The Story

In Ptarth's marble palace, beneath its towering spires, Astok, arrogant prince of rival Dusar, seizes Thuvia roughly against her will, mistaking her stunned silence for weakness. Carthoris, prince of Helium, storms into the chamber and strikes him down hard before the shocked court, shielding her honor without a moment's hesitation.

Humiliated before the entire watching court, Astok flees the city of Ptarth in bitter, burning disgrace, his pride shattered beyond any easy repair. Therefore he silently nurses a secret, festering vow of revenge — against both the woman who spurned his advances and the prince who shamed him publicly.

Grateful, Thuvia thanks Carthoris warmly for his defense, but gently confesses she is already promised in marriage to Kulan Tith, mighty Jeddak of Kaol. His hope collapses instantly at her words, yet his quiet love for her only grows deeper, more patient, and more determined despite the loss.

Back in Helium, the cunning Dusarian noble Vas Kor secretly slips into Carthoris's own household, disguised convincingly as a humble slave. He waits patiently in the shadows for months, biding his time until Astok's simmering revenge finally requires him to act against the unsuspecting prince.

A scarred servant loyal to Vas Kor secretly tampers with Carthoris's prized automatic destination compass one quiet night, bending its delicate inner mechanism ever so slightly. Therefore, when next used for any journey across Barsoom, the device will silently drag his flier toward a course no one ever intended.

Soon after, warriors wearing Dusar's unmistakable insignia abduct Thuvia straight from Ptarth's gardens under cover of darkness — Astok's hidden revenge quietly set in motion at last. Suspicion falls unfairly on Carthoris himself, and he is ordered at once to journey to Ptarth in person to clear his tarnished name.

Carthoris sets out immediately across the dying sea bottoms, determined and resolute to prove his innocence before Thuvan Dihn's watching court. But his sabotaged compass betrays him utterly, dragging his swift flier instead toward Aaanthor, a dead city long abandoned on Barsoom's silent ochre wastes.

There among Aaanthor's crumbling, moss-grown towers, Thar Ban, a green jed commanding the savage Torquas horde, stumbles upon the captive, frightened Thuvia and seizes her at once for his own tribe. It is pure opportunity, not any calculated plan, yet no less dangerous for the desperate princess.

Carthoris lands among the ruins to find Thuvia already gone, her captors vanished into the wasteland. He fights hard through a roving party of Dusarian raiders, wins her cold trail from their leader, and gives furious chase into the mountains ringing the dead city.

A well-aimed rifle shot suddenly cripples his flier in mid-flight, sending it crashing hard into the rocks below. Undeterred and bruised, Carthoris continues doggedly on foot, following the fresh tracks of a wild banth into a black, echoing cave carved deep into the mountainside.

Pursued relentlessly by hungry banths through the tunnel's absolute dark, he stumbles upon a freshly slain thoat and Thuvia's own blood-stained hair ornament lying abandoned nearby. He fears, with sinking heart, the very worst has happened — but mercifully, she is still alive and unharmed.

Emerging at last beyond the cave's mouth, Carthoris finds the hidden, legendary city of Lothar besieged by Hortan Gur's ferocious green horde. Suddenly, disciplined phantom bowmen appear seemingly from nowhere and utterly rout the attackers — illusions fighting and dying exactly as if they were real.

Inside Lothar's ancient, echoing walls at last, Carthoris discovers Thuvia held tightly captive by Tario, the city's own proud and possessive jeddak, who strikes her across the face in sudden cruel anger the very instant Carthoris arrives breathless at the chamber door.

Carthoris attacks Tario without a moment's hesitation and pointedly refuses to kneel before his throne. Deeply shaken, and now doubting his own city's very reality before such open, fearless defiance, Tario furiously orders the two prisoners kept strictly, permanently apart from one another.

Three separate wills now collide dangerously inside Lothar's living illusion: Tario wants beautiful Thuvia entirely for himself, Jav secretly plots quiet treason against his own trusting king, and Carthoris, steadfast, wants only to carry Thuvia safely home again to distant Ptarth.

But Carthoris quietly overhears Jav's treasonous plot forming against the Lotharian throne itself. Therefore he strikes Tario down without warning, acting fast and decisively to shield Thuvia from whatever fresh, unknown danger the philosopher's scheme might bring next.

Tario escapes in the confusion as the chamber floor suddenly gives way beneath them all, dropping the group into a hidden funnel trap far below. Only his own heavy royal couch, wedged fast in the narrow opening above, saves them from a fatal fall.

Komal, the enormous banth that all of Lothar worships as a living god, prowls menacingly into the chamber below. But Thuvia calmly, fearlessly tames the great beast with only her steady voice, proving it nothing more than a hungry animal after all.

At the city's outer gates, Jav and Tario duel fiercely by conjuring entire opposing phantom armies against one another. Therefore a full-scale illusion-battle erupts violently all around Carthoris and Thuvia, armies of soldiers that were never truly there at all.

Jav reaches cunningly into Carthoris's unguarded mind and tricks him into firmly believing Thuvia waits helplessly elsewhere in the city. He is lured cruelly away from her side at the very worst and most dangerous possible moment imaginable.

Carthoris finally sees clean through the cruel deception and races desperately back, finding Jav badly mauled and bleeding by Komal amid the wreckage. A dying, whispered clue tells him Thuvia has fled on foot toward a hidden mountain passage nearby.

Kar Komak, a Lotharian bowman who is permanently, genuinely real and no mere passing illusion like the rest, eagerly joins Carthoris's desperate search. Therefore he finally gains one true and trustworthy ally within this treacherous, ever-shifting city of dreams.

But green Torquasian warriors and swift Dusarian fliers converge violently on them all at once in the chaos. Komal falls hard in the fierce fighting, Carthoris himself is struck down and wounded, and Astok seizes the chaotic moment to capture Thuvia once more.

Carthoris wakes groggy and bruised, a helpless prisoner of savage white apes deep inside ruined Aaanthor, caged tightly among old sun-bleached bones in the pressing dark, his strength failing fast with every long, hopeless passing hour.

Kar Komak tracks him down and swiftly materializes phantom bowmen to drive the snarling apes back. Therefore Carthoris breaks free at last; together the two steal a pair of thoats and flee the dead city at a hard gallop.

Along the way they meet Hal Vas, son of the slain Vas Kor, who reveals grim and unwelcome news: Dusar and Helium are now openly, bitterly at war over Thuvia's stolen fate and Astok's carefully hidden crimes.

Disguised cleverly as the wandering panthan Turjun, Carthoris slips deep and unnoticed into Dusar itself. There, piecing together scattered clues, he learns beyond any doubt what he long suspected — Astok was always Thuvia's true and secret captor.

Astok locks Thuvia away inside a high, guarded tower overlooking the city. Therefore Nutus, fearing swift exposure of his son's shameful crime, quietly orders her secret death and hires the ruthless assassin Vas Kor to carry it out.

Carthoris, still disguised, overhears the entire murder plot through a narrow tower ventilator shaft by pure chance. So he infiltrates the tower at once under cover of darkness, racing desperately to reach Thuvia before Vas Kor's blade can find her.

He duels Vas Kor blade to blade in the tower's dark, cramped chamber and kills him after a fierce, close struggle in the shadows. But Astok slips away through a cleverly hidden panel, vanishing completely into the Dusarian night beyond.

Carthoris and Thuvia flee together aboard Astok's own abandoned flier, the swift Thuria, racing hard through the darkness toward Kulan Tith's warship, which lies besieged and burning under heavy enemy fire on the open Barsoomian sky.

Kar Komak summons phantom bowmen up from below deck at the critical moment, therefore routing the attacking green warriors in a single decisive stroke. His ghostly army then simply vanishes, and he departs peacefully with it for good.

Kulan Tith watches from his own deck as Carthoris fights and sacrifices without a moment's hesitation, and sees plainly, at last, the quiet nobility and steadfast love the young prince has proven again and again throughout this ordeal.

Thuvia, moved beyond words, at last confesses her true love for Carthoris before them all. Kulan Tith, gracious and deeply unselfish, nobly releases her from their long-standing betrothal, asking nothing at all in return for his sacrifice.

What it means

Jav, a soft-spoken Lotharian philosopher serving the court, quietly explains the city's closely guarded secret: Lothar's entire soldiery are illusions born purely of disciplined, trained minds, nothing more. He then feeds Carthoris a full meal conjured entirely from trained imagination alone.

Burroughs's Mars insists that the fiercest wars are fought over what we merely believe is real — phantom armies, false gods, borrowed suspicion, stolen honor. Only clear-eyed courage and honest, patient love can finally tell illusion from truth, on Barsoom or anywhere else.

🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.