A little late, a 120th Birthday post for the spirit of Robert E. Howard.

“Isle of the Ghost Panthers”.

The salt-stained air of Illmort was thick with a miasma that clung to sea-wracked stone and bone. Ragnar stood on that desolate strand, his great leathern boots sinking firmly down into the sands. He hefted the Axe of the Shining One above his tousled head, its haft worn smooth by generations of his warriors’ hands, its metal crafted of an unyielding steel that now drank in the meager moonlight. The relentless tide seemed a living thing, a monster with a thousand mouths that gurgled and hissed as it slithered up the beach, devouring all before it.

Ragnar recalled the incantation, learned from his grandfather while still a boy. Then the words flowed from him like poison from a fang, each syllable dripping with ancient authority. Slowly, coalescing from the air and sea-spray, the incantation’s ghost panthers took shape before him, phantoms woven from an ancient nightmare and despair, their bodies impossibly sleek and muscular, rippling with an otherworldly energy. Their eyes sprang as if into life, and burned as they turned their fearsome heads to fix on him.

Then, one by one, the panthers slowly lowered their eyes, and seemed to promise him absolute obedience. The beasts were his now, so the incantation said, extensions of his own will while it held. They would not fail him, for he was Ragnar of the Iron Hand and the Shattered Chains and his will was strong.

As the black tide surged in with terrifying speed, its roaring voice became a stark counterpoint to the sighing winds. His goal was ahead, across the water — the Tower of the Invisible Moon, a dark and sea-worn spike carved not from sea-basalt but from solidified nightmare. Perched atop it, sometimes lost in swirling fog and shadow, waited whatever eldritch thing that had called him to fulfill his ancestral destiny.

With a mingled roar of human and beasts that echoed across the sea-waste, Ragnar and his gliding ghost-beasts raced toward a narrow raised causeway of black rock. The tide was rapidly flooding it. The sinews in the phantom limbs strained with impossible speed, but Ragnar’s mighty limbs outpaced them. Through the flooding waves they surged into the dark, toward the promise that lay ahead — the pinnacle where his axe might finally meet its destined purpose.