Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spear spikes baited with men's bloodied guts.
Alright, forum, what else have you in the way of literary ultraviolence?
A bit of my own bloody violence.
It doesn't glorify death, but it's a good read, if I don't say so myself.
"Dulce Et Decorum Est"
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
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Ultra-violins I would love to use in-game:
You swing your hammer for 17 points of damage, slamming the orc's head against the cold stone walls, crushing his skull into pulp. Nice job, killer.
15 slashing damage from a greatsword? Horizontal slash at the dwarf's neck level. His head goes one way, the resultant ribbon of blood the other.
All right, you critically hit him with your battleaxe. You succeed in bisecting the elf fighter's head. Diagonally.
I knock him on his back and go all preying mantis on him with my kukris.
Once more I smote him, with the last third blow,
Sacred to Hades, saviour of the dead.
And thus he fell, and as he passed away,
Spirit with body chafed; each dying breath 1600
Flung from his breast swift bubbling jets of gore,
And the dark sprinklings of the rain of blood
Fell upon me; and I was fain to feel
That dew—not sweeter is the rain of heaven 1604
To cornland, when the green sheath teems with grain
Agamemnon's Widow, Clytemnestra.
The clangor of the swords had died away, the shouting of the slaughter was hushed; silence lay on the red-stained snow. The bleak pale sun that glittered so blindingly from the ice-fields and the snow-covered plains struck sheens of silver from rent corselet and broken blade, where the dead lay as they had fallen. The nerveless hand yet gripped the broken hilt; helmeted heads back-drawn in the death-throes, tilted red beards and golden beards grimly upward, as if in last invocation to Ymir the frost-giant, god of a warrior-race...
When the battle was over, the henchman was still falling. Entering a hole in the floor, then exiting a hole in the roof, then back through the same floor again as fast as they eye could follow. The sight pulled the adventurers' eyes towards the roof, coaxing them into staring up at the room above them, which was their own room, and had the same room above that... that was disorienting, but not nearly as bad as the man's prolonged shriek, a sound of unresisted panic and abandoned sanity, reverberating in on itself as it echoed through the ghastly acoustics of the impossible chamber. All three cringed as the poor fellow struck the hole's edge, finally carried across the recursive shaft by horizontal momentum. His scream was cut off as some indistinct part of him splattered across the floor at their feet; the rest tumbled back into a quiet freefall.
"It's rather lovely now, actually, the way the blood keeps falling..."
Everyone looked at the gnome.
"What??"
The clangor of the swords had died away, the shouting of the slaughter was hushed; silence lay on the red-stained snow. The bleak pale sun that glittered so blindingly from the ice-fields and the snow-covered plains struck sheens of silver from rent corselet and broken blade, where the dead lay as they had fallen.
This is pretty.
The nerveless hand yet gripped the broken hilt; helmeted heads back-drawn in the death-throes, tilted red beards and golden beards grimly upward, as if in last invocation to Ymir the frost-giant, god of a warrior-race...
This I had to read a few times before I could parse it correctly.