Conan the Unconquered
Conan the Triumphant
Conan the Magnificent
Conan the Destroyer
Conan the Victorious
The Conan Chronicles
The Further Chronicles of Conan
ROBERT JORDAN WRITING AS REAGAN O’NEAL
These gripping tales of love and bravery in America’s tumultuous past chronicle the lives of the Fallon men as they encounter adventure, forbidden love, and history.
The Fallon Blood
The Fallon Pride
The Fallon Legacy
ROBERT JORDAN WRITING AS JACKSON O’REILLY
Cheyenne Raiders
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CONAN THE INDESTRUCTIBLE
The greatest hero of the magic-rife Hyborian Age was a northern barbarian, Conan the Cimmerian, about whose deeds a cycle of legend revolves. While these legends are largely based on the attested facts of Conan’s life, some tales are inconsistent with others. So we must reconcile the contradictions in the saga as best we can.
In Conan’s veins flowed the blood of the people of Atlantis, the brilliant city-state swallowed by the sea 8,000 years before his time. He was born into a clan that claimed a homeland in the northwest corner of Cimmeria, along the shadowy borders of Vanaheim and the Pictish wilderness. His grandfather had fled his own people because of a blood feud and sought refuge with the people of the North. Conan himself first saw daylight on a battlefield during a raid by the Vanir.
Before he had weathered fifteen snows, the young Cimmerian’s fighting skills were acclaimed around the council fires. In that year the Cimmerians, usually at one another’s throats, joined forces to repel the warlike Gundermen who, intent on colonizing southern Cimmeria, had pushed across the Aquilonian border and established the frontier post of Venarium. Conan joined the howling, blood-mad horde that swept out of the northern hills, stormed over the stockade walls, and drove the Aquilonians back across their frontier.
At the sack of Venarium, Conan, still short of his full growth, stood six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds. He had the vigilance and stealth of the born woodsman, the iron-hardness of the mountain man, and the Herculean physique of his blacksmith father. After the plunder of the Aquilonian outpost, Conan returned for a time to his tribe.
Restless under the conflicting passions of his adolescence, Conan spent several months with a band of Æsir as they raided the Vanir and the Hyperboreans. He soon learned that some Hyperborean citadels were ruled by a caste of widely-feared magicians, called Witchmen. Undaunted, he took part in a foray against Haloga Castle, when he found that Hyperborean slavers had captured Rann, the daughter of Njal, chief of the Æsir band.
Conan gained entrance to the castle and spirited out Rann Njalsdatter; but on the flight out of Hyperborea, Njal’s band was overtaken by an army of living dead. Conan and the other Æsir survivors were led away to slavery (“Legions of the Dead”).
Conan did not long remain a captive. Working at night, he ground away at one link of his chain until it was weak enough to break. Then one stormy night, whirling a four-foot length of heavy chain, he fought his way out of the slave pen and vanished into the downpour.
Another account of Conan’s early years tells a different tale. This narrative, on a badly broken clay prism from Nippur, states that Conan was enslaved as a boy of ten or twelve by Vanir raiders and set to work turning a grist mill. When he reached his full growth, he was bought by a Hyrkanian pitmaster who traveled with a band of professional fighters staging contests for the amusement of the Vanir and Æsir. At this time Conan received his training with weapons. Later he escaped and made his way south to Zamora (Conan the Barbarian).
Of the two versions, the records of Conan’s enslavement by the Hyrkanians at sixteen, found in a papyrus in the British Museum, appear much more legible and self-consistent. But this question may never be settled.
Although free, the youth found himself half a hostile kingdom away from home.
Instinctively he fled into the mountains at the southern extremity of Hyperborea. Pursued by a pack of wolves, he took refuge in a cave. Here he discovered the seated mummy of a gigantic chieftain of ancient times, with a heavy bronze sword across its knees. When Conan seized the sword, the corpse arose and attacked him (“The Thing in the Crypt”).
Continuing southward into Zamora, Conan came to Arenjun, the notorious “City of Thieves.” Green to civilization and, save for some rudimentary barbaric ideas of honor and chivalry, wholly lawless by nature, he carved a niche for himself as a professional thief.
Being young and more daring than adroit, Conan’s progress in his new profession was slow until he joined forces with Taurus of Nemedia in a quest for the fabulous jewel called the “Heart of the Elephant.” The gem lay in the almost impregnable tower of the infamous mage Yara, captor of the extraterrestrial being Yag-Kosha (“The Tower of the Elephant”).