"After The Battle" - Prompt (World Building Notes)

Here's a Prompt Link, from @alonicus who has been putting out some prompts here in the world-building community, and these one is about "After The Battle"

In your setting, what happens to all the bodies on the battlefield once the killing is over? Are there even any bodies? Are they left to rot or buried in mass graves? Is there a truce for both sides to bury their dead? Do the winners desecrate the remains of their foes, or dispose of them with honour? Are trophy monuments set up or other rituals performed?

Also, a snippet of useless information for the day; in the Napoleonic period, bone was frequently used where we would now use plastic, e.g. for buttons. Old battlefields were a popular source of bone that had weathered for a couple of years. If anyone asked, of course it was bone from horses...

It's a good question, and following the questions asked of us, we are given a historical snippet, which I think helps to stir our creativity and helps to get the mind working.

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Kah-Vita
In the war for Kah-Vita, the dead littered the streets. Many rural towns and villages were sacked and pillaged by The Confederation forces that found themselves there.

The Person in charge of the Kah-Vitan campaign was a man by the name of Brigadier T. H. Croyle; who was an absolute monster when it came to his tactics. He found no "Sport" in Ariel bombardments. He did leave the bulk of his forces in orbit above the world and even set up a base on the largest moon of Kah-Vita, Lyni.

Up there he built a dockyard, that is still in use today. It was the only safe place he could land his cruisers, or so he thought. He wasn't expecting an attack from beyond Kah-Vita. But, years into the campaign an attack came from a rouge band of marauding Braakneia troops; who had only recently lost their planet.

They sacked the base -Not to help Kah-Vita, but to steal ships - some of which are used in their enormous fleet, which still wanders the stars, and occasionally sacks Confederation colonies.

T.H Croyle saw this as some sort of joint operation, and decided to punish the population; the bodies of the dead festered and anyone who was caught trying to bury or burn them was tortured in creative ways and left out as a warning to the rest.

Many ghost towns have been re-settled, but there is an ever-present un-easy feeling when in one of these places. In the capital city, known as Lavatrone, there are huge statues erected to ensure the people never forget what they did, even though most would prefer to.

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Gnosians and The Dead
These large creatures are known to brutalise their victims for fun, and there is rarely anything left of the bodies afterward as they go on to eat the bodies, some even say they start when the person is still living. That's not entirely true though, they only eat the first one or two of a group they capture; as a way to terrorize the others.

The Gnosians famously retreated into Dark Space as The Confederation invaded Free Space. Not every Gnosian, there are still some of them living on many different worlds, but no one respects them as a species, on account of the majority of their people running away. "They could have been the deciding factor." This is what people commonly say when discussing the subject, and it's true. But, they were also the "reason" for the invasion in the first place.

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Jex
Brigadier Runish was the one in charge of the Jex campaign, and he ordered his ships to glass the planet from orbit, spewing molten minerals onto the world, mainly for a chance to test this new material on a large-scale population.

There are places in the Dead Zone where people are still and frozen solid in this liquid. No one ever touches them, as the Dead Zoners believe that one could find themselves cursed by doing so.

Famously, in the center of the city, where reconstruction started. There was a park created, and all throughout there are waves crashing from the sky, and then artist renditions of the aftermath. It's worth seeing, and anyone who goes usually splashes out for the guided tour of the park. It's a tourist trap, but at least it's educational.

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