"The Testament of Athammaus" by Clark Ashton Smith

calamus: a type of reed used as a writing pen

lustrum: a period of five years

headsman: while it becomes obvious later in the story, in the introduction it may not be obvious that this means executioner. Specifically execution by beheading.

Tscho Vulpanomi - we've heard this name several times now in the Hyperborea series, and I really don't know how to pronounce that first word. That 'ts' phoneme exists in the Wade-Giles romanization of Chinese, but it is NEVER followed by a 'c' or 'ch' in Chinese. Indeed, in the currently accepted Hanyu Pinyin of mainland China today, the Wade-Giles 'ts' was changed to a 'c'. So we can't use the Chinese pronunciation here, it isn't phonetically possible. I just don't know.

ferine: feral; wild and menacing

anthropophagy: human cannibalism

factitious: artificially created or developed

Archean gneiss: The Archean age is 2.5 to 4 billion years ago. Gneiss is a type of metamorphic rock formed by high temperature and high pressure metamorphic processes acting on igneous or sedimentary rocks. Archean gneiss is typically found in the exposed regions of continental shields.

nacarat: a shade of pale red-orange. I have no idea how to pronounce this word, and seemingly neither does anybody else. Every pronunciation I could find to listen to was different. *boggle*

hodden: coarse woolen cloth (historically typical of Scotland)

liana: a long-stemmed, woody vine that is rooted in the soil at ground level and uses trees as means of vertical support, to climb up to the canopy in search of direct sunlight

ort: a scrap of food from a meal

midden: refuse heap

flagitious: criminal; villainous

ebullition: the action of bubbling or boiling; a sudden outburst of emotion or violence

matutinal: of or occurring in the morning

piacular: requiring atonement

The picture used is the cover page spread for the story as it appeared in Weird Tales, October 1932. Illustration by T. Wyatt Nelson.

To follow along: http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/210/the-testament-of-athammaus

Although I would note that the text above has quite a few deviations from the book I am reading from. Nothing that changes the story in any fundamental word, just minor word choices, like "unaccustomed" in my text is "unparallelable" in the text above. But there's quite a few such variations like that. Such variance has not occurred in any of the other Hyperborean stories recorded to date. *shrug*