Conan: City of the Dead

by John C. Hocking

Perhaps the legends were right. Perhaps Cetriss had bargained with the Dark Gods for the lotus. If this was so, then the sorcerer had been a man of great courage as well as great skill. If this was so, then all his own efforts to fit the Emerald Lotus into earthly categories were doomed from the start. It might have been conceived in a place where the laws of nature as men knew them did not exist. Under what strange skies had the Emerald Lotus first blossomed? And who had been the first to harvest it?

I love the hints that the Lotus is extraterrestrial in origin.