To his utter astonishment, the beings welcomed Crom-Ya as their prophesied deliverer! Now that he had opened the way for them, they would emerge from the depths to overrun the Great Race, sending them fleeing into some other world. Well, perhaps, he supposed, they were right! This was exactly his goal! Fleetingly, Crom-Ya wondered if this “prophecy” had somehow been planted in the minds of these creatures or their ancestors by Rang-Thalun from the distant future. After all he had seen and lived through, nothing any longer seemed impossible, or even unlikely.
“I have four of their weapons here. You can use them to blow open the other doors inside the Great Race’s fortress, your fortress! Of course, they possess a stockpile of these force-weapons, but from all I have seen I believe their plan is not to fight you, but only to flee into some future world by mind-projection as they have before. They post armed sentries at all the doors, but I now believe they are intended only to prevent their captives doing what we are doing.” Withal, he held out the four weapons, one in each tentacle; each was taken by a huge, translucent pseudopod. He received no further communication from the Blind Beings, but he measured their excitement from the sudden chorus of eerie flute-like whistling.
The snail-like locomotion of the Great Race body was quite effective against the weight of gravity. It seemed to take less time to ascend the ramp than it had taken to descend it, but who knew? There was, after all, his inconsistent perception 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
There is tangible proof — in the form of marginal notes— that I went minutely through such things as the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt…
These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various books, all of which the writer seemed to know with equal, though obviously academic, facility. One note appended to von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, was alarmingly otherwise.
— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”
I
Wind! A howling tumult that made hurricanes seem like zephyrs, in a landscape of black congealed lava and upthrust crags. Lightning blazed crimson above. Whenever it ceased for a few seconds, I somehow knew I would have been lost in utter darkness if my eyes were human — and also, in that searing environment, my eyes would have boiled and burst in those same few seconds.