Michael Moorcock · Del Rey Collected Edition, 2008
Two landmark works bound in one volume: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (1976) — three linked novellas in which Elric sails between planes of the multiverse — and Duke Elric (DC/Helix, 1997–98) — a twelve-part graphic-novel script in which the Eternal Champion walks as a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon lord across Dark Age Europe and the Sahara.
Elric, cornered and horseless after fleeing Pikarayd, contemplates walking into the sea — until a strange vessel arrives that has been waiting for him by name
Hunted by the governor of Pikarayd, Elric rides his horse to death crossing dead hills and reaches a desolate shingle beach with nowhere left to go. Out of sea-mist emerges a vast, dark-timbered ship of baroque design — sailing without wind — whose golden-bearded warrior Brut of Lashmar checks a parchment list and hails Elric by name. Below decks: warriors from many eras and many worlds, including the scarred black scholar Otto Blendker of Brunse, the Hasghan fighter Terndrik, and the fierce barbarian Ashnar the Lynx. In the shadows at the far end of the table sits a figure with familiar, anguished eyes — who gives his name as Erekosë, with many others besides.
The blind Captain — tall, pale, of inhuman beauty — confirms the ship sails between the planes of the multiverse. He has assembled twenty warriors for a single mission: to land on an island that is the nexus of all dimensions, where two alien entities now threaten to drain all energy from the universe. Elric agrees to fight — "for the comradeship of it," he says, and recognises it as the best possible reason.
The most cosmologically audacious sequence in Moorcock's oeuvre: four incarnations of one hero merge into a single eight-limbed being and fight cosmic entities by becoming them
Twenty warriors wade onto the island: a landscape under a static red sun, full of sourceless shadows (the ghosts of buildings existing in other dimensions). At the centre stand two structures of living metal and glass that pulse and breathe. These are not buildings — they are the bodies of Agak and his sister Gagak, alien sorcerers from outside the multiverse who feed on the energy of whole universes. Gagak's intelligence pools in a viscous liquid at the heart of her body. The warriors cut through defenders — slug-beasts, giant baboons, eyeless serpents — climbing ever upward through hot, narrowing passages.
When the four heroes reach Gagak's intelligence-chamber, Erekosë understands. The Four stand at the corners of the pool, raise their swords so the blades meet at the centre, and merge. Their atoms disperse and flow together into a single eight-limbed, four-faced entity carrying one massive sword blazing gold-and-black. The merged being descends into Gagak's pool, overwhelms her consciousness, absorbs her, then inhabits her body — reshaping it from a building into a gigantic warrior-form. In this stolen shape it attacks Agak, who begins to drain the energy of entire universes to fight back. Worlds die. The Four drive their sword through Agak's intelligence-eye, killing him, then disperse his stolen energy back through all the planes. For one moment the universe is dead. Then it lives again.
Elric disembarks on a plane where a blue sun burns and a Melnibonéan ancestor obsessed with two-centuries-old guilt holds an innocent girl captive on a golden galleon
The Captain warns that the ship nears the only intersection of Elric's plane with this one — the Crimson Gate. Corum departs by chariot. Elric rows to shore on a world lit by a blue sun, where he meets the stranded Count Smiorgan Baldhead — his old companion — surrounded by the remnants of a crew of pirates from various historical periods, all trapped beyond the Gate. On Smiorgan's anchored ship they find a hiding passenger: Vassliss of Jharkor, a merchant's daughter who fled through the Gate to escape a pursuing Melnibonéan sorcerer on a golden galleon.
That sorcerer is Earl Saxif D'Aan, one of Elric's own ancestors — a great enchanter who two centuries past tortured to death a half-Melnibonéan girl who refused to confess she loved him, only to have her whisper those exact words as her dying breath. He has lived in this limbo ever since, kept alive by sorcery, hunted by the ghost of her fiancé Prince Carolak whose white stallion pursues him from world to world. He believes Vassliss is her reincarnation. Saxif D'Aan's golden galleon bears down on them; Elric invokes sorcery from the crow's nest to summon Carolak through the white stallion — the horse that Saxif D'Aan fears above all else.
An explorer-scholar rescues Elric from the sea, then conscripts him into a voyage across the Boiling Sea to find the ancestral city of Melniboné — and the vast Jade Man who guards it
Rescued by the schooner of Duke Avan Astran of Old Hrolmar — Vilmir's greatest adventurer-scholar — Elric is persuaded (the ship is already heading that way) to join a voyage to R'lin K'ren A'a: "Where the High Ones Meet," the mythic pre-Melnibonéan city Elric's ancestors came from before settling on the Dragon Isle. Avan has found in Melniboné a sealed casket containing a map in ancient High Speech and a tiny ruby with an image Elric almost recognises at its centre. The city, legend says, holds the Jade Man — a colossal jade statue of Arioch, Lord of Chaos — whose crystalline eyes are jewels from another plane of existence. The eyes are long missing.
They cross the killing heat of the Boiling Sea (losing three men), enter the unnamed Western Continent, and row up a jungle river in absolute silence — no birds, no insects, no animals have lived here for ages. On the island in the river's fork they find the ruins: wide low streets, coloured alien building-materials unlike any stone or wood, and no weeds growing anywhere in the cracks. The ruins are strangely perfect. And at the centre, towering over everything, stands the Jade Man — a naked youth of jade, feminine-beautiful, sightless, its empty eye sockets looking north. Duke Avan notes that the eyes — the jewels he sought — are long gone.
Stormbringer kills two more innocent men; Arioch commands the Jade Man to walk; the ten-thousand-year curse of R'lin K'ren A'a is lifted at terrible cost
In a cellar beneath the ruins, the survivors find a naked immortal with an arrow-shaft in his ribs and a face uncannily like Elric's: J'osui C'reln Reyr, the Creature Doomed to Live. The only citizen of R'lin K'ren A'a who refused to flee when the High Lords came, he was cursed by Arioch — the Jade Man — to live forever with unkillable knowledge of what the Lords of Law and Chaos agreed at their meeting. He has existed here for ten thousand years. The crystal "eyes" that fell from the Jade Man's face when Arioch's spirit departed are what Elric's party wandered through. A ruby gem sealed in the map's casket — the Image in the Gem — can command Arioch once, if held by one of the royal Melnibonéan line.
Elric invokes Arioch. The sword demands blood and souls. Against Elric's will it twists in his hand and drives into Duke Avan's heart — then the nameless crewman's. Elric, possessed, commands: the Jade Man stoops, retrieves its crystal eyes, straightens — and in a single step strides into the jungle and is gone forever. The Olab flee in terror. J'osui C'reln Reyr begs to die. Stormbringer flies from Elric's hand and buries itself in the immortal's chest. As J'osui dies laughing, he whispers: "The sword has my knowledge now."
The Eternal Champion in a new historical incarnation: Elric Sadricson, Anglo-Saxon Duke of the Middlemarch, exiled by King Ethelred and seeking a legendary being called "the Silverskin"
A different plane of Earth, circa 1000 AD. Elric Sadricson — albino lord of the western Middlemarch, last of an ancient pre-Saxon line — is exiled by the scheming King Ethelred the Unready, his western lands confiscated, accused of sorcery and unnatural relations with his sister. The real reason: his aggressive, realistic policy against the Danes made him too popular and too dangerous. He retrieves Stormbringer from the monastery of St. Obyn, where the runesword has been locked away since Charlemagne asked for Elric's aid two centuries before. ("He asked too much of me. I could accept his god, but would not reject my own.") He is seeking the Silverskin — a legendary creature said to rule a lost city at the heart of Africa.
In Frankland he rescues Isaak D'Israeli — Jewish soldier-scholar — and his veiled daughter Rebecca from Norman bandits (feeding on the bandits' souls). They travel south together through Moorish Spain to Córdoba — the most civilised city in Europe, its library one of the three finest in the world. In the library, references to the Silverskin point to a lost city, T'aan-al-Oorn, deep in Africa. In the street of the carpet-sellers, Elric bargains for hours for an ugly carpet that turns out to contain, woven in corrupted Melnibonéan High Speech, a complete map to the city.
Stormbringer sinks with the ship; without the sword Elric is failing; underground troglodytes trade for his marrow; a lioness rescues him; weapons are mysteriously returned
A Mediterranean storm destroys their dhow. Stormbringer sinks to the seabed and without it Elric begins to die — he depends on the sword's stolen life-force to sustain his deficient blood. Stranded on the North African coast, he is revived by Rebecca. They are captured by a Berber tribe, then liberated by Lo-bin-Gha (the Desert Wind) — the most feared Taureq chieftain of his age, an old comrade of Isaak's who recognises him. Lo-bin-Gha agrees to guide them deep into the Sahara toward the lost city.
In the night Elric is carried off by pale, simian troglodytes who bargain over his marrow in underground caves. A gigantic lioness erupts into the cave, defeats a caged reptilian beast the troglodytes release against her, scatters the cave-dwellers, and carries Elric gently in her jaws back to the surface. He wakes to find Rebecca tending him — and a veiled suggestion that the lioness and Rebecca are the same.
After eleven days near death in the deep Sahara, Elric descends into a valley of colossal pyramids built as sleeping-thrones for ancient dragons — and finds his own dragon brother still alive
On the eleventh day of dying thirst, they crest a rise and look down into the Valley of the Phoorn: a long, shallow valley containing hundreds of pyramids as large as the Great Pyramid of Giza, each topped with elaborate metalwork, marching in orderly ranks as far as the eye sees. These are the sleeping-thrones of the Phoorn — the dragons — and the related semi-human people who shared their civilisation before the Sahara turned from forest to desert ten thousand years ago. Almost all are dead. But from one pyramid's crown comes a whisper of sulphur.
Flamefang — Elric's own dragon bond-brother from Melniboné, ten thousand years old, grey-muzzled, nearly extinct — recognises him across the gulf of incarnations and time. He needs his skeffla'a — a navigation membrane, bonding to his nervous system via the central saddle-spot on his back, allowing travel between the planes. The ugly carpet from Córdoba was this membrane all along, stolen from Flamefang's bloodline in ages past.
Elric sounds the Horn of Fate, flies the dragon through the Grey Fees, confronts the Silverskin — all the Eternal Champion's incarnations in one anguished entity — and absorbs them
Flamefang destroys a pyramid with his black-radiance breath, revealing the Horn of Fate on a miniature throne within. This is the horn Elric sought, which "two centuries ago I fought for — at the last moment I lost the courage to sound it." He sounds the first blast: the Valley of the Phoorn collapses into a vast pit. Flamefang dives into it, riding deep into the Grey Fees — a liminal dimension of petrified organic matter — where colossal trog-giants threaten them. Rebecca tears off her veil: a lioness-mask, with the eyes of Sekhmet/Bastet, drives them back. The dragon surfaces through a Scottish loch next to Castle Auchy (location of the parallel Moonbeams and Roses story). Elric says farewell to Flamefang. The dragon submerges; his tail flicks once above the waves.
Inside the castle, Elric meets the Silverskin — a mercury-skinned entity whose reflective surface contains all the faces of all the Eternal Champion's incarnations across all of time, writhing in agony under the weight of infinite memory. It begs Elric to enter it. He refuses. When the polarities of the multiverse are reversed by the card-players at the Terminal Café (a cosmological game played by Moorcock, Walter Simonson, Jack Karaquazian, and the Rose), Elric drives Stormbringer into the Silverskin's heart and absorbs all the incarnations into himself. He becomes briefly the whole Eternal Champion — silver-skinned, all-knowing. He sounds the second blast of the Horn.
| Work | First Published | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Sailor Book One — The Four Who Are One | Quartet Books, UK, 1976 | Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon, Erekosë merge; Agak & Gagak destroyed |
| Sailor Book Two — Earl Saxif D'Aan | As above | Blue-sun world; Crimson Gate; ghost story of guilt and love |
| Sailor Book Three — R'lin K'ren A'a | As above | Duke Avan Astran; Jade Man walks; J'osui C'reln Reyr freed |
| Duke Elric — Parts 1–3 | DC/Helix, 1997–98 | Exile, Frankland, Córdoba, the magic-carpet map |
| Duke Elric — Parts 4–6 | As above | Shipwreck, Sahara, Lo-bin-Gha, the lioness Rebecca |
| Duke Elric — Parts 7–9 | As above | Valley of the Phoorn; Flamefang; the skeffla'a revealed |
| Duke Elric — Parts 10–12 | As above (Simonson crossover) | Horn of Fate; Silverskin; all incarnations absorbed; Moonglum waits |
| Aspects of Fantasy (Part 2) | Science Fantasy #62, Dec 1963 | Critical essay on heroic fantasy; companion to Part 1 in Vol. III |
| The Flaneur des Arcades de l'Opéra | The Metatemporal Detective, Pyr 2008 | Short story; Eternal Champion in Edwardian Paris; Zenith the Albino |
| AudioRealms Introduction to Sailor | 2006 audiobook; first print here | Moorcock's cosmological frame for the entire Eternal Champion myth |
| Elric: A Personality at War (Adrian Snook) | First publication here, 2008 | Critical analysis of Elric as literary character and Jungian shadow |