Chapter 1: The Birth
The heat was a leaden cloak over the stinking alleyways of Shadizar. In the pleasure district, where cheap incense failed to mask the smell of sweat, spilled wine, and misery, a woman groaned in the darkness of a sordid room.
Her name was Lyra. Her hair, once a flaming copper, was now dull and stuck to her temples with effort. Her hands, fingers worn by thankless tasks and forced caresses, clenched the grimy sheet. The midwife, an old woman whose face was weathered by the city's vices, muttered incantations as she wiped the laboring woman's brow with a rag.
"Push, girl! Expel this bastard! He's not the first, he won't be the last."
Lyra gritted her teeth, a raw sob escaping her. This one was not like the others. She remembered the man, from that night nine moons ago. A giant with black hair and eyes of steely blue, marked by scars, carrying the wild scent of blood and distant steppes. He had entered the tavern like a silent, devastating storm. He had paid for his wine, and he had looked at her with an intensity that pierced the shell of indifference she had built. He hadn't treated her like a piece of meat, but with a form of wild, animal respect. Conan. He said his name was Conan the Cimmerian.
Then he had left, swallowed by the darkness and his endless quests.
And she had stayed, with her swelling belly, carrying within her a piece of that brute strength.
"Now!" screamed the midwife.
With a final cry, Lyra pushed, feeling life detach from her in a flood of pain and blood. The cry that followed was not the weak whimper of a sickly newborn. It was a roar, brief and piercing, charged with an almost violent vitality.
The midwife, grabbing the baby, laid him on his mother's stomach. Her eyes widened.
"By the black gods of Stygia… look at him."
Lyra, exhausted, turned her head. Her breath caught in her throat. The child was broad-shouldered, his little fists already clenched as if he wanted to fight the world welcoming him. But that wasn't all. As she laid a trembling hand on his chest to calm him, she felt beneath her fingers an unusual warmth, a barely perceptible vibration, like a fire smoldering under the skin. And his eyes… They weren't the milky blue of most newborns. They were a clear, piercing gray, and they seemed to already see.
"He has his father's eyes," she whispered, a salty tear tracing a path to her lip.
She couldn't have known how right she was. For at that very moment, in another reality, a world of humming metal and artificial lights, an ordinary forty-year-old man named Marc was drawing his last breath.
Marc. Dull forty-something, a thankless desk job, a life of routines and silent regrets. His only escape was old heroic fantasy books, tales of forgotten worlds where heroes were hewn from granite and blood. He knew Conan. He had devoured the stories of Robert E. Howard, dreaming of the vertiginous towers of Zamora and the burning deserts of Khitai. As a searing pain crushed his chest, a sudden heart attack in his modest apartment, his last thought wasn't for his failed life, but for a verse heard in a film: "That which does not kill us makes us stronger."
He didn't know how literal that transfer, that metamorphosis, would be.
Marc's consciousness faded in one world only to reignite in another, compressed, reformatted, fused with the raw, pristine essence of a Hyborian newborn. There were no clear memories, no voice in his head. Only a primal instinct multiplied, a sensation of latent power that made his small limbs tremble.
He felt the warmth of his mother's body, a scent of life, fatigue, and desperate love that tickled his nostrils with supernatural acuity. He heard the rapid beat of her heart, a frantic drum that echoed louder than the street noises. The dark room appeared to him with stunning clarity, every detail, every straw of the pallet, every imperfection on the old woman's face, etched into his perception.
Lyra held him close, ignoring the fear his son's intense gaze inspired in her. A new determination was born in her, fierce and protective.
"No one will take you," she whispered against his small forehead. "No one. I will protect you. You will live. You will be strong."
The child, in response, weakly gripped her finger. The pressure was astonishing for a newborn. Lyra saw it as a sign of courage.
She didn't know that the strength already flowing in her son's veins was not only the Cimmerian blood of his father. It was the legacy of a hunter from another world, a man named Kraven, whose essence, the superhuman abilities forged by mystical potions—strength, speed, heightened senses, longevity—and the tactical mind of a born predator, had crossed the veil of realities to graft itself onto the fused soul of Marc and Conan's child.
He would not possess these powers all at once. They would grow with him, reveal themselves in play, fear, and anger. Like a seed waiting for the right moment to germinate.
For now, he was just a baby with eyes too old, nestled against the breast of his prostitute mother, in the most corrupt city of the known world. The son of Conan. The last hunter.
And his story had only just begun.