The third novel collected in the White Wolf edition of Michael Moorcock’s The Eternal Champion, this book goes back to John Daker, who this time around becomes Count Urlik Skarsol, though he remains mostly cognisant of his other incarnations.  Here, he is at the end of some version of Earth, as its sun is cooling and the world is turning to ice.  He stumbles across a decadent and apathetic humanity and must come to terms with his destiny.

It was weird coming back to this particular twist on the Eternal Champion after reading The Sundered Worlds.  It’s tonally and even stylistically so different.  Also, Daker in his various forms is not an especially interesting protagonist.  Mostly, he just sort of sees stuff and reacts to it in an almost inhuman way, as he’s constantly being pushed and pulled by a destiny and nature that always seems out of his hand.

The stories in this collection seem to function as an exploration of the overall metaconcept of the Multiverse, the battle between Law and Chaos, and the concept of the Eternal Champion, as well as the accompanying artifacts and companions.  Certainly this book gets into the Champion’s relationship to the Black Blade, as well as the power and doom it brings.

I would probably have had a better impression of this if I’d read it directly after The Eternal Champion, but because it was broken up by The Sundered Worlds, coming back to Daker felt weird and a bit off-putting.

There’s one last short story in the volume, called To Rescue Tanelorn…  I probably won’t write a review of it, as it’s only about twenty pages long.  I don’t think it features Daker, but we’ll see. 

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