Bacchus knew. He knew that it was autumn on this planet. This part of it, anyway. Their harvest. Dumb as muck rat s**t releasing the dead in a season of dying. How in the a** dancing ******** are they supposed to move on without proof of renewal? Another way the humans were bloody backwards as far as he was concerned. Even so, even knowing how stupid it was to flutter home like a lost bird because of a human holiday, Bacchus was back in this s**t pit looking for the ******** ghosts of whoever the ********. It apparently didn’t matter to him that their souls were probably bobbing around in the Cauldron or floating about in some random reborn a*****e who didn’t know why they owed him an apology.

Bloody humans.

He took another deep swig of the fiery amber liquor as he took in the landscape rotting around the city’s fire blackened stone.

“What a shithole.”

His lip curled into a disdainful sneer as the disgusting wasteland that was the capital slid past him. Living in Destiny City had made him lazier, or maybe this midden heap had expanded since his last visit. He was far too sober for any of this and even the ******** Chaos seemed to have stopped shooting out spores in the absence of anyone to infect.
Lazy p***k.

Some dim part of him knew that the hallucinogenic effects were there to make people careless. To make them more likely to stumble into a pile of half-eaten hosts. Happy little volunteers for its stupid little project. Until, being the shitty boss that it was, it let the high wear off just in time for them to feel the mycelia growing into their muscles. Early enough that they were awake for the whole gruesome process, too late to do a single ******** thing about it. What fun! He snorted, swinging his right arm and trotting past a few knotted clusters of bone. Who needs a festival of the dead when they’re having their own crumbling parade through the streets? His empty bottle spun through the air, meeting in a burst of mutually assured destruction with a skull in a nearby bone pile, the shattering clatter reverberating through the nagging silence. Arms outward he turned in place, face trained on the whirl of buildings around him.

“Still have nothing to say you rootless s**t?”

His boot connected angrily with a disused spinal column, sending a shower of ribs and vertebrae scattering along the flagstones. He couldn’t say if the bones were animal or humanoid and the bottle he called forth from his subspace didn’t care. At some point they’d become less interesting than the rocks at his feet. There was no reason that the bones in the grove should mean a <********> thing to him, but that didn’t stop his body from carrying him to the edge of the city and into the splintered forest as though he’d made the trip every day.

That any of the trees still had enough branches to hold the offerings was unexpected. Tattered banners that somehow clung to their last vestiges of color, bits of gold and glass strung across their wooden carcasses and scattered across the ground. Some idiot’s favorite pendant dangled from an undeservedly intact tree. He delivered a swift kick to its surprisingly solid trunk, bits of bark spraying outward from the impact. The altar remained untouched and untended in the center of the stand of trees, and with a scowl he poured out the remainder of his bottle. One more for the dead.