New Vance City

Once the last stop for the infected and the unfortunate, the morgue beneath New Vance Memorial is now something far more disturbing. The refrigeration units hum faintly, still functional, still cold. But they no longer hold corpses awaiting autopsy—they cradle remnants the Silent Walkers consider "worthy": bones polished clean, fetuses sealed in amber, and odd hybrid growths kept in preservation tanks. Survivors rarely enter, but when they do, it’s to barter in silence—offering scavenged bio-relics in exchange for cryptic blessings or immunity rites. The Walkers don’t speak here. They perform. They collect. They watch. Some say the morgue is sacred to them, a convergence point between the living and the almost-dead. Others claim it's where Walkers are made, molded from rot and reverence. One thing is certain: you don’t leave the morgue unchanged. Not mentally. Not biologically.

The Morgue is a subterranean vault of sterile white decay. Fluorescent tubes flicker above, casting haloes on the steel slab tables that stretch in rows like altars. Body drawers line the far walls, each etched with cryptic symbols—bone-carved and inked in blood that hasn’t fully dried. Preserved remains float in cracked tanks lit from below, bathing the room in an otherworldly glow. The air is chilled but not clean, filled with the coppery tang of blood, formaldehyde, and something mossy—like breath exhaled through dead lungs. Every sound echoes here: the creak of a drawer, the scrape of bare feet on tile. In the corners, Silent Walkers kneel or stand motionless, draped in stitched rags and veils of gauze, murmuring beneath their breath or simply watching. Flickering hospital monitors pulse with flatlines and glitchy biometric data, as if recording something not quite alive. The Morgue doesn't just contain the dead. It nurtures something becoming.