The war is over and people lying,
Dead and buried in mother earth
Corpses cover the ground and the world is dying,
Dead and buried and eternal birth
Dead and buried in mother earth
Corpses cover the ground and the world is dying,
Dead and buried and eternal birth
— "Spirits of the Dead" by Grave Digger
"Souls do not rest there. They come back... angry."
In the Shadowlands, Deepwater is even more disturbing, as it appears in a haze of bloated dead fish, crustaceans, and human bodies. As one gets closer to the installation, the haze of bodies becomes a diseased, almost impenetrable soup. Those who penetrate the murk to reach Deepwater in the Shadowlands find the installation in fine condition — it's just everything around it that's dead.
He came across bones of men scattered so thickly upon the ground that they resembled drifts of snow. He passed the remains of a two-headed giant, impaled by a spear against the split trunk of a great oak, and the withered husk of a creature with the torso of a woman and the legs of a spider, an axe buried in its back. Worst of all, he descried the features of men on the tree trunks, and believed them the play of shadow upon bark, until he drew closer and saw that they were the shriveled faces of those whom he had known in life — knights, squires, soldiers — torn from their corpses and nailed to the wood.
But he neither saw nor heard one sign of life.
But he neither saw nor heard one sign of life.
— The Hollow King, by John Connolly
The terrain of the Realm itself is hideous. The realm is a feculent wasteland of browns and slimy grays, mud pits, piles of rotting skin and cairns of skulls and bones. Putrid or mummified carcasses of mutilated victims project halfway out of the ooze, their forms locked in rictuses of torture. Mass graves, dug by unknown hands, serve as repositories for countless corpses. Black, ash-laden smoke fills the gray sky, and the stench (a combination of rot, burning flesh, sulfur and feces) is nigh-unbearable.
— On The Atrocity Realm, Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Umbra: The Velvet Shadows
"Look, Delta, it is the world for which you strive. You, alone... among the dead."
— Sofia Lamb on the flooded ruins of Siren's Alley, BioShock 2
I floated, tethered, in a field of tentacles that spread as far as the eye could see. Menno floated nearby, tethered, penetrated, incorporated. His eyes were closed. His chest had burst open. I could see his insides.
A few feet away — Aguella. My lovely Aguella. Tied. Attached. A dead thing grafted onto the creature called Father.
Lackofa. Jicklet. Bodies, more and more, I twisted to see more and more. They were all around me, some seemingly uninjured, others torn apart by impact wounds or by sudden depressurization. Everywhere the dead. The last of the Ketran people
A few feet away — Aguella. My lovely Aguella. Tied. Attached. A dead thing grafted onto the creature called Father.
Lackofa. Jicklet. Bodies, more and more, I twisted to see more and more. They were all around me, some seemingly uninjured, others torn apart by impact wounds or by sudden depressurization. Everywhere the dead. The last of the Ketran people
From what I observed in a perpetual state of numb horror, I estimate that in the first twenty moons, a third of our people died, either though Quetzacthulhu or our efforts to appease him. The blood never stopped flowing. The steps of the temples were crimson waterfalls. The walls of bodies grew too large to climb over, and the speed at which they grew was too much for teams to carry them through the jungle. And so there they rotted, whilst we built ladders and towers to lead our sacrifices over the bodies — only for them to roll down and join them.
You could not begin to imagine the stench throughout the land. Nothing removed it, and there was a hard limit in what you could get used to. The unending rotting of thousands upon thousands of our people — men, women and children, whose only crime was not being a priest — the accursed buzzing in their eye sockets, their garish death grins. The world seemed nought but a charnel house.
You could not begin to imagine the stench throughout the land. Nothing removed it, and there was a hard limit in what you could get used to. The unending rotting of thousands upon thousands of our people — men, women and children, whose only crime was not being a priest — the accursed buzzing in their eye sockets, their garish death grins. The world seemed nought but a charnel house.
— Quetzacthulhu, by Set Sytes
If solid ground exists in the limited dimension of Dhizrend, it lies beneath layer upon layer of bone dust, bones, decaying corpses, mountains of skulls, and naked arches made by rib cages of vast, long-dead creatures.
— Numenera: Into the Beyond
