Wicht von Astert

[Unseelie]

It had started with a body, of course. A body which had been found in a Rhienland Military uniform. The dogtags proclaimed him Corporal Hans Hartmann, of Stuttgart. A big, burly man, dressed in green, dead in a toolshed. He seemed handsome, and peaceful, as long as you didn't roll him over. Of course, the police had rolled him over.

He'd had frost in his beard, and his clothing was stiff from it, cap and mitts frozen to his skin and stiff from the encrusting ice. When three men couldn't peel him from the riveted floor, they'd taken crowbars to the corpse, and slowly cracked the uniform from the floor, rolling him onto the coroner's cart. The body whacked the cart like a fallen log, without any sort of fleshy jiggle. The man was an icecicle.

The coroner reported his spine missing, the bones torn out, and soup made of his insides. His organs were a sort of jelly, melting far sooner than they should have. The goo ran when the body was touched, seeping from cracks in the brittle skin.
The body was burned.

They would burn so many more bodies.