A Grim Tour

From the desk of Professor Henry von Flussufer, philosopher, statesman, and principal historian in our fine city of Sturmstadt. The following observations were recorded from my recent trips across our northern half of the world in an effort to observe and record the varying traditions pertaining to the processing of deceased individuals throughout. Out of a desire for brevity, I will be describing only the most widespread and socially acceptable methods - with minor exceptions for truly novel surprises - as I discovered a number of fascinating edge cases related to lesser-known gods during this expedition. These will be discussed in future entries, after I have had time to organize and analyze my notes in greater detail.

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My travels began in Vulkenesburgh in the Underkingdom of Mordrekain, the furthest point I would be visiting on my rounds. The Dwarves and gnomes of this place have much in common with us humans - indeed, it’s many of these same similarities that have attracted so many settlers to the gnomes’ old stomping grounds on the surface. Nevertheless, their traditions pertaining to death are as far removed from our own as they are fascinating.

The Dwarves have long had what might be generously termed a ‘fondness’ for metal, from what I’ve been told of their history. Their metallurgic skills are second to none, and quite literal rivers of molten ore flow through some of their larger refineries, the orange light spilling out into the city at large in the darkness of their night-cycles.

This societal love is reflected in the most common treatment of the recently deceased: cremation of the body, followed by mixing of the ashes with molten metal. This leaves the resulting ingots quite impure, of course, but it’s a symbolic gesture more than a practical one. Once cooled, the bars - which were referred to interchangeably as ‘Bonesteel’ and ‘Teaghlach-cruach’ (quite literally ‘family-steel’) - are presented to the family of the departed for personal use. The Dwarf working the smelter said he’d seen folks keep the ingots as they were as keepsakes, but many fashioned them into trinkets, figurines, or even decorative weapons in memory of the body within the metal.

The Gnomes, I was surprised to learn, also cremate their dead and mix the remains into a building material, but rather than metal, they make an ashen form of a sort of liquid stone called ‘coincréite’ and form it into solid, heavy bricks. The name of the material is a dreadful mouthful, but I can’t deny its usefulness! The residents of the Underkingdom use it extensively in everything from their roads and buildings to statuary.

The ash-bricks are used for more special cases than that, of course. I wasn’t able to personally watch the process of creating the bricks and presenting them to the family on this trip, but the mortician was more than happy to discuss the matter at length with me. According to her, the vast majority of families take the bricks and merely replace an existing brick within their homes with the new one and form a sort of memorial around it, allowing the lost individual to be, as she put it, ‘a part of the family home forever and always’. Some homes, I noted, might have entire walls devoted the the fallen, were they fortunate enough to remain with a single family for enough generations.

As it turns out, not only was I quite correct - the mortician adding in that her business was personally responsible for one of the largest memorial walls in the Underkingdom - but this very development is the foundation of the main alternative most families choose to housing the ash bricks themselves: The bricks are instead donated to the government. Now, naturally this likely strikes many of you as strange and almost uncaring, as it did me, but there are three key reasons why the gnomes see things differently in this case.

First and foremost, any bricks of this sort provided to government offices are marked with rather fetching plaques bearing the name of the deceased whose remains created them. These nameplates, in view of government officials within important governing bodies in positions of honor, give the surviving family no small amount of pride.

Secondly, once enough of these bricks are provided to a specific institution, they begin to form a sort of publicly-funded security system. In buildings like banks, they are arranged into elaborate mazes over time, reinforced by steel grids and designed by teams of specialists to create arrangements that are all but impenetrable to the average thief. In buildings that require a more traditional defenses, solid walls of petal-plated and -reinforced bricks that carry a terrible social - and for some, religious - stigma make for quite the tool for disincentivizing breakage. This pivotal role in keeping their societal wealth and information safe is a powerful motivator for many families.

The third reason is the simplest, though sadly the least interesting. The House of Lords provides minor tax breaks to families who have ash bricks installed on federal property. While it’s not enough to convince every next of kin to sign over a dearly departed loved on to the state, it’s easy enough to see how some might be swayed on top of the other factors.

Before I left Vulkenesburgh, I stopped in at the National History Museum to catch up with an old pen pal of mine, Hamish Macrae. The old Dwarf had shared my enthusiasm for different cultures, and we’d exchanged notes and pleasantries for decades. During our time catching up and sharing a few drinks, he asked about my current project and became quite excited when I informed him of what I’d been learning.

You see, it just so happened that an employee of the museum had apparently survived quite a traumatic experience on the slopes of Mount Hold’s Bane - a place whose name sums up the trouble it causes the Underkingdom quite well, apparently. Despite being all alone and quite young at the time, the man had claimed to seek shelter with an indigenous tribe of folk he called the Terrakin. These folk were made of stone, it seemed, and while old Hamish went on and on about the ramifications of living stone and pondering secrets his employee had never divulged, he did eventually get around to making the point he’d meant to at the start.

The Terrakin, according to Hamish’s man, had a rather unique means of stowing their dead. Within special chambers, beneath the surface of the mountain itself, they would carve holes into the very stone and lay the dead within them. Then, with an ancient magic passed down from generation to generation, they would call magma up from the depths of the mountain and into the holes, enveloping the bodies and sealing them within pristine stone for ages to come.

“From stone we come, and from stone we return,” Hamish had said, no doubt quoting his man who was himself quoting one of the Terrakin. I do wonder whether the quote was prettied up any for my benefit somewhere along the chain, but it’s quiet poetic in any case.

With my visit to Mordrekain concluded, I continue my journey by turning north, towards the much-maligned land of Stirge. Our countries were born from strife against one another, but I wonder if perhaps this gap can be bridge through mutual understanding… Ah, but I set my goals too high, I think. For now, I’ll be happy to simply further our knowledge of their customs.

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After arriving in Stirge and asking around about death rites in the area - and also after allaying the sundry concerns such questions always seem to raise with the local constabulary - I was surprised to learn that our cultures are perhaps not so dissimilar in this respect after all. Or at least, we weren’t for a great many years.

In Duwallen, for any readers who might be unaware, most Human towns above a certain size maintain a Gesunkener Friedhof or ‘Sunken Cemetery’. Beyond the walls of Sturmstadt, the land is simply too wet to create what were once considered ‘normal’ graves by our ancestors, as they flooded almost immediately and led to bloated, stinking corpses floating up through the muck. The solution they reached after generations of attempts was to embrace that aspect rather than try to overcome it. Our cemeteries are intentionally sunk down below ground level and seeded with plants and scavenging fish. These miniature nature preserves mask the grisly nature of their contents as best they can as the fish do their work on the bodies of the deceased, which are contained within ornamental wire cages beneath the water’s surface. In short order, the flesh is stripped from the bone before it can rot to any significant degree, and the pristine bones can either remain in a purchased cemetery plot or be returned to the next of kin to be used as they see fit. The fish, for their part, are allowed to feed and breed and populate, until such a time as they are required as a source of food for the townsfolk’s basilisks.

That hefty aside out of the way, Stirgan burials: Until quite recently, relatively speaking, their most common burial method took place not on land, but at sea! Specially weighted coffins, made from metal, stone, or dense hardwoods, would be dropped into the sea in designated areas, marked with elaborate bouys that bear plates with the names of all who rest below. Most of these coffins are intentionally left unenclosed so that they will quickly flood and sink to the sea floor, as well as to allow scavengers in to pick the bodies clean and prevent any dangers of putrid caskets floating to the surface in the future.

From what I’ve been told, recent advances in nautical engineering have allowed folk to descend beneath the waves without fear of imminent drowning in order to visit the departed more closely than has ever been possible before. I was unable to find anyone who had personally done so who was willing to speak with me on the matter, sadly, but according to second-hand accounts, the reeds and other growths that have overtaken the massive bed of skeleton-filled coffins is quite the sobering sight to behold, though beautiful in its own way. Perhaps, one day, I will make such a visit myself, if I can find someone willing to take me on a trip in one of these so-called submersibles.

The change in popular style, however, came with the rise of one of Stirge’s younger gods; A fellow by the name of Condrir - a name not unheard of in my homeland, nor that of the Underkingdom, it turns out - who in life helped proliferate lighthouses across all of Stirge and beyond, and in death continues to reward the forward-thinking and the well-prepared.

With the advent of the modern lighthouse and the startling revelations in just how impactful they were to sailors, towering platforms have begun to dot the coasts. Atop these structures, Stirgans build massive funeral pyres and cremate their fallen in the dead of night, shedding some much-needed light into the inky seas. Some lighthouses have even had specialized platforms added to them to allow such fires to augment their existing lights! It’s an interesting and respectable sentiment, really. When one’s life ends, it’s quite touching to be willing to devote what is left behind to help ensure that no others follow unnecessarily.

The last tidbit of information I learned was offered unbidden by one of my more crass guides. As he prattled on for a time about the honors associated with both sunken coffins and the lighthouse pyres, I wondered aloud what was done for those who died inland. The man had shrugged and muttered something about coffins in the ground and pyres that were ‘more symbolic than helpful’ before mentioning something that piqued my interest: Criminals, according to the man, received ground burials almost exclusively, because they were often used as fertilizer.

Stirgan soil is tough stuff, you see. While it can support powerful roots in a way that Duwallen’s marshlands never could, it also lacks the rich nutrients those marshlands provide. Stirge’s land requires tending, turning, and added fertilizers, and it seems rotting corpses served quite well in that third case.

I pressed the man eagerly for more information, and he was quick to note that it was generally feed crops that were fertilized in this way, rather than anything meant for human consumption, but he didn’t seem willing to state that it was only feed crops. Still, I was not here to judge, and despite it sounding rather grisly to eat vegetables that grew over the bodies of dead criminals, I had to admit that it was at least quite an efficient use of resources. After all, it wasn’t as if those bodies were somehow any worse than that of a fish or hare or what have you, which I believe are also often used even in Duwallen. I suppose I’d worry a touch more about the spiritual side of things, but really, if a criminal’s spirit is willing to waste time haunting the makings of my next Stirgan salad, I believe I can consider myself safe from whatever ‘horrors’ they might conjure up.

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I had intended to end my diatribe there, expanding on the points I had covered in greater detail some time in the future, but shortly after I returned to Duwallen’s shores, I encountered something that was not only extremely relevant to my work here, but also something unlike anything I had seen in any of the far-off places I’d just visited. How I had been so blind as to miss something so fantastic on my own doorstep, I’m afraid I shall never know.

However, I could not return from this trip and inform you all of these fascinating findings I’d made without discussing what is perhaps the most fascinating of all!

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You pause. That’s where the current page ends, but it’s also the last page you have. Professor von Flussufer is looking at you expectantly, waiting for feedback. He doesn’t seem to realize he hasn’t given you everything. When you point out that you’re lacking his final story, he grows concerned.

“Oh dear,” he mutters, looking around his desk, rifling through stacks of papers and opening several drawers, “I certainly remember writing it, but I do hope I remembered to actually place it on the pile…” He groans and stares into space for a moment. “Or I suppose I might have lost it to the damn winds on the trolley on my way up here this morning,” he muses.

You kindly note that you understand. These sorts of things happen. At any rate, at least you were able to look over so much of the prior work!

But he shakes his head stubbornly. “No, no, no, that final story is too good to be left out! I’ll have to rewrite it, I imagine, but for the time being…” He leans back in his chair. A sly smile creeps onto his face, shadows shifting across it strangely in the light from the flickering gaslamp on his desk. “For the time being, I suppose I’ll just have to tell you the story.”

He chuckles for a time, reaching over idly to grab a worn, leather-clad journal from one of the drawers he’d been digging through a moment before. He flips through the pages until he finds the one he needs.

“Now then. I think I remember how things went… Allow me to tell you of my encounter with the Lumbering Grave.”