Content Warning: Gore, Torture
"What do you think happened to the people?" My assistant asked me on our break. At my response - barely a laugh, continuing my work - they continued. "The people on the mountain? You think they got pulled down with the rest of it all?"
I looked to my tables and thought back over the years I'd worked as a pathologist. I'd gotten lucky enough to live in one of the largest cities in Kortha, and a major center for knowledge and history. While that's all well and good for my free time, it seemed like we were one of the mountain's favorite sources for study as well. Every week, more bodies would turn up - rejects of their trials and errors.
There was one with their face split down the middle, swollen at the seams and held together with "staples" made of a bony material. A careless touch snapped the bones apart on contact, the foreign objects rejecting themselves, revealing several hollowed cavities with whorls of teeth inserted haphazardly within the head. More bone staples were found on the arms of the poor soul, we dared not touch them.
Another had multiple sets of ribs grafted to their back in a rough analogue of wings, the bits of flesh holding onto the foreign bone tattered and ghostly. Try as we might, we only found a match to one of the rib bones in our system - the others never turned up. I didn't know if that meant they were dead somewhere else, or something worse.
I closed my eyes as I looked away from the table, trying to forget the last flayed and split victim we had on it, and turned my attention back to the paperwork before me.
"At least they'll never have to worry about family coming to pick up their bodies."