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    Tomb of the Aeons
    Tomb of the Aeons
    Tomb of the Aeons
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    Tomb of the Aeons

    By John Houlihan

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    'The sands of the desert seem as unchanging as the aeons, but they constantly shift reform and remake themselves, so that one is always looking at a frozen moment in perpetual chaos.' - Kommander Siegfried
    It is 1941 and as Ernst Rommel, the Desert Fox, swings his great armoured right hook to send the British Eighth Army scurrying back toward Egypt, the crew of Ingrid, a mark IV panzer pursue a lone British tank into the deep wastes. But in the subsequent engagement they are ambushed and knocked out by another British tank's guns.
    When they awake hours later, Ingrid's commander Siegfried and his surviving crew begin the long weary trudge back to their own lines, but soon become lost in an unnatural sand storm which seems to blow up from nowhere. When they stumble upon a strange temple complex and find a unit of dead Black Sun SS, they are forced to penetrate deep into the heart of the unholy ziggurats and recover a lost artefact, the Fangs of Set, by their fellow captive, Captain Seraph. Will they defeat this charnel house's newly awoken inhabitants and can they survive the horror lurking at the very centre of this tomb of the aeons?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Houlihan
    Release dateJun 8, 2019
    ISBN9780463352960
    Tomb of the Aeons
    Author

    John Houlihan

    John Houlihan has been a writer, journalist and broadcaster for over twenty five years, working in news, sport and videogames. He has been employed by The Times, Sunday Times and Cricinfo and is the former Editor-in-Chief of Computer and Video Games.com. He currently works for Modiphius Entertainment as a narrative designer and editor, as well being a video game consultant and script writer.His first novel was Tom or The Peepers’ and Voyeurs’ Handbook and he has also written The Trellborg Monstrosities, The Crystal Void, Tomb of the Aeons and Before the Flood in his Seraph Chronicles series (also collected in Tales of the White Witchman: Volume One). The Trellborg Monstrosities is also a game scenario for Call of Cthulhu and Savage Worlds which is published by Modiphius. He is also the writer of the Achtung! Cthulhu: Tactics videogame.He has published The Cricket Dictionary, a modern guide to the words, phrases and sayings of the greatest of games and has also edited a collection of short stories called Dark Tales from the Secret War which is set in the Achtung! Cthulhu universe. Other work includes contributions to sci-fi anthologies like The Hotwells Horror & Other Stories and Flash - A Celebration of Short Fiction.Away from the written word he has an unnatural fondness for cricket, football, snowboarding, cycling, music, playing guitar and all forms of sci-fi, fantasy and horror. He has an unnatural dread about writing about himself in the third person and currently lives in his home town of Watford in the UK, because, well frankly, someone has to.For latest news and information see http://www.John-Houlihan.net or follow @johnh259 on Twitter

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      Book preview

      Tomb of the Aeons - John Houlihan

      John Houlihan has been a writer, journalist and broadcaster for over twenty five years, working in news, sport and especially videogames. He has been employed by The Times, Sunday Times and Cricinfo and is the former Editor-in-Chief of Computer and Video Games.com and Dragon+ the official Dungeons and Dragons magazine.

      His first novel was Tom or The Peepers' and Voyeurs' Handbook and he has also written The Trellborg Monstrosities and the further adventures of the mysterious Mister Seraph in The Crystal Void, Tomb of the Aeons and Before the Flood. The Trellborg Monstrosities has also been converted into a game scenario for Call of Cthulhu and Savage Worlds.

      He has also written two entries in The d’Bois Escapades series The Crystal Void (Illustrated Version) and Feast of the Dead, Cthulhu-inspired high adventure during the age of Napoleon. He has also edited a collection of short stories called Dark Tales from the Secret War, and published The Cricket Dictionary, a collection of phrases and sayings from the greatest of all games.

      Away from the written word he has an unnatural fondness for cricket, football, snowboarding, cycling, music, playing guitar and all forms of sci-fi, fantasy and horror. He has an unnatural dread about writing about himself in the third person and currently lives in his home town of Watford in the UK, because, well frankly, someone has to.

      For latest news and information see http://www.John-Houlihan.net or follow @johnh259 on Twitter

      Cover Illustration by Borja Pindado who is a freelance illustrator living in Madrid with his wife and his daughter. He spends most of his time drawing on his computer fantasy art and comics, drinking coca-cola, listening to music and, from time to time, collaborating with other artists.

      Cover Design and typography by Mark Mitchell who is a graphic Designer and Illustrator based in London.

      Also by John Houlihan

      Tom or the Peepers' and Voyeurs' Handbook

      The Seraph Chronicles

      The Trellborg Monstrosities

      The Crystal Void

      Tomb of the Aeons

      Before the Flood

      The Seraph Chronicles Volume One: Tales of the White Witchman

      Dark Tales from the Secret War (as Editor)

      The d’Bois Escapades

      The Crystal Void (Illustrated Version)

      Feast of the Dead

      The d’Bois Escapades Volume 1

      The Cricket Dictionary

      Tomb of the Aeons is copyright © 2013 JOHN HOULIHAN

      Published by Jolly Big Publishing

      All rights reserved.

      Written by JOHN HOULIHAN

      All rights reserved, no reproduction in any form or media without written permission please (it'll usually be forthcoming for polite requests via the website). Remember copyright and digital theft robs artists of a chance to earn their livelihood, support them by being proud to buy! Especially if you want to read any sequels.

      This is a work of fiction, any resemblance to any person living or dead is entirely coincidental. John Houlihan is the author of this work of fiction.

      For Paul, Matt and Jon, the best of friends

      Special thanks to Patrick Kraft

      Tomb of the Aeons

      By

      John Houlihan

      The Great Waste

      At first the great dunes seem as unchanging as the aeons, yet one soon learns they are not fixed things, but as mutable and storm-ridden as the ocean. The sands constantly shift, reforming and remaking themselves under the influence of the wind and the baleful gaze of the sun, so that one is always looking at a frozen moment in perpetual chaos.

      A difficult thing at first for a simple panzer commander to understand and so different from what we had experienced just the year before. Then, the dappled green forests, meadows and lush farmland had formed our autobahn, as France fell in little over a month, yielding to a combination of armoured Blitzkrieg and her own complacency.

      Here the heat parches, burns, withering mind and flesh and we are steel ships sailing over a barren ocean. The Arabs say water is life itself, but here fuel, fuel is even more precious, the lifeblood of our panzers, the only means to seek sanctuary from the relentless boiling fury above.

      Forgive me, I ramble, but I have seen such things this night, terrible things, things that no sane mind should have to witness and now I struggle to find meaning. Before the war I was a poet and used to have all the words that I ever needed, but the Fatherland has no use for poets any more, only killers.

      You say I am a prisoner of war now and I believe and accept it gentlemen, but forgive me, this is not how one should begin a proper military report. Let me start again from the very beginning. Forgive any minor lapses in my poor English, but I will try to order my thoughts as best I can, so that you may understand how it all came to pass. Then you may judge the degree of my sanity …or its lack for yourself.

      It is March 1941 and after our triumphs of the previous year, the war is entering a new phase and being fought on a new front, the desert wastes of North Africa. During Weihnachten or Christmas of the previous year, the British had chased our unfortunate Italian allies all the way back into Libya sending them packing with their tails between their legs, destroying and capturing an entire army group. Following this humiliation, it was decided to reinforce the front and we, veterans of the Third Panzers, were dispatched to shore up the leaky Italian defences. We were given a new mission and a new name, the 5th Light Division, or as history will always know us from this moment onwards, the Afrika Korps.

      Our journey began inauspiciously, for those who believe in such things, for just before we embarked from Naples the transport Leverkusen caught fire at anchor, spilling men and armour into the ocean and we lost a number of our force before a single shot had been fired. Nor was the crossing the smoothest of journeys. The Mediterranean was unseasonably choppy, British planes from Malta harried and harassed our convoy and our travelling companions, a unit of SS with a strange radial-flashed insignia made my men distinctly uneasy.

      Yet in February we finally landed at Tripoli and felt the heat and dust of the dark continent for the first time. It was stifling and oppressive but we were willing, eager, to test ourselves against the British and their colonial allies. For we had a new commander too, Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel formerly of the 7th panzers, a bold and daring leader who the men are already calling Der Wüstenfuchs - the Desert Fox.

      I believe our original orders were simply to hold the line, but the Desert Fox is a hunter, a formidable predator and we immediately went on the offensive, bursting out from El Agheila, giving you British, how you say, 'a bloody nose' and putting you in full flight back towards the Egyptian border. I had heard on the radio that a small pocket of resistance was still holding out at Tobruk but we were part of the vanguard and had already pushed far beyond that, in the forefront of Rommel’s great right hook from the wastes which outflanked your valiant Tommies.

      Oh but these are the finest of days to be a panzer soldier, your tracks roll across the open desert, driver, gunner and loader working in perfect harmony as you designate the target, engage the enemy and watch as they ‘brew up’—as I believe you say—one by one. There is a poetry, something glorious to it at the

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