Curate, connect, and discover
Oh I just had an evil thought about the Ghoul AU
Belos uses food as a main manipulation tactic for keeping Hunter "efficient and successful" on his missions. It has not been revealed where that meat comes from (if I'm not missing or forgetting anything).
I would totally believe that since petrification is admittedly rarely done if at all in the present day, Belos would feed him the meat of prisoners. Maybe he would amputate them and use those removed limbs to simultaneously feed Hunter less and still keep the meat fresh---objectively, it's being efficient with resources and punishing him for underperforming.
How fucked up would it be if (assuming that the ingredients required to create Grimwalkers are reusable and that the process is worth the time investment) Belos feeds him other Grimwalkers. What if he had tried it previously with the bodies of failed specimens? Would they have been able to tell the difference?
Sorry for the ramble, I just woke up from a nap and had a brrrrrr brain moment
Correct for the most part! The Emperor coven is already known to have secret petrifications of Wild witches so it would make sense for some of them to be executed in different ways for reasons. I don’t think he’d be bother to have limbs amputated, rather why not just kill them if he’s already fine with doing that.
Though the idea of “reformed” wild witches(aka those forced into covens) leaving the conformatorium with missing limbs and being told that’s just punishment is all sorts of dystopian. Though, I always like the idea that the most wild of witches would just “disappear” and the rest, lesser ones would be forced into covens or kept imprisoned. They all get arrested but have different fates depending on severity of their crimes.
After Hunter carvings arise, Belos has a select few witches hanged and taken to the morgue where they could be butchered by him or Hunter (a form of punishment) for food privately.
I always saw Grimwalkers being a limited product due to having very limited sources. I mean there aren’t many palistorm trees, selkidomous are rare, stonesleeper lungs where already limited at the start and might degrade over time, and the galdorstones are difficult to obtain. Realistically, I think Belos could only have a max of two grimwalkers at a time since he’s reusing parts.
Also the horror that Hunter’s body parts had been reused multiple times for past Golden Guards is too horrific to pass up. I think Belos harvests the corpses for these parts after killing them, all besides the bone since that’s too tedious for what it’s worth. So as much as he would like to make Hunter cannibalize other grimwalkers for experiments, he can’t do that unfortunately without further degrading a limited source.
(I think he would have had more sources in the past where he would have been able to do experiments on the grimwalkers until these materials eventually became unusable and he had to be more cautious on what he used his remaining materials on, much to his dismay)
So the best he could do is make Hunter eat the bones. Yes our boy eats bones, plenty of carnivorous animals do and it’s a good source of calcium. Though he can’t survive off them, thats an incredibly deficient diet. Since Hunter is actually consuming something that’s the same species as him, this is genuine cannibalism and it makes him incredibly sick.
Hunter is unaware of this of course, assuming it’s some random witch bone that tastes weirdly gross and is also a bit aged for his liking(not like he has the option to be picky)
Like I said, it makes him sick. Like he’s been poisoned sick. Through these are just bones and who’s to say that Belos doesn’t have grimwalker organs and flesh, preserved somewhere in storage. Might explore that possibility in the future.