Shadows in the Moonlight: Large Print
- ISBN-10
- ISBN-13
- 9798568152156
- Series
- Shadows in the Moonlight
- Pages
- 32
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2020-11-20
- Author
- Robert E Howard
Description
Olivia dreamed, and through her dreams crawled a suggestion of lurking evil, like a blackserpent writhing through flower gardens. Her dreams were fragmentary and colorful, exotic shards of a broken, unknown pattern, until they crystalized into a scene of horrorand madness, etched against a background of cyclopean stones and pillars.She saw a great hall, whose lofty ceiling was upheld by stone columns marching in evenrows along the massive walls. Among these pillars fluttered great green and scarlet parrots, and the hall was thronged with black-skinned, hawk-faced warriors. They were notnegroes. Neither they nor their garments nor weapons resembled anything of the world thedreamer knew.They were pressing about one bound to a pillar: a slender white-skinned youth, with acluster of golden curls about his alabaster brow. His beauty was not altogether human-like the dream of a god, chiseled out of living marble.The black warriors laughed at him, jeered and taunted in a strange tongue. The lithe nakedform writhed beneath their cruel hands. Blood trickled down the ivory thighs to spatter onthe polished floor. The screams of the victim echoed through the hall; then lifting his headtoward the ceiling and the skies beyond, he cried out a name in an awful voice. A dagger inan ebon hand cut short his cry, and the golden head rolled on the ivory breast.As if in answer to that desperate cry, there was a rolling thunder as of celestial chariot-wheels, and a figure stood before the slayers, as if materialized out of empty air. The formwas of a man, but no mortal man ever wore such an aspect of inhuman beauty. There wasan unmistakable resemblance between him and the youth who dropped lifeless in hischains, but the alloy of humanity that softened the godliness of the youth was lacking in thefeatures of the stranger, awful and immobile in their beauty.The blacks shrank back before him, their eyes slits of fire. Lifting a hand, he spoke, and histones echoed through the silent halls in deep rich waves of sound. Like men in a trance theblack warriors fell back until they were ranged along the walls in regular lines. Then fromthe stranger's chiseled lips rang a terrible invocation and command: 'Yagkoolan yok tha, xuthall
