Valusia was the Serpent Men's kingdom and they built it long before there were humans to rule it. The architecture was not designed for the human form — the doorways are too wide, the staircases are too shallow, the throne in the central palace at the capital city of Valusia (the kingdom and the capital share the name) is a coiled stone arrangement that no biped sits comfortably on. When the Atlantean conqueror Kull took the throne and the kingdom by force, he ordered new furniture but did not rebuild the architecture. He understood, in some way the Bureau finds revealing, that the Serpent Men had not really left.
The Thurian Continent
A landmass that no longer exists in the form it had during the Valusian era. The pre-Atlantean Thurian continent occupied a region of the western Atlantic that has since been partly submerged, partly elevated, and partly absorbed into the geological framework of what is now the Caribbean and the West African coast. Modern geography does not preserve enough of it to map. Howard's reconstruction, produced through his vision-receptions across the 1930s, is the only coherent record the Bureau has of the Thurian coastline, and the only one that places Valusia in a defensible geographic context.
The continent supported at least seven other pre-human civilizations of varying complexity. Valusia outlasted all of them. The Serpent Men were not the only old race on the Thurian landmass. They were the patient one.
The City of Valusia
Capital of the kingdom. Marble and obsidian. Wide processional avenues, low temple complexes, an obsessive use of serpent motifs in the carved reliefs. The city was built when the Serpent Men were the dominant civilization on Earth and there were no other contenders. By the time Kull took it, the city had been operational for tens of thousands of years and the Serpent Men had withdrawn from public visibility but not from operation. The court Kull inherited was riddled with them — advisors, scribes, generals, priests. The kitchens were probably clean. The kitchens were rarely the problem.
The carvings on the older temple walls depict scenes the human eye has trouble parsing. Geometries that suggest the Serpent Men had access to spatial intuitions humans do not share. The Bureau's analysts have catalogued recurring motifs — coiled forms, eclipses, what appear to be star charts oriented to a sky that does not match any reconstruction of Earth's actual ancient sky.
The Kull Discovery
One of the more disturbing entries in the Hyborian Age record. Kull, after taking the throne, discovered that several of his closest advisors had been Serpent Men in human guise for the entire duration of his reign. The discovery came when one of them attempted an assassination during a private audience and the disguise slipped under combat stress. Kull's investigation, carried out personally with a small group of warriors he was certain of (mostly Atlantean exiles from his own people), uncovered enough evidence to indict the entire upper court. The purge that followed was thorough. It was not complete. Kull himself acknowledged, in the records that survive through Howard, that he could not be sure he had found all of them. He simply ran out of advisors he was willing to suspect.
Decline
Valusia did not fall to invasion. It fell to entropy. After the Kull purge, the kingdom's stability never fully recovered, and within a few generations of his death the throne had passed through several incompetent successors and the Serpent Men had quietly resumed their infiltration. The kingdom's eventual collapse is not well-documented, partly because the people writing the records were already serpents wearing the faces of scribes. The accounts of the last three Valusian kings read like S̵͐R̆͠𓆗K̡̉͡ꫀĽ̄Ḱ̴̯M͌ĮTͅV̡̳X̷̲̍X̑Ẅ̱̑ — too smooth, too consistent, too flattering to a court that the surrounding evidence suggests was already a hollowed shell.
By the time the geological cataclysms that ended the Thurian Age struck, Valusia was already a shell. The cataclysms simply made it official.
Current Status
Destroyed. The continent it sat on is partly submerged, the city itself has been buried under millions of years of sediment, and no expedition has ever credibly identified the site. What survives is the documentation — Howard's vision records and the corroborating fragments in the Pnakotic Manuscripts. The Serpent Men remnants who continue to operate in the modern era do not return to Valusia. Whatever they remember of it, they prefer not to. The Bureau interprets this as significant. A people who do not return to their own ruined capital are a people who left something there they do not want to find again.
The architecture is the part that stays with me. Doorways too wide. Staircases too shallow. A throne built for a body that does not bend the way ours bends. Howard saw all of it from a small house in Texas and described it in passing, in the middle of an action sequence, the way a man describes a room he has been in many times and no longer finds remarkable. That is what convinces me. Imagination embellishes. Memory understates. The Valusian architecture in Howard's pages is understated to the point of carelessness — he was not selling it, he was just describing it, and the descriptions are internally consistent across stories written years apart and never revised. Somewhere under the Caribbean sediment there is a city with doorways the wrong size for us. I do not want to find it. I am writing this down anyway.