The Black Flame

In the ancient days, before the desert came, there stood the empire of Kithara, where obsidian towers rose beside the lost Sea of Xis. It was a place of learning and knowledge, of lost sorcery and the wisdom of gods now forgotten. Over it all ruled the royal bloodline of the Mutarai, descended from the race of giants who brought civilization out of the sea before the memory of man.

The greatest ruler of the lost empire was Amezalan the Wise, and he had three sons. Two were born of his queen, and the third by his sorceress concubine. The eldest son was Siduh, who grew to be a man of great learning; the second was Eshuh, the warrior; and the last was Utuzan, born of a darker bloodline, and he became a worker of magic like his mother.

Then the emperor was slain, and strife tore the land apart. Utuzan rose against his brothers, and there was war in the ancient world. Armies marched, rivers flooded, and cities burned. At the end, the dark prince was cast down and bound with forgotten magics. He swore he would return to have his vengeance, but he was sealed away for all time.

Ages passed, and the empire wore away beneath the coming of the desert. The Sea of Xis withered and vanished, and the once-great cities of Kithara became ruins in a desolate wasteland. The descendants of the people went north and built a new civilization in the river-valleys and on the coastlands. A thousand years passed, and then two, and then three. Until Kithara was only a name whispered in legends, and the Dark Prince Utuzan a fable.

Peoples have risen and fallen, kingdoms been born and destroyed, and the very face of the world has changed. Now, in a dangerous time when empires clash, the Dark One will be freed from his imprisonment. Now kingdoms undreamed when he was sealed away will learn to tremble at his name. After aeons of waiting, he will have his throne, and a new world will learn to fear the power of Prince Utuzan, the Chosen of Anatu, The Black Flame.

Annnnnd here's the teaser for next year's story.  So many times in Sword & Sorcery the villain is an ancient wizard conjured up from the past to wreak havoc.  This time, I'm going to make one the hero.  I think it's going to be a good time.

Pathfinder

This is almost undoubtedly the movie that got director Marcus Nispel the gig to helm the 2011 Conan reboot that failed so miserably. Nominally a remake of a 1987 Finnish film of the same name, it is actually almost a completely different movie save for some elements of the basic setup. With a strong cast including Karl Urban, Clancy Brown, Moon Bloodgood and Russel Means, this had all the pieces to be a solid mid-budget action film, and yet it somehow fails to come together.

Karl Urban plays Ghost, a man who was marooned as a child on the shores of North America by a Viking ship and then left to be raised by the Native Americans who found him. Despite having lived among the natives, he is still held as an outcast by some of his tribe. Once he has grown to adulthood, more Vikings turn up, led by the villainous Clancy Brown as Gunnar, and Ghost has to use his knowledge of his former people to defend the Native Americans from the savage raiders.

It’s a bloody film if you get the unrated version, though the theatrical release was cut down for some unknown reason. There are impalements, severed heads, stabbings and spilled entrails left and right. All the blood and gore is, refreshingly, practical, rather than painted on splashes of CGI red. People are shot with arrows, hacked up with swords and axes, skewered on sharp stakes, and burned alive.

Nispel is doing his best work here as a director, and that means he gets some really gorgeous shots. They filmed in British Columbia, and took great advantage of the snow-covered, mountainous vistas all around. Nispel has a great eye for composition, and he uses light and color to make really dramatic images. True, he abuses the digital color correction pretty shamelessly, but it was 2007, everybody was doing that.

As a historical effort, the movie is a disaster. True, we know that the Vikings visited North America long before the age of exploration, and that they did battle with the people they called “skraelings”, but we have no evidence that their entry into the New World was with violent or rapacious intent. In fact, Viking raiders would never have voyaged to the Americas when richer targets were much closer to home. Explorers and colonists traveled to Greenland and later Newfoundland, not reavers.

The look of the Vikings in the movie is simultaneously outlandish and awesome. Vikings never wore horned helmets, nor did they wear plate armor. The Norsemen in Pathfinder are made into almost inhuman monsters by their design, as if the director held up a print of Frazetta’s Death Dealer and said “make it like this”. They wear horned helmets with goggles that cover their eyes, so all you see of most of them is a demonic helmet, a huge beard, and teeth. The actors apparently wore football pads under their costumes to make their armored shoulders look huge and intimidating. The swords and axes look entirely fanciful, and spiked flails are used prominently, when such weapons were never used by Vikings and in fact may not have existed at all.

I would be interested to see a Native take on the Amerindian people in this movie, as they pretty much just seem like standard white stereotypes. (The screenwriter, Laeta Kalogridis, is of Greek ancestry) The movie does get points for casting actual native actors and actresses, though the great Russel Means is criminally underused.

Most of the problem is that Nispel, as a director, is not good at building or maintaining tension. The movie is slow to start, and proceeds at a lumpy, uneven pace throughout. He often uses slow-mo just to highlight a cool image, but then the image doesn’t mean anything – it just looks good. The action scenes are poorly planned-out, as the layout of the physical space is unclear, and the number and disposition of enemies is not given, so the battles have no shape to them. You need to know how many bad guys there are, you need to know what each side is trying to do and what happens if they win or lose, otherwise your action scenes have no shape and just go on until they arbitrarily stop.

The themes of savage peoples battling each other in a harsh landscape is very Sword & Sorcery, and Ghost stands out as a good basis for an S&S hero, even if he never really seems to step up and catch fire. The characterization in the movie is generally weak, and that makes the whole thing also seem unimportant. This had all the elements to make a good movie, but despite some good bits in the action scenes and some beautiful cinematography, it remains strangely unengaging.

The Voice From the Deep

Shath sat on the ember throne and brooded on his fate, and the war that was not yet over. The great hall was silent, for his barbarian warriors were still out in the city, gathering their dead and slaying the last of their enemies. It would be days before they had hunted out the last remnants of the legions and piled their heads into great towers. In time they would decorate the walls of the city with the skulls as a reminder to all who would think to set themselves against the new emperor.

He looked up as a shadow flitted high in the towering columns, and he watched with pleasure as Ellai flew on her delicate wings among the great pillars, gliding with grace and a lightness that made her seem weightless. Her silken robes and veil billowed like colored fire in her wake, as light as she, and then she spiraled down, easy as a fallen leaf, and touched the floor with no more sound than a breath.

She came to him and he held out his hand, embraced her when she came close. Shath had never sired a child of his own kind, and he doubted he ever would. But this small child of the wilderness was as beloved to him as a child of his own blood.

“The battle is done,” she said in her small voice, relieved and weary. “I hope you shall never again have to preside over such destruction.”

“As do I,” he said. “In my youth I sought a great battle, a battle that all men would tell tales of and bow their heads in reverence at the carnage and the terror of it. Now I have fought such a battle, and I will be content if I never see one to equal it.”

“And yet you are not content. I can feel that within you,” she said. She touched his face, her small hand on his rough-hewn cheek.

“Kurux escaped me, at the end,” he said. “The power that sustained him, that rose him up, took him away at the end, and I cannot allow that to endure.”

“No,” she said. “No you cannot.”

“Can you tell me where he is? Help me, as you have so many times. Guide me.” He held her hand. “I could not have reached this throne without you.”

“You could have taken a throne,” she said. “But I would have you be a great emperor, not simply another murderous tyrant. I would have you become wise, now that you have conquered.” She closed her eyes. “I do not need to seek him. He is known to me. I know he has gone into the darkness, and it waits there. It is a power you must destroy, yet I do not know if you can.”

“Tell me,” he said.