This audio novella is one of the first in the Argan the Warrior series. Originally written in 2021 for an anthology titled Legends of the Werewolf Hunter it was republished here on substack in text format in 2023 with the audio added for subscribers the following year. Now the audio version comes to you via this podcast, the first few minutes are available to all comers, but the whole story is only for subscribers.
Follow Argan as he serves the mighty Nimrod, the first emperor in recorded history, more well known as Sargon the Great. Argan knows what it is to be an emperor, for long before the historical records discovered in this second age of men, he ruled the entire world, even if only for a season.
Condemned to hunt down and destroy the Nephilim he created in the days before the Flood that wiped his civilisation from the earth. He created those soulless beasts to be the perfect warriors to advance his kingdom, demi-gods under his personal control. But their creators soon realized their error, at the same time the superhuman monsters realised their own power. Edged on by dark forces beyond Argan’s authority, the Nephilim began to see humanity as little more than cattle, food even.
Argan’s wickedness and greed for power only increased, murder, lying, rape, torture…nothing was too much for him. And then his evil boiled over the limits set by the Creator and the curse was placed on Argan. To die and be resurrected over and over until all of the Nephilim were destroyed. He was killed not long after, only to rise back up and walk back into the palace, his wounds healed, and his body again strong. He laughed at the Archangel that delivered the curse to him, mocked the Creator.
“What kind of a curse is it that gives the accursed immortality!”
And that was what he thought it was, at first.
With a final victory that eradicated the last mortal forces loyal to the Creator, Argan cinched his rule on earth, anticipating to maintain a human empire into which the Creator could no longer reach, for there were none to pray to call him down. Argan had created a world where science ruled and the gods stood beside men. A place where mankind not only chose his own path, but defined his own immortality.
And then the world exploded, literally. Unable to withstand the strain of constant abuse forced through its veins, the ground ruptured spewing massive columns of mud and water and steam and magma miles into the sky. The sky shield cracked and the great protective dome of water vapor lost its cohesion, loosing torrents of rain sufficient to refill oceans in a constant deluge. Between the water from below and the water from above every tall mountain vanished beneath the salty seas. And everything that had the Breath of Life within died.
Argan died again, but this time he awoke to his curse. Alone on earth so it seemed, except for the Nephilim monsters who had survived the flood. For unlike mortal humans, Nephilim are not imbued with the Breath of Life. Once his “children” realized his curse brought him back to the mortal world for them to kill again, they stalked him without mercy.
In time Argan learned that he was not truly alone on earth. After more than a century of hunting, killing, and being killed he discovered that one family, eight humans, and a minimal collection of all the assorted beasts and birds, were safeguarded in a nightmare of shattering earth, tossing waves and water from both the sky above and caverns below. By the time he encountered them, their numbers had grown to thousands, and by the time Noah’s great-grandchildren were running the show the population had exponentially grown to hundreds of thousands and soon to millions.
It was among those early generations, their elders still having vivid memories of sitting at Noah’s knees and the knees of his sons, to learn of the world before, mist-shrouded memories of old men’s tales that became the legends and mythologies of the world to come.
In this broken world of new things, where nothing worked as it did before, where men were relegated to only a tenth of the average lifespan of men of the first age, Argan had no power but that which was given to fulfill the end of the curse: to locate (or be located by) the Nephilim monsters and to kill them, no matter how many deaths he had to die.
In this story Argan, a warrior skilled beyond the imaginations of modern men, awoke to this new life several years before the tale of the Shadow of the Bastard King opens. He became a warrior in Sargon the Bastard’s personal guard, soon being elevated to Captain of the Shadows, commanding the elite of the elite in Mesopotamia.
Follow Argan the Warrior as hell ascends to consume the Shadow of the Bastard King.
