Introduction - Kyrik Warlock Warrior by Gardner Fox

1975 Genre: Vintage Paperback / Sword and Sorcery

KYRIK THE MIGHTY:

Kyrik the mighty-muscled warlock swordsman is a hero for this or any other age. From Mankind's darkest and most unremembered past he comes striding, the ever-unvanquished sword Blue Fang glittering in his granite-like hand. Through the mists of Man's pre-history he comes a-questing for those who would enslave or destroy him for their evil gain. The greatest champion of all the known world, from the Endless Green Sea to the Red Desert, Kyrik dominated his world and his era.

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Introduction

In the old legends and the almost forgotten folklore of mankind, it is said by men who claim to know that there were other men on this our Earth of which no written record remains. These men, lost in the mists of Time though they are, yet remain our ancestors.

Wise men often speak of cycles of civilization, in which men and nations rise and fall into oblivion, of catastrophes from space which have devastated our planet, of ice ages, of fallen moons and other destructive influences that come and go, wiping out all evidence of those past eons. From time to time, slight traces of those past civilizations have been found by us, and are thought to be no more than an interesting, mysterious artifact which, embarrasses the scientists and the historians.

For those who doubt, I call attention to the Piri Reis maps, which use Cairo as a projection point and which show our world perfectly, as though mapped out from an aerial photograph by an airplane or a satellite. They show the continent of Antarctica as though it were not hidden by uncounted tons of snow and ice. Our own scientists have only discovered this continent's outlines very recently, by sonic probings beneath the ice. Piri Reis lived in the eighteenth century. He did not make them. From whence did he get them? Who took the aerial photographs from which those maps were made? As far as our written records go, it was not until this century that we had airplanes or satellites that could make such photographs.

Ancient records say man has been visited from space by other intelligent beings. Possibly mankind itself had space travel long and long ago. There is a plain called Nazca in Peru, which some say was a vast landing field for spaceships, with giant markers to show its direction to any spaceships entering our atmosphere. Men also say that the "terrace" at Baalbek is also a landing field for spaceships.

Examine also, if you will, the idol of Tiahuanaco, that shows the exact position of the stars as they were—27,000 years ago. According to our beliefs, there were only cavemen around at such a remote period in Time. Was that idol made by those members of an extinct Terran civilization that perished in some planet-wide war or other disaster?

There was a giant race of men who lived on Earth in the dim past. They are mentioned in the Bible. They are mentioned also in Indian and native folklore that calls them "gods", that says they taught many things to the race of ordinary men who lived on Earth in those days.

I call your attention to the antique electric battery—nobody knows where it came from, but it is very old—now to be seen in the Baghdad museum. Plato spoke of a vast continent on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Plato lived some centuries before Christ, and Columbus did not discover America until the last few years of the fifteenth century. Where did Plato derive his knowledge of North and South America?

All these are but a smattering of mysteries we cannot answer. Yet they postulate the fact that at one time, there were other high civilizations upon the face of the Earth. They have no names, they leave no traces behind, or if they do, they are such traces that must remain forever inexplicable.

I suggest also that here and there on our world—in Death Valley, in the ruins of Khara Khota in the Gobi Desert—there are evidences of a titanic destructive power used to obliterate whatever was below it. An atom bomb out of the unknowable, far-distant past? A bomb which helped, along with the glaciers of the ice ages, earthquakes, even the turning of the Earth upon its axis, which changed the then tropical regions into what we know today as the arctic and the antarctic, to bury out of sight the remains of mystical kingdoms and faraway lands. I think of Atlantis, a memory from those olden times, which was destroyed in a single day and a night. Were there many Atlantises blotted out by past cataclysms?

Atlantis is only a name for the forgotten memories of mankind. Perhaps Lemuria is such another name, and Gondwanaland, Masma, Pohjola, Aluminor, as well. Bolivian legends have it that there were very ancient civilizations, and that they were destroyed in a battle with a non-human race of beings. The animal-headed gods of ancient Egypt? Is the Biblical story of Michael battling the fallen angels a race memory of this encounter? There is no proof, it becomes only an exercise of the imagination.

Fulcanelli says alchemy is the link between those very old and now forgotten civilizations and our own. The Eskimos have legends that claim they were brought to the far north in flying machines. The Popul Vuh also tells us about a very ancient civilization, as do other writings no one pays any attention to, any more.

I think that there is truth where there is legend, as Schliemann proved at Troy. I think that there were other civilizations, long forgotten by mankind, that exist only in our myths.

It is of those other times and other lands I would write, of a barbaric period before the rise of a high civilization—perhaps the very one that took the photographs which served as a model for the Piri Reis maps. Their times were not as ours, they could work magic and wizardry, the art, now since lost, that gave certain members of their society the power of mind over matter.

Kyrik lived in that world. He was a warlock as well as a warrior, in that Time before the first Ice Age and while two moons were in the sky. Later one of those moons was to crumble and form a Saturnian ring to shut off sunlight and so bring that first Ice Age, but when Kyrik lived, that future was not known.

The seven seas may have been four in number, or ten, when he was wenching and looting, raising up kingdoms and toppling them. Even the shapes of the continents were not as ours, as suggested by the Continental Drift theory, and demonolotry and sorcery were living things, as science is today.

Kyrik was a king and a barbarian, as well as warlock and warrior. This is his story. Or at least, a beginning to it, for much is to be told of Kyrik and his world, of the men he fought and the women he loved, of the mysteries and wonders of the lands where he rode his black stallion, and wielded his sword, Bluefang. You will find mention also of Illis, that lovely demon-goddess whom he loved and worshiped, and who took a very personal interest in his affairs.

It happened a very long time ago, in a world that has been forgotten. And now to Kyrik—of the Victories.

-Gardner F. Fox

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