Xuthal's very essence into a cage for the 'Sleeper Below,' the cosmic horror their flight could not escape. These lights," Thalis indicated glowing jewels set into the walls at regular intervals, "serve as faint echoes of their power, a dying song growing fainter with each passing age."
She gestured to faint inscriptions on a nearby pillar, her fingers tracing glyphs with practiced familiarity. "Kherm's people, the Khermi, fled a dying star-system, or perhaps a realm beyond mortal comprehension entirely. Dimensions collapse strangely in their histories. They brought Thog with them, or it followed as cosmic parasites do, drawn to fleeing prey. They bound it here with arts now lost, but the binding weakens inexorably. Kherm, last of his ancient line, uses his own life-force, amplified through something they call the Heart-Stone, to maintain the city's existence and keep Thog... mostly... chained and dreaming."
Thalis added with a knowing glint in her dark eyes, "Stygian lore whispers of such 'World-Hearts,' remnants of pre-Cataclysmic civilizations who trafficked with powers from beyond the stars. Nebthu himself covets any knowledge of them with religious fervor, believing them keys to ultimate dominion, or perhaps utter destruction. He cares little which, as long as the power flows through his grasping hands."
"The Black Lotus?" Natala pressed, her scholarly instincts overriding fear. "Why do they all sleep instead of living?"
Thalis smiled sadly, genuine regret touching her features. "Xuthal's lifeblood and its poison, inextricably intertwined. Most slumber eternally, lost in dreams Kherm curates like a gardener tending poisoned flowers. The Lotus dulls reality's sharp edges, making the chains of this place bearable for them, perhaps even for Kherm himself. Its influence runs subtle and pervasive through every stone. It can cloud the minds of those who believe themselves resistant, if they lower their guard even momentarily." She gave Conan a knowing look weighted with meaning.
"You know much for a prisoner," Conan observed, his barbarian instincts for deception honed sharp. "And you wear Stygian features proudly."
"A political pawn," Thalis said, her face shadowing, voice laced with cold crystalline anger. "Offered as a 'gift' to a rival temple by Thoth-Amon's underlings in their endless games of power. I learned their ways despite their intentions, the subtle arts of unbinding what others sought to control. Especially from the acolytes of Nebthu, who took particular pleasure in his 'lessons' of domination, breaking spirits and reshaping wills."
Her eyes glinted like obsidian catching firelight. "Unlike my former captors, I do not surrender to the Lotus's sweet embrace. I watch with clear eyes. I learn what they think hidden. I study forbidden texts in Xuthal's deep vaults." A flicker of unreadable desire crossed her features. "And I seek... opportunities for vengeance and power both. Xuthal holds forgotten powers in its ancient bones. Some are best left buried in darkness. Others..." her gaze lingered meaningfully on a dagger hilt at her hip.
Its pommel bore no Stygian craftsmanship, but something starker and more primal: a carving of a single heavy chain link, shattered as if by tremendous internal force. "...could remind certain Stygian priests, Nebthu foremost among them, that their manipulations carry consequences they never anticipated. They delve into rites of binding and unbinding, seeking dominion over shadows and spirits. Perhaps I learned more than they intended, absorbed enough forbidden knowledge to turn their own arts against them like serpents biting their masters. The Heart-Stone here... a shard of its essence could unravel many of their precious wards, turn their own bound things against them in delicious irony."
"Why reveal this to us?" Conan asked bluntly, his hand drifting nearer his sword. A sudden tremor ran through the floor, making ancient stones groan. A section of the far wall shimmered like heat-haze, and a shadowy pseudopod, thin as a whip and black as void, lashed out before retracting with a wet sucking sound. A spark of cold hungry light pulsed at its core. Thalis flinched visibly, her eyes darting to the disturbance with naked fear. The air grew colder still, and a faint musky odor intensified: a reptile pit mixed with ancient dust and something that pricked the nostrils like static discharge before a lightning strike.
"Perhaps," Thalis said, her voice a fraction tighter, the purr strained, "because this city grows more unstable by the hour, its foundations crumbling. Kherm's control proves far from absolute, and Thog's influence spreads like poison through water. Perhaps I see in you, Cimmerian, a force to stir these stagnant waters, shatter this rotting order. Your strength... it could prove useful to my purposes." She glanced at Natala with reassessment. "And your knowledge, girl, might be more valuable than you realize, worth more than all Stygia's gold."
She paused, then looked directly at Conan, her mask slipping to reveal genuine conviction beneath. "Kherm's tyranny, this city of living death and dreaming corpses... It reminds me too much of Stygia's own cruelties, the chains they wrap in silk and call mercy. Destroying his hold here serves as a worthy goal in itself, justice for the imprisoned. And if a tool for Nebthu's downfall falls into my hands during the chaos..." She left the sentence unfinished, pregnant with implication.
Just then, a disembodied voice echoed through the chamber, cold and resonant, seeming to emanate from the very stones. It carried an almost unbearable weight of sorrow, yet underscored by chilling possessiveness that made skin crawl. "Intruders... you disturb the dream's delicate fabric... you disturb his sorrow's sacred depths... you will join the eternal sleep, or be consumed by what dwells below... My Xuthal shall not fall... My child must dream forever within these walls, safe from the waking void's cruel hunger..."
The voice faded like mist, leaving oppressive silence in its wake, heavier than before.
Conan's hand tightened on his sword until knuckles whitened. "Kherm speaks?"
Thalis nodded, a grim set to her sensuous mouth. "He feels our presence like splinters in his flesh. His grief serves as a tangible force here, amplified through the Heart-Stone's power until it becomes almost physical. It has festered over uncounted centuries into something... more than simple sorrow. A cancer of the spirit. He will not permit us to leave if he possesses any power to prevent it, his desperation making him as dangerous as Thog itself."
"A way out exists?" Natala seized the word with desperate hope.
"Several ways," Thalis admitted with calculated honesty. "But the desert shows no mercy to the unprepared. And Kherm protects his dreamers jealously, his last family." She looked toward an escape route she had long since mapped in her mind. "He will have fortified it, of this I am certain. His desperation makes him predictable in his defenses, always the same patterns."
Before Conan could voice the retort forming on his lips, a section of ceiling groaned ominously, and dust showered down like ash. Another tendril of shadow probed from a widening crack, this one thicker and more solid. Its tip brushed a stone brazier, which crumbled silently to powder with an unnatural chilling hiss that spoke of entropy accelerated beyond nature's laws. A wordless snarl, more animal than human, tore from Conan's throat as he shoved both Thalis and Natala back. The tendril whipped past where they'd stood, close enough to feel its unnatural cold.
He hacked at the retreating tendril with savage efficiency. It dissolved with a faint hiss and a stench like burnt circuits and charred flesh, leaving only a greasy stain. Thalis stared at Conan, her breath catching for a single heartbeat before her iron composure reasserted itself. He fights like a force of nature unleashed, she thought with clinical appreciation, untamed and direct as a lightning bolt. Dangerous beyond question, but perhaps a danger she could channel toward her own ends.
Her dark eyes, moments before wide with genuine alarm, now narrowed with fresh calculation. She weighed the barbarian's raw power against the city's encroaching madness and her own desperate need for leverage against Stygia. Escaping Xuthal alive was one goal; escaping with means to strike at Nebthu was another entirely. This Cimmerian savage... he might just be the chaos factor her carefully laid plans required.
"Very well," she said, her voice regaining its characteristic purr, though an edge of genuine urgency now underscored the seduction. "An alliance proves mutually beneficial. We each possess what the others lack. There exists an elixir, the 'Breath of Life,' hidden deep in the vaults near the Heart-Stone that anchors Thog's prison. It serves as a distillation of the Stone's purest energy, designed by the first Khermi to restore vitality and sharpen senses against the Lotus's mental fog. Its effects last only a short time, and it won't transform us into gods. But it could grant us an edge against Kherm's constructs and the city's oppressive psychic influence. More importantly, it can momentarily disrupt the dream-stuff Kherm uses to animate his guardians, making them vulnerable to steel."
"What do you demand in return?" Conan cut through her explanation with barbarian directness.
Thalis's cool fingers lingered a heartbeat longer on Conan's jaw than necessary, her touch a deliberate spark, her dark eyes searching his with promises of forbidden secrets and darker pleasures. "Your strength, Cimmerian," she murmured, her breath warm against his ear, intimate and invasive, "could unmake empires, or bind them to your will. With such power properly directed..."
Conan's muscles tensed, his barbarian instincts warring with cold suspicion that her beauty served as much of a trap as Xuthal's dreaming halls, perhaps more dangerous for its flesh-and-blood reality. He removed her hand with deliberate firmness. "Our only interest lies in leaving this cursed place alive. Help us achieve that, you'll be rewarded fairly. Hinder us..." He left the threat unspoken but crystal clear.
Thalis's smile turned colder, predatory warmth replaced by calculating ice. "Very well. The elixir waits deep within the lower vaults, near Thog's lair where reality grows thin. The guardians there are not to be trifled with or dismissed. They serve as extensions of Kherm's desperate will, fueled by the city's dying energy. Their solidity varies with proximity; the closer to Kherm or a nexus of his power, the more real and deadly they become. Shadow transforms to flesh and steel."
Natala, recalling a diagram from her father's fragmented notes (a depiction of energy conduits linked to a central focusing crystal, labeled in archaic script), pointed excitedly to a carving on the wall. It depicted a colossal amorphous mass of living shadow, its countless writhing tentacles coiling around a pulsating stone from which lines of dark energy flowed like veins. "Look! Thog coiled around the 'Heart-Stone'! Lines of dark energy flow from it throughout the city. Father theorized the Heart-Stone wasn't merely a prison, but a power source as well. A conduit for Kherm's control and simultaneously Thog's anchor to this dimension. He wrote that a significant physical disruption to it could unravel Kherm's hold entirely and potentially banish Thog back to the Outer Dark from which it came."
"Lead the way, then," Conan said with grim finality.
Thalis smiled, genuine anticipation mixing with her calculated seduction. "Follow closely. And do try not to get eaten before we reach our destination."
Chapter 4: The Slumbering God Stirs
The passage was cold as a tomb, the air heavy with the scent of dust and something acrid, almost like ancient decaying metal corroding across eons. Green-lumed jewels cast undulating shadows that writhed like living things across the walls. A faint rhythmic sighing emanated from the stones themselves: the city breathing, Natala thought with growing dread, or perhaps Kherm's will woven into its very fabric like thread through rotting silk. Amorphous shapes of deeper blackness, almost too quick for the eye to follow, flickered at the corners of their vision. Each carried that fleeting hellish ruby spark, manifestations of Thog's growing influence seeping through the cracks in Kherm's control.
One shadow-tendril brushed against a loose stone, which crumbled to dust with unnatural speed, leaving behind a crawling itch on the skin where its shadow fell, a violation that made flesh crawl. The air seemed to vibrate with low thrumming, and occasionally the walls themselves would shift and flow like dark water, disorienting them with impossible architecture. Conan muttered through clenched teeth, "By Crom, what new devilry is this?" His Cimmerian mind, grounded in the stark realities of blood and steel, recoiled from the impossible fluidity of stone. A silent snarl formed in his throat against such sorcerous affronts to natural law. Small skittering sounds echoed from unseen crevices, like the claws of monstrous insects the size of war-dogs. The oppressive atmosphere felt heavier here, closer to the Heart-Stone's pulsing malevolence.
As a whip-like tendril of shadow lashed from a crevice, its ruby spark glinting with malicious intelligence, Thalis hissed urgently, "Down!" The trio dropped to the cold stone, the tendril's icy passage stirring the air above them with a chill that promised death. It retracted with a wet sucking sound, leaving behind a faint stench of burnt stars and cosmic void. In the tense pause that followed, Thalis rose with feline grace, her movements fluid despite the pressing danger. She stepped closer to Conan, ostensibly to point out a faintly glowing glyph on the wall, its lines pulsing with the city's unnatural rhythm like veins carrying poisoned blood.
Her body pressed subtly against his broad back, the soft warmth of her bare breast brushing against his skin with deliberate intent. For a fleeting moment, Conan savored the sensation, a primal spark of pleasure cutting through the oppressive gloom like a knife through silk. Her voice dropped to a low intimate murmur, barely audible over the stone's sighing. "Stay close, barbarian. In this place, strength like yours is a beacon, and I've always been drawn to fire that burns hot enough to consume the world." Her dark eyes, catching the green luminescence, held his for a heartbeat, a teasing challenge beneath their cool calculation, a promise and a threat woven together.
Conan's muscles tensed, his barbarian instincts warring with the cold suspicion that her touch was as much a trap as Xuthal's shifting halls, perhaps more dangerous for its flesh-and-blood reality. He grunted, stepping back slightly, his gaze narrowing with predatory wariness. "Keep your fire to yourself, Stygian. We've enough to burn us here without adding more fuel." Yet the heat of her proximity lingered on his skin, a fleeting distraction he shook off with a scowl and force of will.
Natala, crouched nearby, her fingers tracing a different glyph as she muttered about its archaic origins and pre-Cataclysmic roots, seemed oblivious to the charged exchange. But her shoulders stiffened, a subtle sign of her scholar's intuition catching the shift in the air between them. The faint pang of inadequacy from earlier stirred again, an unwelcome ghost, though she buried it beneath her focus with practiced discipline. Her eyes narrowed as she deciphered the glyph's meaning, her mind a fortress against such distractions.
"The elixir is in the city's heart," Thalis whispered, her earlier confidence tinged with genuine caution. "A place of great power and greater danger. The oldest guardians sleep there, near Thog's central chamber. They are echoes of Kherm's lost protectors, drawn from memories of his own world, constructs of grief given terrible form."
They descended spiraling ramps, the architecture growing older and more alien with each turn, cyclopean in scale, its angles subtly wrong in ways that made the eye slide away and the stomach churn. The very geometry seemed designed to offend human perception. The air grew colder with each step, the sighing louder, joined by a subsonic vibration that resonated in their bones like the heartbeat of some vast dying thing. The scent of decay and ozone grew stronger, choking. Conan felt Kherm's attention like a physical weight pressing down, a cold pressure on his mind now laced with possessive anger sharp as broken glass.
He fought off a fleeting vision that assaulted his mind: an immense star-faring vessel, impossibly vast, drifting silent and cold through an empty void that stretched beyond comprehension. A profound sense of loneliness emanated from it, a sorrow tinged with the desolation of cosmic abandonment, but now twisted with bitter resentment that curdled like spoiled milk. He gritted his teeth, shaking his head violently to clear it; the sorcerer's pain was a palpable thing, poisonous and invasive, yet it fueled a dangerous madness that made him unpredictable.
Another whisper, closer this time and more insistent, slithered through his mind like a serpent: "Why do you resist the peace of the dream? My world is dust... gone to nothingness. Only Xuthal remains... my Xuthal... my dream... my little one's only haven from the waking void's cruel hunger..." A spectral image of Kherm, gaunt and sorrowful, his face a mask of anguish, flickered at the edge of Conan's vision. His eyes pleaded, then hardened with a tyrant's resolve, the transformation chilling. Conan spat on the stone floor, the sound echoing. "Keep your cursed dreams to yourself, wizard!" he snarled under his breath, his voice a rasp of defiance.
Suddenly, without warning, the floor beneath them buckled violently. A section of the passage ahead twisted, walls flowing like liquid stone before reforming into a labyrinthine knot that defied natural geometry. For a horrifying instant, the newly formed walls writhed with oily Thog-like tendrils, and a chorus of mocking whispers echoed from dimensions beyond mortal ken. Then Kherm's will, with a palpable psychic wrench felt by all three like a spike driven through their temples, forced the stone back into his intended sorrowful patterns. "A trap!" Thalis hissed, her voice tight with alarm and genuine fear. "Kherm's will reshapes the city against us! And Thog pulls at the threads of his control, unraveling the tapestry!"
Conan eyed the shifting walls with barbarian pragmatism. "Natala, your father studied such things. Any tricks to these shifting stones, any weakness in the sorcery?"
Natala scanned the patterns with scholarly intensity, recalling a lecture on 'sympathetic architecture' tied to emotional states, a theory her father had found fascinating. "It's Kherm's grief... it's not just a key, it's the mechanism itself, the engine that drives the change. The glyphs here," she pointed to faint etchings that pulsed with the wall's movement like veins carrying dark blood, "they speak of 'memory' and 'loss,' concepts given architectural form. We need to find a sequence that represents... acceptance, or a counter-emotion. Something his grief would resist or recoil from." She frowned, tracing a complex symbol with trembling fingers. "This one... it's similar to a dynastic seal from a lost age my father studied, but altered, twisted by sorrow into something grotesque. It might relate to a specific sequence, but the meaning is... elusive, just beyond my grasp."
While Natala worked to decipher the shifting puzzle, her mind racing, Thalis stopped suddenly, her head tilted, listening. A low growl, like stone splintering under immense pressure, echoed from deeper within the city's bowels. The walls pulsed ominously, becoming translucent for a horrifying moment. They revealed a chaotic swirling darkness beyond, filled with a sense of immense watching malice and the stench of something like burnt stars and cosmic rot.
"Thog stirs," Thalis breathed, genuine fear naked in her eyes for the first time. "His nightmares shake Xuthal's foundations, testing the bars of his cage. The guardians will be agitated, maddened by his influence. Kherm fears Thog's full awakening; it would shatter his control completely, and with it the last vestiges of his precious memories. And sometimes those nightmares seem to deliberately corrupt Kherm's own dream-constructs, twisting his sorrowful guardians into something more grotesque for a fleeting moment. A flicker of Thog's influence that Kherm must then fight to reclaim, his power strained against the entity he sought to master but never truly could."
Natala cried out suddenly, triumph in her voice despite the fear gnawing at her. "I think I have it! The pattern... from the mural of the fleeing Khermi... the star-ship effigy! Touch the points in that sequence, but in reverse! As if returning, not fleeing!"
Thalis, appraising Natala's sudden insight with new respect, murmured almost to herself, yet loud enough for Natala to hear, "The little sparrow has talons after all, sharp ones." A flicker of defiant pride crossed Natala's face before she refocused on the task, her jaw set with determination.
Conan and Thalis, following Natala's desperate directions, pressed specific points on the wall in the reversed sequence. With a grinding sound like the bones of the earth shifting, the passage reformed, opening into a vast circular chamber. The walls were covered in writhing carvings of Thog, its many-limbed form seeming to move in the flickering light. In the center, on an obsidian pedestal that seemed to drink all light, a golden flask pulsed with warm light that felt obscene in this place of cold death. Immense resonant breathing came from beneath the floor, a sound that vibrated up through their feet and into their very souls, the breath of something vast and hungry.
Three tall imposing figures guarded the pedestal, their skin like tarnished silver, eyes closed, radiating menace that made the air itself heavy. Their forms were vaguely reminiscent of the robed Khermi from the murals, but twisted, corrupted by ages of grief. As Kherm's will focused upon them, sensing the intruders, their forms solidified with terrible purpose. Intricate patterns glowed faintly on their silver skin, ancient script from a dead world. One, its features contorted in a silent snarl of sorrow that was almost human, twitched as it sensed their approach. Another bore a shield emblazoned with a shattered star, a symbol of lost hope. These were not mere Xuthalites; they felt older, imbued with a deeper despair and a more potent, sorrowful strength that spoke of ages spent in service to a mad grief.
"Dream-projected guardians," Thalis whispered, her voice tight. "Constructs of Kherm's will, drawn from his deepest grief, given form and terrible purpose. Attack them physically, and all Xuthal will know our location. Thog's attention will be absolute, and his hunger unleashed."
Conan scanned the chamber with a warrior's tactical eye. "There must be a way to disrupt them without a direct fight, some weakness in their construction. Natala, those glyphs around the base? What do they say about these things?"
Natala quickly examined the etchings, her scholar's mind racing. "They speak of 'focused will' and 'sympathetic resonance,' concepts from pre-Cataclysmic thaumaturgy. They are dream-constructs, tied to Kherm's emotions like puppets to strings. We must distract them, disrupt the sorrow that binds them here, and break the connection." She looked at Thalis. "Can you project something potent? A strong defiant emotion to counteract the grief?"
Thalis considered, weighing the cost. "A dream of rebellion? Of breaking chains and casting down tyrants? Yes, it resonates with my soul. It would be draining, perhaps dangerously so." One of the silver guardians seemed to shrug off Conan's initial physical diversion, a large stone he'd dislodged and hurled, with contemptuous ease. Its form barely flickered, the stone passing through it like smoke. Thalis's initial psychic probe, a wave of defiant energy laced with Stygian power, seemed to only momentarily stagger them, emphasizing their deep connection to Kherm's potent grief. They were anchored in something profound.
"Our best chance," Natala insisted, her voice firm despite the fear gnawing at her. "We must take it."
"Very well," Thalis agreed, her jaw set. "Cimmerian, your cue. A distraction they cannot ignore, something to shake the very foundations."
Conan hefted a massive loose block of stone, his barbarian strength making it seem almost light. "This should get their attention." With a mighty roar that echoed through the chamber like thunder, he slammed it against a load-bearing pillar. The impact was deafening, shaking dust and small stones from the ceiling. Simultaneously, Conan let out a ferocious Cimmerian war cry, a sound of pure primal fury. The breathing below paused, then resumed with an angry guttural rumble that spoke of waking hunger. A wave of pure terror washed over them, a psychic assault that sought to unman them. The guardians' metallic eyelids snapped open, their eyes swirling vortexes of cold light, pitiless and ancient. They turned towards Conan, their movements stiff yet imbued with desperate strength born of ages of sorrow.
One of the guardians, its face a mask of Kherm's own anguish made manifest, raised a hand wreathed in shadow. "You will not profane this sacred place of memory!" its voice was a chorus of grieving whispers, each one a lost soul crying out.
"Now, Natala! Thalis!" Conan bellowed, drawing his saber in a fluid motion.
Natala closed her eyes, focusing on her father's defiance against the Stygian priests who had sought to break him, the memory of his courage a burning coal in her heart, warming her against the cold despair. Thalis sank to her knees, a fierce silver aura flowing from her like moonlight, enveloping the guardians in a tempestuous dream of shattered chains and defiant cries against tyranny. "Awake!" she commanded, her voice echoing with power that made the very stones tremble. "Your master's grief is not your eternity! Break free!"
Conan sprinted across the chamber, his barbarian speed surprising, and snatched the golden flask from its pedestal. The guardians swayed, their forms flickering like guttering candles as the dream of rebellion struck at their core. But one, the largest, bearing the shattered star shield, resisted with terrible will. It growled as it stepped towards Conan, its silver hand outstretched and crackling with dark energy that promised oblivion. A rumble of profound displeasure came from below, Thog's hunger stirring.
Chapter 5: The Wrath of the Slithering God and the Fury of the Dream-Master
The deeper passages pulsed with malevolent energy that made reality itself feel thin and fragile. The city's sighing whisper had become a guttural rasp; walls shifted like disturbed water, their surfaces slick with an unseen ichor that stank of alien worlds. Thog's musky otherworldly odor choked the air, thick and cloying, now mixed with the sharp tang of ozone and something like cold dead stars winking out across the void. More amorphous limbs of shadow, thicker now and always bearing that central spark of ruby malice, whipped from crevices with increased frequency, forcing them to dodge and weave.
Conan felt a fleeting internal curse, a raw thought that cut through his focus: No beast of earth or hell prepared a man for such sights, such violations of natural law. One Xuthalite, seemingly asleep in a wall niche, suddenly lunged with inhuman speed. Its eyes burned with Thog's malevolence rather than Kherm's sorrowful control, its nails elongated into shadowy claws that dripped a viscous black ichor hissing where it struck stone. Conan barely parried the unexpected attack. The creature's touch carried an unholy cold that bit even through his guard, numbing his arm. It dissolved into oily smoke when his blade passed through it, leaving behind chilling disembodied laughter that seemed to echo from the Slithering God itself, mocking their struggles. The very ground felt unsteady, as if they walked on the skin of some vast dreaming beast whose slumber grew more fitful with each passing moment.
"They know," Thalis whispered, her face pale beneath its olive complexion. "Kherm will be furious beyond reason. His control is being challenged, unraveled. And Thog... Thog is awake and playing, delighting in this chaos like a cat with wounded prey."
The elixir's fire still burned in Conan's veins, though he sensed its potency was finite, already beginning to fade. A temporary sharpening of his already formidable senses, nothing more. Natala felt invigorated, a desperate energy thrumming through her scholar's frame. Even Thalis moved with renewed confident grace, her movements almost serpentine.
The passage Thalis led them through was ancient beyond reckoning, the stone crumbling in places, revealing darkness beneath that seemed to writhe. Suddenly, a wall section shimmered like a heat haze. A Xuthalite warrior materialized, its armor a grotesque parody of Khermi designs, eyes burning with Kherm's reflected fury made manifest. It lunged, hands ending in shadowy talons that seemed to drink light. Conan met the charge with barbarian directness. His saber passed through its arm with little resistance, cutting shadow, yet the talons raked his chest, drawing blood that sizzled faintly where it touched his skin, an unnatural reaction. The wound was shallow, the pain an icy burn that felt less of torn flesh and more of a spirit chilled to the bone, yet it served as a stark reminder that even dreams could kill in this accursed place.
"More dream than substance, but still dangerous!" Thalis cried, her voice sharp. "Natala, those archway glyphs, can you find their weakness, the anchor point?"
Natala, her mind racing against mounting pressure, focused on the intricate symbols carved around the arch. The glyphs swam before her eyes, the psychic pressure immense and crushing. "Anchors for their manifestations! The central glyph, the keystone, it's a symbol of Kherm's sorrow... a stylized weeping eye! Smash it, Conan!"
Conan, needing no second bidding when destruction was the answer, spotted the weeping eye glyph with his barbarian's keen sight. With a grunt of effort, he swung his sword, not with the edge designed for cutting flesh, but with the flat, striking the keystone with brutal force that sent vibrations up his arm. The glyph fractured with a sound like shattering glass, spider-web cracks spreading. The warrior shrieked, its form flickering violently as its anchor point was destroyed, and dissolved into motes of despairing light that faded like dying embers.
Their progress became a running battle through shifting corridors. Xuthalites materialized with increasing frequency, their forms more solid and dangerous as Kherm's rage intensified and focused, though none possessed the true chilling weight of the guardians Kherm would later summon from his deepest memories. Some wielded weapons of pure shadow that felt unnaturally cold to the touch, others attacked with the chilling touch of the void that numbed flesh and bone. Conan fought with savage fury, his Cimmerian blood singing with the familiar song of battle, the only music he truly loved.
Thalis, conserving her more potent magic for greater need, used her dagger with deadly grace, her movements precise as a dancer's, occasionally uttering sharp Stygian syllables that caused the dream-constructs to recoil or waver. Natala, no longer a helpless noblewoman cowering behind warriors, called out weaknesses in glyph patterns and structural instabilities, her knowledge becoming a weapon in itself. She felt a surge of fear that threatened to overwhelm her, then a grim satisfaction as her insights proved useful. Her father's dusty scrolls were taking on terrifying practical reality, theory forged into survival.
Once, she pointed out a loose keystone in an archway just as a shadowy horror began to coalesce beneath it, its form all writhing tentacles and gnashing teeth. Conan, with a well-aimed stone, brought the arch crashing down in a shower of dust and rubble, dispersing the threat before it could fully manifest. Natala's frame, once softened by Brythunian courts and fine living, now moved with a lean purposeful grace, her torn silks clinging to sweat-slicked limbs that spoke of a scholar turned warrior through necessity. Her eyes, alight with fierce determination, caught Conan's for a fleeting moment, a spark of shared defiance that needed no words to convey its meaning.
He caught her eye for a brief second, a flicker of grim approval in his own. The girl was learning, hardening into something useful. Good. She'd need every scrap of that steel to survive what lay ahead.
The floor bucked violently without warning. The passage ahead collapsed in a shower of stone and choking dust. From the darkness beyond, a monstrous shadowy limb, thick as a python and longer than a man was tall, lashed out. Obsidian shards glinted along its edges like teeth, the air around it crackling with that same ruby light seen in Thog's single baleful eye. It slammed into the wall beside Conan, the stone cracking and groaning, deep fissures spreading. The air filled with the stench of something ancient and rotten, a smell that spoke of opened tombs and dead stars, and a psychic pressure that made reality itself seem to warp and bend like heated metal.
"Thog!" Thalis screamed, her voice ragged with terror. "He bars our way, manifesting directly!"
Conan roared defiance, his barbarian soul refusing to bow. "If we cannot go around, then through!" He hacked at the limb with all his strength. It recoiled with a psychic shriek that clawed at their minds like iron hooks, making Natala cry out and clutch her head. But another tendril, larger and more solid, snaked out from the rubble, its surface roiling with captured screaming faces that seemed to beg for release or death.
Conan found himself facing a manifestation of Thog itself: a vortex of shifting shadows, its single eye a swirling abyss that reflected their deepest fears before igniting with hateful inner fire. It was a churning horror, its form defying easy comprehension or description, its presence exuding a cold that was not of earth. The very air around it shimmered as if reality was unraveling at the seams. He met its gaze without flinching, sword ready, and with a barbaric yell that echoed his ancestors' war cries, buried his blade in its densest part. The entity shrieked, a sound that was both physical and mental, vibrating in the bones. It recoiled, its form wavering like smoke.
This thing is tied to the city, to that Heart-Stone, the tactical thought struck him with cold clarity born of countless battles. Break the anchor, break the beast. Simple barbarian logic applied to cosmic horror.
After an eternity of fighting through shifting corridors and spectral foes that seemed endless, Thalis stopped before a blank wall that looked no different from a thousand others. "This is it." She pressed a sequence of symbols Natala had identified from a crumbling fresco depicting Kherm's flight from his doomed world. Though Natala had hesitated over one symbol, unsure if it represented a star or a closing eye, before Thalis urged her to choose with time running out. Stone slid inward with a groan of ancient mechanisms, revealing a narrow opening and beyond it, impossibly, a star-dusted sky.
The passage beyond was short and tight, the air within it cold and tasting of ancient stagnant water and stone dust, before it abruptly opened out. "An old emergency exit, leading out beyond the city's immediate influence," Thalis explained, her voice grim as she peered into the sudden space beyond. "But be warned, Kherm will have defenses. He would not leave any escape unguarded or untainted by his despair. Given his state of mind, he will likely be there himself, making his final stand."
Freedom seemed to beckon. Or so they thought in their desperation. Conan pushed through the constricted exit, finding not open desert as hoped, but a small enclosed subterranean cistern. On the narrow ledge surrounding the dark still water, stood a dozen Xuthalite warriors, more solid than any before, their eyes open and filled with a desperate murderous light. At their head stood Kherm himself, robed in shimmering black that seemed to drink light, his face a mask of cold fury, profound weariness, and raw obsession twisted together. His staff, topped with a multifaceted black crystal that pulsed with unholy light, seemed to hum with power. In his other hand, he clutched the small worn star-gleam toy, that fragile relic of a lost child. His presence was a physical weight, the very air thick with a sorrow that sought to drown them, now sharpened by palpable madness that made him unpredictable.
"Thalis," Kherm's voice was a low growl, like stones grinding together in some infernal mill, yet edged with a chilling calm that was more terrifying than rage. "You persist in this folly, this rebellion against necessity. Thog is... agitated. His full awakening threatens Xuthal, the last bastion against the oblivion that consumed my world, my child, my little star-sailor!" His voice, though controlled, trembled slightly on the last words, a flicker of the broken being beneath the tyrant's mask. "Only a potent life-force, a new dream, can calm him now! Perhaps your dreams will suffice, Stygian!"
His face contorted, the cold mask cracking to reveal raw agony beneath. "You speak of waking worlds, of freedom? I saw my world burn! My child... her laughter silenced by the void's cruel hunger! Xuthal is all that remains, a dream woven from my very soul, a bulwark against the endless night that would swallow everything! You cannot understand the necessity of this peace, this order! You lack the scars to comprehend!"
Thalis spat on the stone, her earlier composure replaced by a cold fury that mirrored Kherm's own madness. "Your obsession is your prison, Kherm! You are no better than the Stygian priests who chain gods for power, who delight in breaking spirits like yours... and mine! This 'peace' is a living death, a monument to your failure to let go, to accept loss!" This declaration seemed to solidify her resolve, her stance becoming more aggressive, her hand gripping her dagger with lethal purpose.
Kherm sneered, his voice regaining its cold edge, his eyes glittering with a fanatic's light that allowed no compromise. "So be it. The girl," his gaze fixed on Natala with predatory hunger, "will serve well in the deeper dream-levels, her knowledge mine to harvest. The barbarian... your vitality will sustain Thog for a time. As for you, Thalis, an eternity of waking nightmares awaits, custom-crafted from your own betrayals!" He raised his staff, and the water in the cistern began to churn, bubbles rising. "You will not leave! Xuthal is eternal! My sorrow is eternal! And I am its master!" From the dark water, shadowy forms began to coalesce, dream-constructs of his lost people, their eyes hollow with grief, their hands reaching out in supplication or accusation.
The Xuthalite warriors advanced, their movements unnervingly precise and coordinated. Conan roared, meeting their charge head-on. Steel rang against shadowy blades and ethereal armor in a cacophony of violence. Thalis fought beside him, her dagger a silver serpent darting through the fray, her lips moving in silent Stygian incantations that seemed to make the very air around her targets shimmer and distort reality.
Natala, her heart pounding like a war drum, focused on Kherm through the chaos. His staff pulsed in time with a larger pulsating black rock set into the cistern wall behind him: the Heart-Stone, its surface veined with sickly green light, emanating a palpable thrum of dark power that made her teeth ache.
"Conan! Thalis!" she cried, her voice cutting through the din of battle. "The Heart-Stone! Behind Kherm! That's Thog's anchor, the source of his power! Conan, if you can damage it..."
Kherm, distracted by Natala's cry, turned to unleash a blast of shadow energy at Conan. The Cimmerian dodged with battle-honed reflexes, the energy scorching the stone where he'd stood, leaving it blackened and smoking.
Thalis saw her opening and lunged at Kherm with predatory speed. "Your sorrow is your own, Dream-Master! Release this city from your selfish grip!"
Kherm parried with his staff, a magical duel erupting in crackling energies and clashing wills that lit the cistern with eldritch light. He snarled with bestial fury, "You will not take her from me again!" A spectral image of a laughing child, transparent and sorrowful, flickered around him like a ghost. It lashed out with tendrils of pure grief that Thalis barely deflected, her own Stygian wards flaring defensively in silver light.
While Kherm was engaged, Natala saw Conan battling two Xuthalites near the Heart-Stone. "Conan, the Stone! A direct blow might shatter its focus!" she yelled, pointing to a fissure Conan's earlier struggles had inadvertently created near its base, a weakness in the alien crystal.
Conan, grunting with effort as he dispatched one warrior with a brutal slash, saw his chance through the melee. The last of the elixir's fading fire burned through him, lending him speed. With a savage roar that echoed through the cistern, he spun, his greatsword arcing in a deadly circle. He brought the pommel of his sword down with all his Cimmerian might onto the exposed cracked base of the Heart-Stone.
The impact resounded like a thunderclap in the confined space. The Heart-Stone erupted in a blinding chaotic flash of green and black light that seared the eyes. Kherm shrieked, not just in pain, but as if his very soul was being torn from the fabric of Xuthal itself, unraveled thread by thread. He attempted one final monumental exertion of will: a wave of pure despair lashing out like a physical blow, trying to mend the Stone or shield it with his own essence. But it was too late. The dark energy imploded from his staff, which shattered in his grip with a crystalline scream. The dream-constructs from the water dissolved with mournful sighs, fading like morning mist.
Kherm was thrown backwards, convulsing as if in seizure. The unholy light in his staff didn't just shatter but seemed to claw its way back into him, consuming him from within like a cancer. His robes billowed as if in a phantom wind from dimensions beyond, and for a moment, his form became a vortex of screaming shadows and fading starlight before collapsing. "No... My memories... my Xuthal... my little star..." he choked, his voice a desperate whisper that echoed with cosmic despair. He clawed at the air, as if trying to hold onto fading dreams slipping through his fingers. Then his eyes, for a horrifying instant, lost all human focus, becoming twin windows onto a cold star-dusted void beyond mortal comprehension. "...lost... forever... kssssh...thk..." The last was not a word, but a dry clicking sound, like galaxies crumbling to dust across eons.
The fragile star-sailor toy fell from his grasp and skittered across the ledge, coming to rest near the violently pulsing fractured Heart-Stone. Conan spared a glance: a child's plaything amidst the ruin of a god's dream, a fragile speck against cosmic madness. The Xuthalite warriors faltered, their forms becoming translucent, their light dimming like dying stars. Some collapsed into dust that blew away on an unfelt wind. The cistern shuddered, stone grinding against stone. Black water boiled with unnatural fury.
A monstrous scaled head, larger than a war-horse, its eye a vortex of captured despairing souls that pulsed with sickly internal luminescence, surged from the depths. Thog, its form shifting between solid and shadow, a chaotic mass of scale and darkness, incorporating the screaming dissolving faces of Xuthalites into its substance. It was less a physical creature and more a tear in the fabric of reality itself, its edges blurring, its roar a sound that promised madness and the unmaking of sanity. The very air around it distorted, colors shifting into unknown spectra that human eyes were never meant to perceive.
Before the full horror could settle, a momentary raw thought flashed through Conan's mind: No beast of earth or hell prepared a man for such a sight, such an affront to natural law. Then, for a vertiginous instant, he felt the sanity of the world itself fraying at the edges like old cloth. The sheer impossibility of the entity threatened to overwhelm his senses more than any physical blow. A cold cosmic dread tried to unman him, a terror far deeper than fear of fang or claw. Tendrils of pure void, cold enough to freeze the soul itself, lashed out, carving grooves in stone as if it were soft clay. The air reeked of ozone, decay, and something utterly alien that scraped at the edges of sanity like nails on slate.
"Crom!" Conan yelled, shoving Natala towards the dark opening of the escape tunnel with desperate strength. "Go! Now! Don't look back!"
Thalis, seeing Kherm writhing on the ground, his form rapidly fading into nothingness, snatched an ornate dagger the Dream-Master had dropped. A shard of the now-violently-pulsing Heart-Stone lay beside him, glowing with unstable power that made the air around it ripple; she scooped that up too, its energy raw and chaotic, burning her palm. "This way! The city is tearing itself apart! Move!"
Thog's head lunged at Conan with serpentine speed. He leaped, his saber scoring its snout, black ichor spraying. Thog bellowed, thrashing, its shadowy form lashing out. Reality itself seemed to ripple and tear around it like fabric rent by claws. Conan leaped onto its neck with barbarian courage, driving his sword down towards where its dark heart should be, if such a thing had a heart. The creature's form flickered, its connection to this plane unstable due to the damaged Heart-Stone, but its rage was undiminished. Its hunger raged now raw and uncontrolled, no longer chained. It tried to pull Conan into its shifting mass, its touch burning like absolute zero, visions of cosmic horror assaulting his mind. Conan felt his strength being sapped, the very essence of his being threatened by the creature's anti-life aura, a hunger that devoured reality itself. He roared, driving his blade deeper, but it was like stabbing smoke and shadow made manifest.
"Its essence is tied to the void beyond the stone!" Natala yelled from the tunnel mouth, her voice sharp with urgency despite the psychic pressure that made her sway on her feet. "Sever that tie, Thalis! Your unbinding magic! The Stygian rites of severance you learned!"
As Thog's unmaking began to distort the very chamber, warping stone and air alike, a jagged piece of the ceiling, loosened by the creature's thrashing, broke free. It hurtled towards a momentarily vulnerable Conan. "Conan, look out!" Natala screamed, shoving a loose fist-sized rock from the tunnel entrance with all her might. It struck the falling debris, not enough to stop it, but deflecting it just enough to crash harmlessly beside the Cimmerian. He grunted, a rough sound of acknowledgement for the girl's quick thinking. Another debt owed in a battle that offered no time for proper thanks or pretty words.
Thalis, seeing Conan struggling against the increasingly chaotic entity, focused her will with iron discipline. She recalled the forbidden Stygian texts she had pored over in secret during her captivity, texts detailing the unweaving of powerful bindings, the severing of anchors to the Outer Dark. Arts her captors, particularly Nebthu, had sought to master for domination, not unmake for liberation. Channeling this dangerous knowledge, not as raw destructive light, but as precise unbinding, she held the unstable Heart-Stone shard aloft. Its chaotic energy served as a dangerous amplifier, burning her hand.
Chanting words that felt like tearing silk, each syllable a violence against reality, Thalis's body swayed as if in a trance. Her movements became a sinuous dance that seemed to pull the very shadows of Xuthal into her spell, weaving them into her working. Each Stygian syllable fell like a lover's whisper made deadly, her midnight hair whipping around her like a living veil possessed. The Heart-Stone shard glowed brighter in her grip as if answering her fierce primal will. The air crackled with the forbidden energy of her craft, a display both beautiful and terrifying that spoke of powers mortals should never wield.
Words that seemed to pull at the very fabric of existence with each syllable, she thrust her hand forward. No beam of light emerged, but rather a lance of absolute nothingness, a ripple of pure unmaking that visibly warped the air like heat haze over a frozen landscape impossibly inverted. It struck the point where Thog's ethereal form seemed most anchored to the crumbling reality of Xuthal, a nexus of swirling shadow near the shattered Heart-Stone. The sound was not a shriek, but a deafening implosion, as if a vacuum had opened into another hostile dimension.
Thog's physical form began to rapidly dissipate, not just wounded, but unmade at its core. Its substance dissolved into oily smoke and fading whispers as the Heart-Stone's instability amplified the chaotic unbinding. The very air around it warped and tore like fabric. For a horrifying moment, they glimpsed a chilling expanse of utter blackness beyond, a void teeming with unseen ancient hunger, before reality snapped back with concussive force that knocked them from their feet.
Thog's resistance was immense; the unbinding effect flickered, and Thalis cried out, blood trickling from her nose and ears. But Conan, sensing the critical shift as Thalis's sorcery tore at the entity's core, roared and plunged his sword into the dissipating struggling mass one last time. His Cimmerian steel, though largely useless against Thog's fully coherent alien nature, now bit into the unraveling chaos, physically disrupting the residual energies. Adding a barbarian's brute finality to the delicate sorcerous unmaking, giving it the killing blow it needed.
Conan, feeling the pressure lessen as Thog's form destabilized completely, wrenched his sword free with savage effort. He spun, parried a last desperate Xuthalite that was more shadow than substance, and kicked the fading warrior into the churning water. Then he sprinted for the escape tunnel, diving through as the cistern roof collapsed with a deafening roar, tons of stone crashing down.
The passage was mercifully short. They stumbled out onto cool desert sands, blessed and real. Behind them, Xuthal crumbled, its death throes and Thog's fading bellows muffled by the collapsing stone. A vast cloud of greenish dust, shot through with flickers of unholy light, rose into the sky, obscuring the stars like a funeral shroud.
Epilogue: The Taste of Dawn
They ran until Xuthal was a distant rising dust plume against the bruised pre-dawn sky, a monument to fallen dreams. Conan finally slowed, chest heaving like a bellows, leaning on his sword. Thalis clutched Kherm's jewel-encrusted dagger, and the faintly glowing still-warm fragment of the Heart-Stone.
"Crom! Too close," Conan admitted, wiping sweat and grime from his brow. He thought of Kherm, not a monster born of evil, but a being broken by a loss so vast it had shattered his mind and turned his grief into a prison for countless souls. The alien sorrow he'd brushed against, the echoes of a child's laughter amidst dying stars, the final inhuman click from the Dream-Master. It left a bitter taste, a grim understanding of how even profound love could curdle into possessive madness that destroyed all it touched.
He looked at Natala, who stood watching the dust cloud, her expression a mixture of exhaustion and newfound hard-won strength. The silence from the ruins was profound now, deeper than any desert stillness, the silence of final endings.
Natala shivered, though not from cold. "All those dreamers," she whispered, her voice carrying the weight of their fate, "trapped so long in false paradise. Now... either peace or nothingness awaits them. At least their sorrow ends." She turned from the ruin, her gaze resolute, tempered like steel in forge fire. "Xuthal... it showed me that knowledge isn't just for scrolls and quiet libraries. It's a weapon, a shield, a survival tool. My father taught me much, but this city taught me how to wield it, how to make theory into reality." A quiet determination settled in her eyes. The horrors had not broken her, but forged her anew, stronger for the tempering. "I won't forget what I learned here. Or what we fought for, what we survived."
Conan grunted, a sound of grim acknowledgment that carried rare approval. "You fought well, girl. You have steel in you, real steel. Your father would be proud."
Thalis leaned against a rock, her breathing evening out, her composure returning like armor donned. "Indeed. Xuthal does not yield its prisoners easily." She tested the dagger's edge with a bloodied thumb, feeling its balance. "Kherm had quality in his possessions, at least. And the Heart-Stone fragment," she held it up, its light pulsing erratically like a dying heartbeat, "it still pulses with power. A dangerous tool, unpredictable, but potent beyond measure. It resonates with an ancient power, something the oldest Stygian texts only hint at as the 'Tears of Forgotten Gods,' a power that could unravel the bindings of Set himself if wielded with enough will and blood sacrifice."
She looked out at the vast desert stretching endlessly. "The oasis is a day's march, perhaps less if we push hard and the desert shows mercy."
"And then?" Conan asked, sheathing his sword with finality.
Thalis met his look, her dark eyes holding a new sharper light, the glint of purpose refined. "Then, Cimmerian, the world awaits our return. Stygia, in particular. My former masters, like Nebthu, thought to bury me, to break my spirit with their bindings and lotus dreams, to make me their perfect toy. With this dagger, and this Heart-Stone shard, I hold a key to unravelling their power, to tearing down their temples." She smiled, a dangerous predatory curve of her lips that promised vengeance. "They practice the Rites of Set, seeking to bind shadows to their will, to chain gods for their own glorification. This dagger can sever such bonds, and the stone can amplify the chaos of their unmaking tenfold. Their temples, built on secrets and suffering, will tremble and fall. They will learn what true power, and true loss, feels like when it comes for them. Nebthu will learn that some spirits, once awakened, cannot be caged again, cannot be broken."
A predatory gleam entered her eyes, cold and fierce, but beneath it Conan sensed a deep burning pain, a resolve forged in suffering and a thirst for righteous vengeance that would not be denied. "Perhaps our paths will cross again, Conan, when the sands shift and the stars align favorably. When another city of dreams needs breaking."
She pushed off the rock with renewed energy. "But for now, let us put distance between ourselves and that city of broken dreams. The dawn air tastes clean, untainted. Let us savor it while we can."
Conan nodded, his gaze lingering on the fading dust plume of Xuthal's ruins, a monument to cosmic sorrow. He offered his arm, and Natala took it without hesitation, her grip firm, her fingers brushing the corded muscle of his forearm. For a moment, their eyes met. Hers fierce with newfound steel, his glinting with a rare quiet respect born of shared battle. The desert wind stirred her hair, and Conan caught the faint curve of her lips, no longer the soft noblewoman's smile but a warrior's expression, tempered by Xuthal's fires. A spark of something unspoken passed between them, quickly buried as they turned toward the dawn together. But the warmth of her touch lingered on his skin, a promise of battles yet to share, a bond forged in blood and survival.
Thalis, clutching Kherm's dagger and the pulsing Heart-Stone shard, walked beside them, her dark eyes fixed on the horizon where vengeance awaited. Together, the three unlikely allies turned their backs on Xuthal's ruins, striding into the vast waiting silence toward the nascent blood-red promise of dawn. The desert wind, cool and fresh, felt like a benediction, carrying away the last whispers of Xuthal's sorrow. Ahead lay the unknown, and for Conan, that was always where the next adventure began, where life waited to be lived and battles waited to be won.
The End.
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