Worldscar

The apocalypse already came and went.

Nobody won. Nobody lost. The civilizations that built wonders beyond comprehension are gone. The gods are dead. The suns are black. The last worlds circle cold stars at the edge of existence.

And yet, somehow, things are still moving.

The universe is just an exhausted corpse still twitching.

Life continues because it does not know how to stop. The universe is not hostile—hostility implies intention. It is worse than that. It's existence itself is diseased, atrophied, and refusing to die.

There is no dawn coming. No restoration. No golden age. No chosen people waiting to rebuild what was lost. What remains are the final spasms of something that should, for all intents and purposes, already be dead.

The survivors are not inheritors of greatness. They are scavengers picking meat from the bones of dead history.

Across blackened worlds that have become little more than enormous graveyards, loosely cobbled-together scavangers masquerade as the remnants of once-glorious civilizations. They fight over scrap, bones, food, fuel, and ancient weapons they barely understand.

There is no salvation.

There is only hunger.

Hunger is the last law of the Mortisphere.

Everything is energy-starved. Everything consumes.

Creatures hunger for flesh. Machines hunger for fuel. Armies hunger for conquest. Dead gods hunger for forgotten worship. Survivors hunger for one more day.

Nothing grows anymore. Nothing flourishes. Everything that remains survives by consuming something else.

The last scraps of existence are being eaten by the things stubborn enough to remain alive.

What will remain when they are finished?

Nothing.

Mortisphere is not a world waiting for the apocalypse.

The apocalypse is over.

Think of its inhabitants as people wandering through the empty pages after the story has already ended.

The universe died screaming.

The scream is what remains.

But this is not a story about miserable survivors hiding in bunkers and contemplating the hopelessness of existence.

Nobody has time for that shit.

The sun is dead?

Cool. Bring torches.

The gods died?

Perfect. Their bones make excellent fortifications.

Someone just challenged a seven-metre mutant warlord to a knife fight for the heck of it?

Dibs on his boots.

A thousand screaming warriors march across the corpse of a dead god because there is nothing else left to do. Nothing matters anymore, and for precisely that reason, they will carve their names into the bones of creation anyway, along their path of utter destruction and death.

Ride into the darkness.

Blow something up.

Take its loot.

Laugh because tomorrow probably doesn't exist.

The worlds of the Mortisphere are the garbage heap left behind by creation.

Black suns burn coldly over dead planets. Rusted war machines the size of cities crawl unmanned across ash plains. Squabbles over ancient weapons capable of annihilating planets are prized yet barely function. Mutant beasts grown to ridiculous proportions can be found absolutely everywhere. New hope cities, which are filled with anything but hope, resides by the skeletons of dead gods, fueling them and corrupting them all the same.

Nothing green remains.

There are no forests or meadows. There is no natural abundance waiting to reclaim civilization. All, is dead.

Instead there are blackened wastelands, rust deserts, ash plains, bone fields, ancient ruins, dead cities, fungal colonies, corpse mountains, chemical rivers, and seas filled with whatever ancient putrid fluids still leak from the remains of creation.

Mountains may be the fossilized remains of creatures too enormous to comprehend. Valleys may be wounds of these creatures. Entire regions may consist of the rotting flesh of the last gods, laid bare beneath the black sky.

The question is never:

What lives here?

The question is always:

What has managed to keep lurking in the shadows of the black sky after everything else died?

And you know as well as I do, nothing fucking good, that's what.

Mortisphere is macabre and grotesque, but it is not primarily horror.

Imagine the book art as,

A warlord rides a gigantic corpse-beast across a dead planet.

A knight carries a chainsaw-sword fashioned from the jawbone of an extinct god.

A fungus-covered titan awakens because some idiots tried to loot its ribcage.

A machine-priest repairs a ten-thousand-year-old cannon by replacing its missing components with bones.

A gang of scavengers murders each other over the last barrel of fuel while a dead moon falls from the sky.

The Rust Saints charge across the skull plains while the Black Choir opens fire from the corpse-fortress of a dead god.

A corpse has become the host of a sentient mushroom using its bones to move.

Everything is excessive.

Everything is filthy.

Everything is magnificent.

This is heavy-metal absurdity at the end of existence.

Across some dead worlds stand enormous forests of pale mushrooms.

Their long, impossibly slender stems disappear into the black sky. Far above, immense caps spread into a false canopy where leaves once might have reached toward sunlight.

There is no sunlight anymore.

And these are not forests in any conventional sense.

Beneath the fungal towers lie thousands upon thousands of corpses. Skulls are fused into the earth. Ancient armour protrudes from heaps of decomposing bodies. The remains of forgotten armies form the soil. Broken machines slowly disappear beneath mycelium.

The mushrooms rise from them.

Beautiful.

Enormous.

Utterly grotesque.

The idea is not, to create a sense of dread and despair, the idea is to make the viewer go, “Of course there is a mushroom forest growing from a million corpses. Where else would it grow?” That's the premise we want this world to build upon.

That, is Mortisphere.

The last worlds are littered with places bearing names such as:

The Doomwastes. Gravehollow. The Blightlands. Carrion Reach. Deathmarch. Woevale. Dreadmoor. The Rotlands. The Blackwaters. Gravepeak. Doomspire. Deathscar. The Carrion Sea. Wormwood. Hellmouth. The Godgrave. Skullreach. Doomhold. Woehold. Blackgrave. The Ruinlands. The Dreadwatch.

There is no need for subtlety.

The universe ended.

Call the enormous field of skulls Skullreach.

Civilizations are fucked.

Machines are fucked.

Gods are fucked.

Planets are fucked.

Reality itself is abso-fucking-lutely fucked.

Everything that still functions does so imperfectly, violently, or for reasons nobody understands.

= II. EVERYTHING IS HUNGRY =

Every creature, faction, machine, and surviving civilization wants something.

Flesh. Fuel. Territory. Worship. Power. Scrap. Blood. Another sunrise that will never come.

Existence has been reduced to raw and pure consumption with no moral.

= III. NOBODY CARES ANYMORE =

There is no fixing the Mortisphere.

There is no saving the universe.

There is only surviving, in this cold, terrible, and very very dead universe where only hunger remains.

Let's fuck shit up.