It is an incontestible cycle of human history, 5000 years old: Cities rise, then they fall
But what of this city?
The man walks with difficulty down the street. The street sign reads: ISCARIOT AVENUE.
He is carrying a severed head on a stick, and the severed head talks. "Can you spare any change?" the head asks passersby. The man himself can't talk; his body has half gone to rot. One eye is an empty hole; tiny fanged mites rove in his hair. His skin is pustulating from the latest urban infection, and his tongue has long-since been eaten out of his mouth by vermin.
A well-dressed woman in a smart bonnet taps by on elegant high heels. She's wearing a fur-lined trench coat of patterned human skin, and diminutive horns sprout from her smooth, angled forehead. The woman is an uptown She-Demon.
"Can you spare some change, ma'am?" the head asks.
The man holding the head extends a cadaverous hand, and before the elegant She-Demon walks on, she gives him a shiny twenty-five-cent piece.
The coin is embossed not with the face of George Washington but the face of serial killer Richard Speck.
"Thank you," the severed head says to the She-Demon as she traipses away.
They recycle here.
Hybrid Trolls comprise a municipal reclamation crew, transferring any manner of corpse from the streets into the huge back bins of several steam-powered Meat Trucks. Eventually the trucks will chug past the front gates of the Industrial Zone, emptying their wares into the collection hoppers of a typical city Pulping Station. Blood will be drained for distillation, flesh fileted for sustenance, bones dried and ground for cement. Good value, to say the least.
Barges manned by Golems float atop the brown, lump-ridden surface of a river called Styx, pumping raw sewage into the city's domestic water reservoirs. Great furnaces burn raw sulphur for no other purpose than polluting the air, but vents in the furnace silos recycle the intense heat to keep the local prisons roaring hot. The hair of the human dead is used to stuff pillows and mattresses for the demonic elite.
Even Souls are recycled. When one body suffers sufficient destruction, the Soul is transferred to a lower species. Endless life in eternal death.
Most cities run on electricity, but this city runs on horror. Suffering serves as convertible energy; terror is the city's most valuable natural resource, where it is tapped as fuel. Industrial Alchemists and civic Warlocks use their advanced means of sorcery to harness the synaptic activity that constantly fires between neurons, the greatest production of which comes from pain; this power is called agonicity or electrocity. In the humming Power Plants, the city's least useful residents are impounded, hung upside-down against long stone slabs and systematically tortured. The torture never ends—as they never really die. Instead they just hang there, often for centuries, convulsing from ceaseless pain, the energy of which is fed from their exposed brains to the vast power converters.
A single human Soul can generate enough agonicity to light a city block—forever.
