Yakhmar

The greatest and most terrible of the ice worms is Yakhmar, gigantic in size and ferocious in its cold hatred for any of the living.

The higher animals, he knew, radiated heat. Below them in the scale of being came the scaled and plated reptiles and fishes, whose temperature was of their surroundings. But the Remora, the worm of the ice lands, seeming unique in that it radiated cold; at least, that was how Conan would have expressed it. It gave out a sort of bitter cold that could encase a corpse in an armor of ice within minutes. Since none of Conan’s tribesmen claimed to have seen a Remora, Conan had assumed that the creature was long extinct.

This, then, must be the monster that Igla had dreaded, and of which she had vainly tried to warn him by the name yakhmar.

– Lair of the Ice Worm, L. Sprague de Camp & Lin Carter

The ice-crusted hell of northernmost Cimmeria is a land where life fights to survive. The Eiglophian Mountains rear up into the skies, becoming ever more hostile to humanity with each step up the face of those jagged spires. While scattered clans of Cimmerian barbarians cling to a joyless existence here, the only life that truly thrives in this realm of untouched snow and ancient stone is utterly inhuman. They are the predators of the peaks, and the mightiest among them are some of the deadliest creatures to be found anywhere in the world. First among these are the ice worms of Cimmerian and Hyperborean legend.

Some warriors of the northlands believe with certainty that the ice worms are extinct. But the ice worms still live, burrowing ever deeper into the earth’s skin in order to hide from the agonizing touch of the sun’s heat and the fire-arrows of human hunters. The greatest and most terrible of these creatures is Yakhmar itself, gigantic in size and ferocious in its cold hatred for any of the living.

The rare tales that tell of Yakhmar speak of a monstrous white-furred worm, its body formed of coil upon coil of winding, rippling, muscled flesh. The beast’s eyes are a sickly, undersea green that radiate cold light in the dark surroundings of its lair, and its opened maw is a gaping hole in inward-pointing teeth and a slick, grasping tongue that snares a warrior’s limbs and drags him closer so the creature may feed.

Yakhmar, and perhaps its lesser kin, possesses the ability to produce a piping call that is able to hypnotize even strong-willed souls, luring them from the safety of their campfire and into a foul death. Ice worms feed on the flesh of warm-blooded creatures, rasping the flesh away from their victims’ bones and leaving the bodies encased in a block of solid ice once all warmth is leeched away. Of all the ways to die in the Hyborian Age, such a death is surely one of the most agonizing.

Yakhmar

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