Inspiring Illustrations - A Crown of Snakes and Flowers

NOTE: These are adventure seeds and setting work for my own Hyperborea campaign inspired by the Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerors of Hyperborea Gazetteer.

20). A Crown of Snakes and Flowers

When the doom finally came upon the great city of Kor the King was lost, his body and the crown of Kor never found. It is said that the nameless beast, which no power seemed able to stop, slew the king and consumed his body leaving only a bloody bag of flesh behind, but there are rumors that the king escaped through tunnels beneath the city which led beyond the walls into the dense surrounding forest.

Escaped or slain, he was never seen again but within the forest of Koth (called Trogos by the native tribes of ape-men and fish-eyed troglodytes) the crown of Kor, adorning a worn and ancient skull, has been described as the center of an inhuman and barbaric shrine. The crown is of reddish gold formed into bands of snakes and flowers, and so the shrine is a strangely bright affair of flowers laid in offering while snakes writhe about the rotting bodies and man and beast beneath their floral coat.

Tribes of the frog-like reptilian trogs surround the shrine, and their fondness for snakes has led them to cultivate true monstrosities as pets. What other relics of mighty Kor may be found if this truly be the lost crown, and are the worn bones and fleshless skull the pitiful remnants of its once powerful king?   

Inspiring Illustrations - The Harvester of Kor

15). The Harvester of Kor

Kor, magnificent Kor, vast and ancient Kor, capital of old Hyperborea. Ruined Kor, infested with semi-intelligent man-apes of Hyperborea like worms in a carcase festering in the sun. Kor of towers that scrape the clouds, of magic that lifted men to the sky and touched the moon, Kor of dark-despair and haunted madness. Kor that was, whose foundations are of emerald that cannot be cut or shaped by any means that man can bring to bear. Kor with doorways that cannot be opened, wickedly curved and shaped, squat and peaked for the entrance of beings that were never human.

A monster came to Kor that could not be named. It ate the souls of men, and their hearts, licked clean their bones, and left a bloody pile of empty skin behind. The armsmen of Kor, with their armor of diamond that could not be pierced, their golden bracers that gave them the strength of ten, their curved blades of blended steel that would cleave shields in a single stroke, these heroic men fell one by one to the nameless beast that stalked by day and at night breathed out its fetid nightmares through the streets of the ancient city.

And Kor died, its people fled, its king's flesh hung from the gates of his palace like a flag, an empty sack that screamed from a hollow mouth. The high-priest of Kor whose Gods are forgotten burnt himself alive on a pyre of sacred tomes and cried aloud for vengeance even as the fire ate his flesh and burned his name from the knowledge of men.

When his ashes were long cold and scattered by the winds which played joyfully among the empty streets of Kor the Harvester came down from the dark between the stars. In the shape of a man he met the nameless beast and chased it deep beneath the dungeons of the city. Tied to this earth for an aeon which to him is the single beat of his heart, he walks the streets of Kor.  It is he who opens forbidden doors, he who takes his tithe of blood from among the beast-men, he who they fear beyond their own  Xathoqqua, and he who awaits to find again the hidden nameless thing and fulfill his oath so one day he can again return to his cold and distant home in the darkness of the sky.