To Rescue Tanelorn Read Free

of Chaos by the likes of Elric and his kind. Some readers weren’t too happy about my writing what was, after all, primarily a humorous story, but it seemed to me that there was a chance to offer an aspect of Elric which was not one of unrelieved gloom! There’s always a danger, as one’s work grows in popularity, of taking oneself too seriously. That’s why from time to time it’s worth writing a bit of self-parody like “The Stone Thing,” which I originally wrote for a friend of mine Eric Bentcliffe, who put out some very funny fanzines a few years ago.
    The Jade Man’s Eyes
was done for my friend Bill Butler, a bookseller and poet who also published a number of offbeat books from his shop in Brighton. Most of the books he published were typically done for love rather than profit and, since he was an Elric fan, this was one of several projects I did with him in the hope of making him a little money! Sadly, he died in 1977, and I wrote a rock song about him (since he had always wanted me to write a rock song about him) called “The Great Sun Jester,” which was recorded a year or two after his death by Blue Öyster Cult (who also did a version of an Elric song, “Black Blade”).
    In the early 1990s Ed Kramer proposed an anthology of Elric stories written by other hands, such as Neil Gaiman, Tad Williams and Karl Edward Wagner. I wrote “The Black Blade’s Song,” published as “The White Wolf’s Song,” for this, linking it into my stories of the moonbeam roads and the Second Ether, while the story I did for the anthology’s sequel, “Sir Milk-and-Blood,” takes Elric into the sequence of modern-dress stories I wrote which links him back to Monsieur Zenith, who originally inspired him. I wrote “Crimson Eyes,” for instance, for the
New Statesman
’s special Christmas issue, and Elric/Zenith’s other adventures in conflict with
The Metatemporal Detective
have recently been published in the volume of that name. I wanted to bring my hero back to his origins in homage to the stories which originally excited me as a boy.
    There is one further homage here. Because Rackhir was in this volume, it seemed reasonable to include a fairly recent story concerning him. I wrote it as a firm nod to Robert E. Howard for an anthology,
Cross Plains Universe,
done in 2006 for the World Fantasy Convention held in Austin, the nearest large town to where I live in Texas. The book was intended to celebrate and commemorate Howard, and I was flattered to be asked to join in. Readers of Howard, as well as myself, will see a few nods to Conan as well as my own cosmology and its heroes.
    I have written almost all my Elric stories because I was asked to do so, either by commissioning editors or by readers. My affection for the crimson-eyed albino has never waned. Since I began writing I have always maintained a close relationship with my readers and have done my best, whenever possible, to accommodate them when they have asked for a certain kind of story. While I retired from writing long epic fantasy stories or, for that matter, science fantasy novels with the most recent sequence involving Elric and others of my own heroic pantheon, ending with “The White Wolf’s Son,” I still take great pleasure in producing the occasional shorter story or graphic tale, and I suspect I shall continue to write these until my career comes at last to an end. Meanwhile, we have these, so wonderfully, gloriously, handsomely illustrated by Michael Kaluta. I hope you enjoy them.
    Michael Moorcock,
Lost Pines, Texas,
May 2007
    NB: In addition to the appearance of “Phase 1” as an independent story, three other stories appear here for the first time in one of my own collections: “The Eternal Champion,” “The Jade Man’s Eyes” and “The Roaming Forest.”

THE ETERNAL CHAMPION

    In the Cycle of Time many things may repeat themselves, especially in the lives of men and halflings. This is a story of the dim and distant past—or the