The Gods of Mars
  • 148
  • 0
  • 26
  • Reads 148
  • 0
  • Part 26
Completed, First published Mar 02, 2026

Dust-choked canyons bleed crimson under a dying sun. Here, beneath the ochre skies of a forgotten god, a civilization of sculpted bone and decaying splendor clings to life. Burroughs’ Mars is not a land of romantic conquest, but a tomb-world haunted by the echoes of a vanished race. The Tharks, gaunt and spectral, stalk the barrens, driven by ritualistic hunger and shadowed by the remnants of their ancient, colossal makers. Within crumbling cities carved into the very rock, whispers of a past cataclysm linger—a betrayal amongst the gods themselves. John Carter finds himself caught in a web of ancient feuds, where honor is measured in the weight of severed limbs, and salvation is a hollow promise etched in the dust. The air is thick with the scent of decay, the silence broken only by the rasp of wind through empty eye sockets of forgotten statues. This is a Mars where the line between salvation and damnation is a whisper of sand, where the gods themselves have fallen to rot, and the only certainty is the slow, inexorable march towards oblivion beneath a bruised and bleeding sky. It’s a landscape of bone-white despair, haunted by the ghosts of a fractured past, where every sunrise heralds another day of unraveling beneath the gaze of cold, alien stars.
Copyright: Public Domain
This license allows anyone to use your story for any purpose, including printing, selling, or adapting it into a film freely.
Recommended for you
16 Part
A creeping dread clings to the Yorkshire moors, mirroring the decay within Ravensthorpe Manor. The estate, a skeletal silhouette against perpetual twilight, holds a silence thicker than the November fog—a silence punctuated only by the frantic whispers of servants and the brittle coughs of its ailing master, Sir Alistair. He is a man haunted by shadows, both real and imagined, obsessed with uncovering a family curse tied to a missing heir and a portrait whose eyes seem to follow every movement. The narrative unfolds through fragmented diary entries and feverish accounts from those trapped within Ravensthorpe’s stone embrace. Each revelation unravels not a solution, but another layer of suffocating grief and ancestral guilt. The scent of damp earth and dying roses permeates every room, clinging to the velvet drapes and tarnished silver. A suffocating claustrophobia settles over the reader as the investigation descends into a labyrinth of secret passages, forgotten crypts, and the chilling echoes of past tragedies. The manor itself is a character, breathing with a malevolent history. Rain lashes against the leaded windows, mirroring the tempest brewing within the hearts of those who dare to seek the truth. But the truth, when it finally surfaces, is not a grand revelation, but a splintering of sanity, a descent into the madness that has always festered within Ravensthorpe’s walls. It is a tragedy not merely witnessed, but inhaled—a slow, insidious poisoning of the soul.