The dramatic podcast The Silt Verses by Jon Ware is set in an alternate universe where monstrous “god-like” entities are both revered by familiar technological societies and exploited by government leaders. As political tensions build between the Peninsula and the Linger Straits nations, such gods are weaponized to mutate innocent mortals into terrifying monsters fired at enemy populations.
The story’s two main characters, the jaded veteran worshipper Carpenter and the fervent neophyte Faulkner, begin the series as illicit devotees of The Trawler-Man, an outlawed river god. The pair are hunted by relentless travelling police agents such as Investigating Officer Hayward who chase reports of underground religious activity and “unlicensed” feral gods. Eventually all three are drawn into deadly factional intrigue and the horrors of a modern eldritch war.
In one episode, the marketing/design agency Old Black Crow decides to rebrand its patron corporate mascot/god The Bronze Savant with a new god, The Crawling-in-Ecstasy. To “product launch” this entity (“welcome the new corporate god into the environment”), the company’s management arranges a mass sacrifice of under-performing employees and those at the end of their corporate contracts – a process known as “hallowing” a saint.
The hierarchy of entities in this universe include:
* GODS: Hungry divine powers sustained by worship and sacrifice.
* ANGELS: Living manifestations of gods, including saints, animals, artificial things, and collateral monsters. (For example, The Trawler Man manifested/used giant crab monsters.)
* SAINTS: Sacrificed humans remade into divine manifestations. When war began, these victims were transformed (“hallowed”) by ritual, packed into rockets, and launched into enemy territory to wreak havoc on local populations.
* HUMANS: Prophets and priests, common people, and martyrs offered as sacrifices to the gods or, later, forcibly made into Saints. (Many “martyrs” were political dissidents and criminal convicts cleared out of government camps and prisons.)
Some of the “gods” mentioned in the series include:
* THE TRAWLER-MAN: Rivers, drowning, silt, tides, flesh, crabs/river-angels, death-and-return; specifically the White Gull River. An illegal god of the White Gull River worshipped by the Parish of Tide and Flesh.
* THE SAINT ELECTRIC: Electricity, radio, pylons, power plants, trains, electrical grids, commercial infrastructure. Commercial licensed as the god tied to electricity and radio, “fed” by sacrifices managed by the state.
* THE GRINDINGLORD: God of coffee, wakefulness, stimulant/sedative beverages, workday consumption, sacrifice through sleeplessness.
* OLD MAN MIRRORS: A god of glass, mirrors, enclosed reflective spaces. Its angel, a Mirror-Angel, is unleashed as a tool of assassination and sacrifice at a civil service conference.
* THE WAXEN SCRIVENER: Illegal god of forgotten or abandoned faiths, sacred books, corrupted preservation. Tied to insects that feed on sacred texts left to rot. A bookseller is found to shelter his brother in the process of being “hallowed” (ritually transformed) into a Larva Saint, a human-sized insect creature.
* PENDA’S SLAKE / THE GOD OF PENDA’S SLAKE: Forest/chapel lure-god; predation, sacrifice, local rural cult, monstrous transformation.
* THE PETROPATER: Oil, petroleum, fuel, extraction, industrial energy.
* THE SLAG KING: Slag, mining/industrial waste, furnaces, heavy industry.
* THE CLOAK: Concealment, refuge, fugitives, hiding, possibly mercy or escape.
* THE CAIRN MAIDEN: Goddess of death and possibly destiny, cairns, stones, burial markers, mourning, memory, mountain/rock sanctity. May appear as a recurring vision to those she has marked, protecting them until the appointed moment of their death.
* THE MANY BELOW: Subterranean or underworld collectivity; buried masses, the dead/hidden many, communal under-earth power.
* THE LAST WORD: Formerly a young woman named Val, given over to the state for a special “hallowing” program. She is then either a saint of the rhetoric gods or a goddess of rhetoric herself. Associated with command, reality-changing speech, final authority, war propaganda. She has the power to change people, places, or history just by saying “corrected facts” aloud, “much like the outlawed rhetorical gods,” usually to inflict suffering and destruction on those who get in her way. Has serious mother issues. She mostly affects nearby targets, but her power can reach continents away if linked to someone present. (“Your family back home never really existed, did they?”)
* THE BURNISHED MIRROR: Reflection, silence, self-recognition. Some Children of the Burnished Mirror observe vows of silence.
* BROTHER BOIL AND SISTER SORE: Infection, sores, inflammation, bodily affliction, sickness.
* JOLLY KING KIPPER: Fish, canned/processed seafood, food-brand divinity, commercial appetite.
* THE BEAST THAT STALKS IN THE LONG GRASS: Predation, pursuit, wild grasslands, hunting, rural fear.
* THE WIREBITTEN CHILD: Wires, electricity/telecommunications, injury, children, possibly industrial sacrifice.
* SID WRIGHT’S GOD: Sleep, anti-sacrifice, broadcast compulsion, escape from wakefulness; born from popular radio DJ Sid Wright’s failed/altered Grindinglord sacrifice.
* THE PROPAGANDA GODS: Rhetoric, persuasion, lies/truth, war propaganda; the wiki describes them as rhetorical gods once called “Liars’ Gods.”
More gods, angels, and saints are described on the Silt Verses fan wiki.