Conan stood.
“Let them come,” Conan said, and his smile was the edge of an axe. “I was not made for thrones. I was made for this.”
A scout burst through the doors, armor dented, breath ragged.
“Crom,” he growled to the empty hall, “I have never asked you for mercy. I do not start now.”
He remembered the cold of his homeland. The sting of snow in his lungs. The honest bite of steel. Not this velvet cage of crowns and couriers.
The wine was sour. The women’s laughter, tin. The torches in the hall guttered like frightened things.
But for now… for now, he was simply Conan. A thief who stole a kingdom. A warrior who had never learned to kneel.
His bare feet—calloused from a thousand battlefields—rested on the mosaic of a serpent he’d crushed with his own hands. Outside, the city of Aquilonia whispered his name like a prayer and a curse. King. Barbarian. Savior. Tyrant.