I love the idea of dead gods. Not in the sense of “hey i killed something supernaturally strong” but in the sense of “i killed it and it’s still a god.” It is still worshipped. prayers are still answered. miracles are performed in its name, even as it lies pierced by a thousand swords and burning with chemical fire. even as it drifts through vacuum, decapitated and bleeding molten rock. in cosmic spite of being shot through each eye and hurled into a plasma reactor, it still radiates the power of the divine in a way that primitive death cannot smother. the nature of godchild is not so simple as to be tied to the mortality, or immortality, of any living being.
In science that’s called a whalefall :)
that is horribly accurate of a description, thank you for the terrifying image of Bog.
Now I’m just imagining a corpse of some ancient deity slowly falling apart as it rots but its every little scrap of flesh still capable of performing miracles and people hurredly butchering it for sceaps to have REAL miracles of their own. Medieval snake-oil salesmen actually selling miraculous elixirs made of the dead god, a broken down church bustling with pilgrims wanting to touch and recieve the blessing from some priest(of an entirely different god) who can actually heal anyone but fo a small donation to their own deity. The imagery and religious iconography of the god retaining their mystical power but being adapted to other gods or even claimed as being made by one’s own magical brilliance. Bit by bit everyone takes a piece of it, carnivorous minor gods desperate to be on the limelight like the big named gods, spirits thinking they can become godly, even wizards and magicfolk trying to define and quantify its existence and power through research. By the end when there are no scraps left and only the barest bones remain is it buried in obscurity as its miracles are abused by those of other faiths, by tricksters, and by nonbelievers. Thus the deity’s own faith and religion are lost to time but still not truly dead only waiting to be unearthed unknown eras later by the unknowing and ignorant at the mercy if its remaining ancient authority as a dead god haunting the world. Even as fossilized bones in the dirt, a god is a god and even a god can leave behind a ghost.
Those are very well thought out and compelling cultural effects of a god-being’s death, but one reason I thought of whalefalls is the ecological side of things, the fact that there are whole living organisms that come into existence only for the presence of a dead whale….osedax worms drift dormant in the ocean as microscopic eggs, and they only wake up when they touch whale bone. Then the skeleton of a whale spends years and years as a “garden” of worms that don’t exist in any other kind of environment, and they help maintain a tiny ecosystem out of a body so big it can take actual decades to completely disappear.
Even a deer dying is an explosion of specialized life like that; maggots eat the flesh, everyone knows that, but as the soft flesh is cleared away you get hide beetles that only eat skin and bone, moths that only eat fur, even special kinds of maggots that specialize in the interiors of broken horns, not to mention all the bacteria and fungi pouring out into the surrounding environment as well. In turn, all of these things have their own specialized parasites and predators; larger beetles that prey exclusively on maggots, mites that feed on the eggs of carrion insects, parasitoid wasps, nematodes, a whole food web exploding just around one roadkill skunk.
So if you have a setting where gods have always existed and gods can die, then you have to wonder what kinds of things had to have evolved to make a god decompose :)
