Pillars of Atlantis: A Tale of the First World

By Christian Sturm

There has been a question which has been pondered upon for centuries. Did civilization start with ancient Mesopotamia as history says; or did a much earlier civilized period exist which is lost to time? There is no definitive answer to that question, thus the subject remains a mystery. But mystery and doubt is a powerful lure, and it is the unsolved mystery of legendary lands, such as Atlantis, which has captivated the imagination for a long time. In the novel 'Pillars of Atlantis' one is swept up in a sprawling odyssey set in a wondrous but grippingly realistic version of the supposed Atlantean World which engages one's mind regarding the origins of civilization upon the earth. Indeed, here is a wonderful and thrilling tale where the seeker of fabulous marvels and high adventure can let their mind wander back to a lost world of unbounded wonder which lies far beyond the memory of Man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543951448

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Arcanum Resurrectus

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Of the dawn-days of Man lost to the awesome depths of time, long-held beliefs asserted that back then civilization had yet to be, saying that in those days of Man’s wild youth, long before the recording of great events, the only kingdom that thrived in all its savage glory was the kingdom of the wilds, where Mother Nature reigned with a harsh and heavy hand. This was a more heroic age of raw survival, quoth the historiographers, than times we live in now----epic days when our brave, cave-dwelling ancestors were challenged by the sudden strike of cosmic fireballs, exploding super-volcanoes that blasted brilliant sparks of red-hot rock up to the stratosphere, and roaring floods so destructive they swept whole worlds away!

Thus spoke those wise and learned men of antiquarian erudition who gazed back with their mind’s eye across the eons upon those far days of our wild, Stone Age ancestors who, besides defying the blood-dripping fangs of a brutal world, discovered how to procure that vital necessity called fire, and were the first to believe that the beast called Man bore the divine spark we call a soul.

Yet despite beliefs regarding Man’s primal past, there once was a cult of secret knowledge whose robe-draped initiates asserted that our earthly civilization is older than we know, and that there were cities when our Stone Age ancestors walked the earth. These cities stood in very old, old days indeed----mythical days of giants, gods, and a million-year-old isle-city, whose half-mile-high towers were more awesome to behold than a mountain of gold!

As much of a leap into fantasy as it might seem to men of reason, it was said of this forgotten starting point of our world civilization that it thrived in Paleolithic times, when earth was the wilderness world of our ancestors who brandished stone-tipped spears at the monsters of the Age of Ice: the sabretooth lion, the great monitor lizard, and the giant sloth----as well as the shaggy mastodon of the primeval plains, whose colossal tusks soared so far up against the sky when looked at from close to, that they even awed the spear-gripping giants of those early times as they gaped on high.

And it was writ within a certain theosophic tome, that upon a time those of that cult of secret knowledge discovered a most curious set of four-and-twenty scrolls all housed deep within a hidden cave- temple of Romano-Celtic origin. Marred by a billion age-old cracks were these mummy-like scrolls of crumbly vellum that rested in the dust of lost centuries. The titulus of these brittle and time-browned scrolls of unknown origin----ancient relics which could all fall into powdery pieces in clumsy hands----was Arcanum Resurrectus, and enlightening were the words of the dead language inscribed upon all these crack-covered scrolls, for these faded words lent a vivid narratus of the lost but ‘true’ commencement of earthly civilization which came to pass more than a thousand lifetimes before the days of Ancient Rome!

By reason of myth-memories which bespoke of a bygone world ruled by gods, folk always had the feeling that some lost era of our world civilization once existed in time, even though no one could place such a period lost in all that time----like a haunting dream one can scarce recall. However, it was the Arcanum Resurrectus which faithfully elucidated upon this forgotten starting point of our cities and towns----that crumbling old set of vellum scrolls whose faded scriptum opened the ivory gates to Man’s misty past.

Recorded were those faded writings of the crumbly scrolls upon vellum in three written languages: Latin, Runic, and Greek, quite similar in fashion to the befamed Rosetta Stone; moreover, as old as these writings were, they were but multigenerational copies of scrolls which existed so long ago that those prehistoric originals did crumble to dust before Romulus laid the foundations of Rome.

According to the Arcanum Resurrectus, it was those beings who the antique scrolls referred to as the Great Old Ones who founded our earthy civilization in times that would shock the scholars of the present time. True celestial gods were these beings who, back at the dawn of time, descended from the gulfs of infinity above the clouds to the terrestrial regnum of Man. It was more than a million long and eventful years ago that these beings, who came down to earth in elliptical sky-boats it was writ, did conquer a race of club-dragging brutes, once known as half-men, and enslaved many of these grim savages to the sturdy yoke of thralldom to facilitate in the construction of the now long-forgotten but first true city, called Avalonum, where these autocratical gods----they who ancient myth described as big-eyed beings with six fingers on each hand----dwelt in colossal palaces as big as clouds. These were exceedingly old, old days indeed when our globe was but a howling wilderness----enchanting days of a far more wild and much younger earth to be sure, when mystery and wonder lay beyond horizons unseen.

A city as vast as an entire kingdom was this mighty metropolis of those big-eyed ones from on high; and it was writ of Avalonum that this great prehistoric city mantled an island of spacious dimensions which once belonged to a now long-sunken archipelago known, in the present time, as Atlantis----that alleged, myth-making land and precursor of all civilized cultures of Mother Earth.

And it was writ of our civilization’s ‘first youth’ which thrived eleven thousand years before the Common Era commenced, that upon a time the inhabitants of Atlantis could boast of a transoceanic empire which extended far beyond their isle-realm in the Atlantic Sea----an imperium that reached far, far off to the then wilderness-spanning continents of prehistoric Africa and Europa where the great Atlanteans established many a colonial settlement out amid savage-dwelling forest and plain. However, our narratus of bold adventure unfolds not in those glorious days when Atlantis was an empire flung far-and-wide, but rather in its later declining era. This was in the days of Seventh Age Atlantis; but even though this was a much more recent epoch in the vast history of the Atlantean Isles, still we will need to fare a very long ways down the infinite corridor of time, where the slow and steady tick, tick, tick of time’s cosmic clock echoes throughout all eternity, until we reach the days of our noble tale.

And it was writ that even during those dark days of an Atlantis in decline when so much of the million-year-old city of Avalonum stood in ruin, it presented to the far-gazing eye an awesome sweep of architectural wonders----from one side of the observable world to the next----leagues of distance-dimmed temples, palaces, and governmental edifices constructed upon such an impossible scale, that all these shocking, insanely huge structures of granite, and the even denser stone known as andesite, would strike both fear and awe within the hearts of men upon sight of buildings which looked to be the work of some monstrous race of titans a hundred feet high!

‘And behold! as I gazed out across the waves of the vast Atlantic my spirits soared as high as the cloud-capped towers of Avalonum themselves as my eyes took in the wonders of an isle-city which could only have been built by beings garbed in the robes of gods.’

Thus spoke a passage in the Arcanum Resurrectus regarding the isle-city of Avalonum which gave narratum to ancient voyages out to Atlantis and her greatest city by a once eminent mage of the First World, better known by his distinguished appellation of Troltin the Wise; for it was in those far days, when most of earth was still a howling wilderness of monstrous beasts and brutish men, that a few bold adventurers of those forgotten civilized realms of prehistoric Africa and Europa sailed out to the mystic isles of Atlantis and that isle-city named Avalonum to seek the wisdom of the gods.

It was also writ, in what was referred to as the Testamentum of Troltin the Wise, that among the ruined structures of old Avalonum there stood a grove of twelve close-built towers which did serve as both lofty temples and the domicilium of the rulers of the land. The fashion of these million-year-old but near fully intact towers was architecture called ziggurat----tall, narrow, cone-shaped structures of tough granite fashioned of many ascending tiers stacked upon one another in a step-like manner, with each tier smaller than the one below it as these huddled towers climbed straight up to the sky like some dream-vision from fairylore.

Erected were all these exceedingly high towers of the eons upon a miraculous scale which might seem far beyond what is possible for mere mortal ingenuity, according to predawn myth, as well as those grotesque, crumbling old scrolls which all comprised the Arcanum Resurrectus. Again, here were architectural feats which were such fabulous objects to behold, that upon first sight of these twelve sky-high ziggurats of brown and orange-tinged stone, this grove of lofty towers bore the magical look of architecture that could only exist in a dream: ascending rings of columns encircling round, step-like tiers that climbed a half mile into the air----an eye-filling spectacle of graceful arches, noble statues, and pinnacles of stately mein----as well as thousands of stone carvings cut into well near every inch of the cylindrical walls of all these well-preserved towers, whose roof-pinnacles had stood in the winds of Heaven for a million years.

Here, within this fabulous cluster of sky-high ziggurats cleverly fashioned of immeasurable tons of interlocking, concavo-convex blocks of stone to well withstand the rigors of a million years, was a truly marvelous feat of monumental architecture the eye-popping sight of which would seem well beyond the bounds of reality to folk who had never laid eyes upon stone-built structures so daringly high as these towers of supreme majesty that climbed, tier-by tier, twenty-five-hundred vertical feet into the air. A colossal conception of the gods were all these lordly towers of old----an extravaganza of extravagant minds, which, according to Atlantean scholars, were erected through the slave-power of those savage brutes called half-men and by the magics of the gods. In historic times men erected stone-built towers of awesome heights such as those which once stood by the waters of the Euphrates River, but none to equal these half-mile-high marvels of the First World that bore the miraculous look of towers which one might see only far off in some enchanted world beyond mortal sight.

Within the faded scriptum of those sacred scrolls it was said also that for eons beyond remembering it was this stupendous stand of close-built towers which was the wonder of the First World. Truly, faint memories of this grove of prehistoric towers, whose close-built arrangement lent them the dreamlike look of some impossible colonnade of pillars that held up the sky, did survive in classic lore for many thousands of years after the mighty Atlantic rose up its salty waters and covered the Atlantean Isles when climatic change gave cause for the glaciers of the Age of Ice to melt away.

It was the ancestral lore of a bygone race of fish-eating men who abode on the Madeira Isles and did bow before the old snake-gods of early Man which preserved the ancient memory of those sky-high ziggurats that once graced the earth for a million years. Hereto we shall simply refer to these long-ago people as the Good Fisher Folk, and it was their generations of talebearers who handed down time-honored tales set in a far-off time of dragons and prodigious beings called giants. It was also a time of mortal men who abode in an isle-city, called Avalonum, where towers touched the very sky!

It was said within the songs of the gay minstrels among the Fisher Folk that so marvelous were those great towers to behold, that even the hovering gulls of the isle-city of Avalonum would marvel upon them as they took wing above Avalonum’s plenteous streets and squares. However, notwithstanding architecture so wondrous that upon first sight of it folk could scarce believe their very eyes, if one were to journey down the infinite corridor of time to those declining days of Atlantis, when lived Troltin the Wise, and gaze out from a wave-bobbing craft upon that old isle-city and its grove of twelve close-built ziggurats which touched the upper sky, so desolate and lone would Avalonum appear to the far-gazing eye, and so dirty, worn, and eaten into by that invisible assailant known as time, that this sea-girt city bore the chilling aspect of a place which could only be inhabited by the ghosts of men long in their tombs.

Truly, during those dark days of an Atlantis in grievous decline one could scarce believe that any life might bestir within the isle-city’s mass of time-beaten stone besides the wheeling gulls whose stark cries would echo out across the eerie grandeur of marble and granite structures which stood empty for many hundreds of years. Yet notwithstanding Avalonum’s state of age-long abandonment and neglect as it was in the far days of Troltin the Wise, within that tall metropolis, which was covered by the sea some nine thousand years before the burning of Troy, there dwelt a trifling of folk still, principally in dirty old tenements that towered dark and grim above a twisty maze of uncounted building-bound streets where gloom prevailed, even in the broad of day, by reason of tenements so tall that they shut out most of the blessed rays of the sun on high.

And it was writ that far, far above the crumbly roofs of the city’s ancient tenements there also abode, up within those temple-towers of eons that dared to touch the very sky, a collegium of Mage Elite forever known as the Urthostean Brethren. An aloof and secretive lot were all these wise and spiritually attuned metaphysicians who were the collective sovereigns of the Atlantean Isles, confined as they were so much of the time high up within that grove of close-built towers which the Great Old Ones erected at the dawn of time, in accordance to Atlantean myth, with an arrangement that aligned these grand old ziggurats with numerous star-patters up yonder in the benighted sky.

It was this positioning of these structures of stone relative to parts of Heaven, as well as the fact that they all had been erected upon earth’s invisible ley-lines, which made these towers resonate with earthly and cosmic forces that could be exploited by those versed in the high arts of the occult----such as the elite collegium of very powerful mages known as the Urthostean Brethren. Thus, because these twelve, sky-high ziggurats reflected all the signum of Heaven in such a manner, the isle-city of Avalonum was also known as the Celestial City.

It was writ of those astonishing dream-towers, as to call them, that they were known as the Pillars of Atlantis for as long as the Atlanteans could recall. An equivoque title was this appellation, for it came about for two reasons----with one begotten from a long-standing belief that as long as these soaring old structures stood so would stand the isle-realm of Atlantis, therefore making all twelve of these eternal, half-mile-high ziggurats stone-built metaphors for immortality. The second reason why these timeless towers came to bear their long-familiar name was well-rooted in the aforesaid fact that they rose up to such fantastic heights above all the other high-built structures of the isle-city, that when all foreign seafarers or voyagers from the other isles of the archipelago of Atlantis sailed in towards old Avalonum, behold! this wide grouping of pinnacle-topped towers hit the eye like some fabulous colonnade of conical pillars that held up the sky!

However, it was not just these eons-old towers alone which were referred to as the Pillars of Atlantis, but also they who dwelt within these sky-bearing marvels of dense adamantine stone. These were all the sacred Mage Elite of great Atlantis, known as the Urthostean Brethren----they who the few denizens of the vast city of Avalonum regarded with a reverence which was scarce less than that reserved for the gods themselves. It was also writ of these metaphysicians that as a group their phylum could be traced far back across the long eons to the Great Old Ones. These were those divine and big-eyed ones who, at the dawn of time, descended within those sky-boats from the infinite sea of Heaven to establish the first true civilization upon Mother Earth, Atlantis----mother of all civilizations of Man!

Being connected thus by an eons-long genus to all the Great Old Ones, it was the Urthosteans who were the altruistic guardians, or pillars, as it were, of righteousness and virtue which helped to keep the inhabitants of Atlantis within the bounds of civility; unlike the highly corrupt aristocracy of imperial times----they who ventured far beyond those bounds before they were cast down from off their gilded perches of repose centuries before the days of our tale.

Yet besides aspiring to the highest pinnacle of morality within the isle-realm, it was all the blessed Urthosteans----the progeny of the gods----who guarded Atlantis and the great isle-city of Avalonum, like some mystical host of archangels, from the evil artifice of they who were known in those far days as the Zulclots. This was a dark, ever-conspiring cult of metaphysicians who had renounced the rule of the Urthosteans and, paying homage only to the dark gods of the dreaded Underworld, pursued paths towards the absolute seizure of absolute power over all the inhabitants of the Atlantean Isles, even if it meant killing off half of the populace to achieve such an end.

It was in the sixth age of the long history of Atlantis, back during the conflict known as the Great War, when the good Urthosteans had been prevailed upon to assume theocratic sovereignty over the isle-realm by certain sagacious priests who were aware of the fact that the continued governance of the aristocracy of the land, with all of their decadence, profligacy, and incessant quarreling amongst themselves, was a road that could lead only to damnation and ruin for an isle-realm where gods once cohabited with human beings far back during the early infancy of Man. Thus, designs were laid down which declared that the good Urthosteans would all join together in leadership after the dethronement of the emperor, Grathevas----the high potentatus who, during those turbulent days of the Great War, bore dominium over the isle-realm of Atlantis and its colonial lands across the sea with an authority which was absolute.

Such a collective leadership of Mage Elite would commence after the very bloody and systematic eradication of the morally corrupt aristocracy of that isle-realm by discontented factions within the army, priesthood, and bureaucracy----as well as all the half-starved denizens of Avalonum who rushed forth with fists held high. It was the latter faction whose mob-rage waxed day-by-day, thus resulting in man-slaying riots from having borne the yoke of subordinate oppression as folk struggled beneath the crush of the tyrant’s heel. A banquet of blood was held throughout Atlantis, as it were, during this sad and woeful time which tried the souls of men. Truly, it was in those days that even the vast and hundreds-foot-high interiors of Atlantean temples echoed with the hammering swords of war. Such was a period which comprised a full lustrum of rebellion by the principal populace of the isle-city, as well as violent blood-feuds wherein death laid its icy hands upon the nobles of the land.

In later times, much was postulated as to what transpired in those bloody years to tear the nobility of Atlantis asunder; but it was the Atlantean sagas which related the narratus of a certain war-fellow of high renown who helped to fan the fires of this internal strife. This classic yarn spoke of this historic personage as being a highly charismatic nobleman whose dark, piercing eyes could mesmerize a pit full of snakes. Being a valiant and courageous lion in battle this man ascended into a rank of preeminence upon the wings of heroic deeds. Marodas was the name of this battle-famed personage from the long, saga-filled history of the Atlantean Isles, and of his actum within this blood-stained theatrum of war it was writ that there was no warrior in all the isle realm of Atlantis who had ever donned the coveted laureate of victory upon their brow as brave and mighty as he.

However, though esteemed was this great warrior for heroism and valor when he served as a champion to the emperor who honored the great hero with a gold-plated clypeus, unbeknownst to all, save but a few, well-versed was this young hero in the arts of the occult. Thus came he to don, besides that golden laureate of victory, the coveted headdress of Zulclotas----the legendary mage who founded that dark cult of ever-conspiring metaphysicians, through whose veins did flow the venom of treachery.

It was also writ of this bold young hero who concealed his high officium within that evil-embracing cult, that he had designs to one day usurp the fabulous dream-throne of the land where sat the lord sovereigns of great Atlantis for well near half a million years. The dactylic sagas of the Atlanteans told how, with his secret villainies, guilefulness, and deep obsession for ultimate power, the esteemed warrior succeeded in prolonging the bloody conflict of the isle-realm, principally by perpetuating and increasing the furies of the envy-divided aristocrats, and even inciting foul discord among the priests in Avalonum by way of invidious intervention and clever deceit. All of this the scheming young villain did by first winning the confidence, trust, and favor of Grathevas, the mighty emperor of Atlantis himself----he who bestowed upon Marodas the officium of a royal counselor whenever the renowned warrior was engaged not in affairs of war, and when he served in the throne-hall, forever known, by reason of its mind-staggering size, as the Hall of Giants.

Having sedulously secured such a status within the royal court it was with a nimble tongue that this double-dealing conspirator was able to perpetrate foul dissension, rivalry, and animosity among the jewel-sparkling popinjays at court from whose mouths did spout flowers of bombastic eloquence to his imperial majesty within that fabulous throne-hall of granite and marble, the Hall of Giants, far within the heart of Avalonum’s Monumental Districtus, and several city blocks away from those dreamy temple-towers, whose cloud-poking pinnacles seemed to bear the weight of Heaven itself.

Upon bended knee did these boot-licking fops of the royal court kiss the royal ring of their supreme lord of glory whom these men honored and extolled as if Grathevas were a god, rather than a corpulent, jewel-dripping blob of a man who bore the face of a fool and who lived for the pleasures of the table and liberal indulgences of narcoticus, beer, and wine. A murderous beast was he also----he who won the timeless throne of Atlantis by great villainy indeed upon slipping a dash of wolfbane in what would be his father’s very last goblet of wine. But besides this foul patricidal exploit it was Grathevas who abused his monarchal privileges by defalcating the imperial treasury to pillar his lust for luxuries, which did include the year-long construction of a vast pleasure-palace with a private hippodrome, three spring-fed baths, an amphitheatrum, and five spring-fed natatoriums. This palace also had three convivium halls whose pillars were splendiferously adorned with gold, moonstone, and gleaming arfvedsonite to please the eye of the mega-maniacal tyrant who, upon a whim, had proclaimed himself to be a god! Such self-apotheosis was a momentous affair accompanied by a score of celebratory days of festivities and drunken orgies that depleted the imperial treasury, as was told, to a mere half sack of gold.

It was during those war-swept years that Marodas, the champion of Grathevas, also proved to be a cunning assassin who rid himself of those who posed the slightest threat to his ambitions, which he accomplished by way of a sharp dagger, wolfbane, and such wicked means. A clever killer was he to be sure. However, in time the road of treachery and blood he followed----a long, dark road all bloodied over and bestrewn with his schemes of usurpation and subversive artifice----had, at long last, come to its terminus by reason of the exposure rendered by priests who hid keen eyes and ears behind the stone of well near every statue, pillar, and sacred shrine of the huge governmental buildings, palaces, and pillared fanes of a metropolis whose twelve temple-towers continued to bear the very weight of Heaven itself, as it seemed to the good denizens of Avalonum, even during those blood-spattered years of disunity and war.

And so it was that through his grave crimes to usurp the throne Marodas was sentenced to be dragged from his own war-chariot, down an entire monument-lined street of old Avalonum, known as Kings Way, until he was bleeding and dead. But the sagas told how this young viper escaped the royal dungeon upon the eleventh hour when, with the aid of those of his nefarious cult, Marodas fled like the slick-bellied snake he was into the inner recesses of a dark and towering city whose crowded old buildings and maze-like streets comprised an area vaster than any kingdom which spread upon the continent of Europa back in those days of the First World.

When a mighty host of more than thirty thousand warriors had been rallied forth by a lion-hearted praefectus of the army named Oriflamas----he whose rousing war-cry was Glory to the Brave----those of the aristocracy and several high priests of moral turpitude were beheaded, put to the sword, or shot with arrows through the heart. Truly, many a royal skull did roll into the dirty street-gutters of the Celestial City during the bloody termination of the nobility of the land, save for the head of the beast in the guise of an emperor who was so besotted from narcoticus and wine that he laughed all the way from his orgy-couch as he was escorted, by two of his own bodyguards, to a terrace of the palace wherefrom he was pushed so that those gathered before the royal abode could witness the tyrant falling two hundred and fifty feet down to a great space, known as the World Square, where that great blob of a man slammed to the paves with bone-splitting might!

After the carnage of the nobles had been kicked to the crows as it were, and after the exuvium of war had all been justly disbursed among the indigent plebeians who bore inveterate antipathy for the heartless nobility of the land, it was the Urthostean Brethren, the beloved of the gods, who were judiciously entrusted to govern that long-troubled land. To honor a very hallowed tradition of the land, ordained were all five-and-twenty of these illuminati of the Mage Elite out in the World Square, which laid deep in the Monumental Districtus of the isle-city. A marble colossus, all of one hundred and ten feet high, did tower in all its glory up upon a house-sized pedestal at the center of that spectacular square; and it was within this building-enclosed place, and before that lofty figure of stone, where these Mage Elite of Atlantis, the progenitors of the Great Old Ones, were ordained with a publicly inscrolled mandatum which stated that the Urthosteans were to accede as collective sovereigns, judges, and lawgivers of all the Atlantean Isles, and, as such, would preside as an elite quorum over all governing affairs of state with a hierocratic authority which was well near absolute.

Unlike the former nobility of the land, the Urthostean Brethren were men of high cosmic consciousness and therefore practiced a form of governance which held to the ethic that those who head the all were obliged to serve the all. But though the dominatus of these servant-rulers did restore some measure of peace and prosperity back to that previously war-torn land, the blessed realms of joy had been denied to all the denizens of Avalonum still, by reason of the pernicious games played out by that nefarious cult led by the odious outlaw who survived since his escape from what would have been a spectacular but inglorious form of mortal demise whilst being draw across the city paves by his war-chariot until he lay bleeding and dead.

And so it was writ that the cult, known as the Zulclots, amassed all its metaphysical powers and skills and brought forth pestilence upon Avalonum, within whose cobbled ways death stalked in the form of maladies which brought much suffering indeed. Truly, so many a fly-swarming carcass was cast into the corpse-carts of the Celestial City in those days from spotted fever, lung sickness, and a deadly affliction that turned people dark-blue, that all but the gods were cognizant as to the sum of rat-chewed corpses which filled up all those many hundreds upon hundreds of carts.

But besides the pyretic plagues of those days in the long history of Atlantis, the dangerously wicked Zulclots drew upon all of their occult powers and skills to summon forth, from the Underworld, hosts of those stygian entities commonly known as daemons to wreak havoc upon the terrestrial realm of Man. And it was writ of these luciferous fiends which crawled up from Hell, that so ghastly were they of face and form, and so utterly bizarre, that to even look upon one such abomination of supreme horror might well deal out death even to the most stout-hearted of men, or worse still, could shatter one’s sanity and reduce a man, women, or child to a form of gibbering madness of which there was no remedium known to Man.

And so it was that as the cry of death, terror, and utmost despair continued to echo down throughout the thousands of streets which formed Avalonum’s vast labyrinthus of pavimentum and wall, at length the evil that stalked all those building begloomed lanes put to flight many a man, woman, and child from the shores of the isle-city. These many affrightened and despairing folk took vessel out to the villages, towns, and more diminutive cities of the other isles of great Atlantis where no Horned Thing, as the daemons came to be known, stalked the streets of those places by night. However, there did exist a few quarters of the vast city of Avalonum which, for certain rationales of strategy, the Zulclots did mercifully spare from sickness and the incursion of prowling night-fiends up from the halls of Hell…..Hence, it was within these much more select parts of the old isle-city that some modicum of prosperity was well

preserved across many a year.

Yet those mercifully spared parts of that great metropolis of old comprised all but a relatively small portion of a kingdom-sized city, where millions of urban folk abode upon a time. Therefore most of the streets of the Celestial City had become so empty in those latter days of dark decline, that when the salt-spiced breeze from the sea blew down those deserted ways, it echoed like the plangorous wails of all the dead denizens of Avalonum who might haunt the isle-city as they recalled all the horror and deadly pestilence afflicted upon them during those tragic days of death and woe.

It was also writ in the crumbly old scrolls, that toward the end of Sixth Age Atlantis, long centuries after the Mage Elite had assumed dominatus over that isle-realm far a-sea, there came to pass bitter days indeed for the Urthostean Brethren. The sacred scrolls, which clearly bridge the present to the past, did speak of a series of evil atrocities which this order of Mage Elite suffered across a span of many a year. The scrolls spoke of the night when three Urthosteans beheld, within the luminance of a full-orbed moon, one of their own lot sprawled, beard up, upon the paving stones of a quite spacious peristylium of the great city. As the young mage laid upon the worn paves, the chilling howls of departing daemons could still be heard echoing through the rows of marble columns which surrounded that inner court, and also through the high-built structures of Avalonum which shot up around the peristylium into the benighted sky. Yet though the young mage was able to survive a greeting from the Hell-spawn known, to the Atlanteans, as the Horned Things, it was the mere sight of the fiends he encountered upon that moonlit night which reduced the once keen-minded prodigy to all but an insane, rictus-faced fool----he who, according to the urban legends of that greatest city of the First World, would sing a doleful ditty, amidst a madness without cure, whenever the moon was full.

It was this horrific incident which precipitated the withdrawal of the Urthosteans up to the sanction of the twelve temple-towers that challenged eternity, and which were all fortified against unwanted visitants by a field of prophylactic forces all drawn there by way of powerful runes cut into the masonry of those sky-high ziggurats. Carved were they almost a million years before the days of our tale, and barely discernable to the uplifted eye were these potent runes, lost as they were amid all the bewildering throng of intricate wall-carvings which so richly adorned the stonework of those timeless towers straight up to the clouds!

Though no one could frighten off the daemon-packs that roamed certain streets of old Avalonum by night----indeed, not even with a thousand flaming swords----the beleaguered Urthosteans held their forbearance firm, during those days of black despair, as they sought pathways to salvation by way of psychic delving into the mental levels of perception known to seers as the Inner Planes. And so it was that, by-and-by, the sacred brethren engaged all but little in statecraft and such quotidian affairs, sequestered as they were so much of the time high up within their tower-sanctuariums which, within the fullness of time, had become to the Urthostean Brethren like tall, conical cages of spell-worked stone. It was far up within the marble-lined chambers of those sky-bearing ziggurats, forever known to the good denizens of the isle-city as the Pillars of Atlantis, where these wise and very powerful metaphysicians endeavored to unravel the cosmic mysteries that might stay the violent talons of increscent evil which clawed toward supremacy, not only within the vast isle-city of Avalonum, but also within the towns and more diminutive cities of those other isles of Atlantis therewith.

And so it came to pass that the good brethren resolved, after three days and two nights of formal symposiums up within their marble-lined chambers in the sky, to revive the old, bygone tradition of a sacerdotal monarchy by the additis officiorum of a new priest-king of Atlantis from among high priests of the isle-realm. Ulpharothas was the name of the young man who they assigned----he who was coronated with much ceremony to be sure. However, this priest’s reign served more as a mere nostrum than aught else to offer up a greater sense of unity and order to those of the priestly councilium who were engaged in all the affairs of state during the intermittent absence of the Urthostean Brethren.

To the denizens of Avalonum an edictum echoed out from city orators upon street corners and within public squares, that this new priest-king would be coronated within the venerable Hall of Giants. Fabulous beyond all telling was this cathedral-sized throne-hall of the First World, a mighty hall indeed whose big, two-hundred-foot-high pillars of adamantine stone were richly adorned, all up and down, with thousands upon thousands of intricate and colorfully painted carvings. Moreover, adorned were the hall’s gigantic walls, here and yon, with vast and lofty murals which all depicted certain momentous events of the isle-realm----mythical and historic----from the million years which great Atlantis had known. And so it was that within that hallowed hall of eons Ulpharothas came to sit, after his elaborate coronation, upon the gem-encrusted seat of a line of Atlantean kings that stretched far, far back to the very dawn-days of great Atlantis----when gods from beyond the clouds of Heaven governed the land.

With all the majesty of one of the emperors of imperial times did Ulpharothas grace the high-backed throne of Atlantis, whose ornate splendor bedazzled the eye of the beholder for more than half a million years with the gleam of both scarlet and blue-green marble all marvelously adorned with a multitude of tiny carvings, a wealth of glittering gems, and gold tracery spiraling throughout. With his jewel-embroidered cape all a-flow about his person did this newly appointed king sit with well near divine glory upon that tall dream-throne of eons that twinkled, with all its many gems, like a million colorful stars. Yet notwithstanding the wisdom of this token king, neither he nor even the Urthosteans themselves could countervail in full all the deleterious acts of that dark cult of ever-conspiring metaphysicians whose power had been steadily gaining a measure of supremacy within the land, by-and-by.

And so it was, in the isle-realm of Atlantis, that within the fullness of time the sovereignty of the Urthostean Brethren seemed not as inexpugnable as it had been since this comitium of Mage Elite came to rule the land. Hence, it became a rather routine affair for the high priests of the great isle-city to prostrate themselves down before the gigantic feet of the roof-ramming statues of their chief deities----shiny colossi of black, green, and white marble----as these robed gentlemen of the temple called out desperate oratorum for salvation from the agentium of evil who were gaining power in Atlantis, day-by-day.

But grievously, the mortal pleas of the priests which echoed out within the mighty temples of Avalonum seemed to fall upon ears as deaf as those carved upon the enormous heads of those towering statues which rose with solemn majesty to the very roofs of the few temples still in use in an isle-city whose shining glory, by the days of Troltin the Wise, was but a distant glint of bygone things.

II

The Poet-Warrior

__________

As was stated within the exordium of our narratus, the Arcanum Resurrectus did speak of centers of civilization other than Atlantis which were of such early existence that their place in time grossly contradicts the so-called irrefragable theories regarding the origins of civilized Man. Truly, this was an ancient world far more ancient than the one in the history books here in the present time. Founded were these domains of lost antiquity by the old Atlanteans----they who, with aspirations to exploit all the raw materials of prehistoric Europa, came to colonize parts of that vast greatland when it was but an untamed wilderness of deep forests and grassy plains. There, back in those days long gone, was the dominium of the sabretooth lion, giant sloth, and the shaggy steppe-mastodon of the Age of Ice, as well as the diffused clans of bison and mastodon hunters who roamed in epic drifts from one hunting ground of migratory beasts to the next, during late Paleolithic times, in pursuit of game.

The epoch of our noble tale, as mentioned, are those dark days of an Atlantis in long decline; and again it was this isle-realm of those savage times, as well as those exceedingly few civilized cultures of prehistoric Europa, which comprised that lost civilization which the Arcanum Resurrectus oft referred to as the First World, and which, as said, was the remote inception of the world we know today. What has lingered on of the vanished lands of that early part of our world is but a mere wisp of a memory in the guise of myth; but it was writ that these bygone centers of civilization once laid near the original seacoasts of Europa as they were before the bleak glaciers of the Age of Ice began to melt and elevate the seas, thus inundating those realms of mislaid myth with ocean-water across vast gulfs of time.

To speak truth, if we of the present-day were to take a great step back across the eons we would see that in the days of our tale the map of Europa would have been different from what Mankind has known since time immemorial. To wit, before the complete melting of the northern glaciers of the Age of Ice which raised the level of the seas, the fair isles of old Britannia were not the familiar sea-girt bodies of land as they exist in the present time, but were, during those dim days long before history began, still part of a