His passing left a grave impression.
It's traditional throughout most of the world to mark a grave whenever possible: with a simple cross or other marker, with a stone bearing a name and other details, or sometimes with a weapon. But sometimes such an artificial marker is not needed. Some beings make a profound change in the ground itself when they die, so that that spot can be distinguished forevermore, and all who pass see that one with great power perished here.
The very good may have a mound suffused with flowers, the evil a blackened husk of charred earth or a smoldering pit, for the same reason they would have, in life, had Fertile Feet or been a Walking Wasteland. Other effects may occur, especially giving a hint as to the nature of the power of the one buried.
In a variation, the change can be made by a survivor, as a way of memorialising the fallen.
If the change is a curse placed by the dying one with their last breath, that's a Dying Curse. Compare Leaking Can of Evil and Evil Tainted the Place. Not to be confused with supernatural variants of Prematurely Marked Grave.
As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In the ending of DARLING in the FRANXX, a cherry tree grows from Zero Two's petrified body after it crumbles into dust. When Zero Two and Hiro's disembodied souls finally make it back to Earth many years later and are reincarnated, they meet again under this tree, which has grown enormous.
- In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, the 2nd Databook reveals the Blue Spider Lilly, the one thing Muzan wanted in the whole world, coincidentally started growing in Uta's grave, the late wife of Muzan’s mortal enemy Yoriichi; the irony being said flower only blooms during the day, barring the evil limited by the night that is Muzan from ever identifying it.
Film — Animated
- FernGully: The Last Rainforest: The Big Bad, Hexxus, was defeated and sealed in an ugly, gnarled tree prior to the events of the movie (and at the end of the movie, sealed in a much bigger, less ugly tree).
- Interstella 5555: After Shep is buried, the Crescendolls hold hands and meditate around his grave. Blue flowers instantly grow on it, and his ghost appears and flies off.
Film — Live-Action
- The witch in Hawk the Slayer erects a forcefield dome over Baldin's grave to keep predators away from his corpse.
Folklore
- Possibly similar to the John Newton example below, there is an allegedly true story that an apple farmer killed a an apple thief and buried him on the orchard and from then on those apples had a reddish tinge inside; giving rise to the Bloody Ploughman
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- According to Japanese Mythology, Cherry Blossoms get their pink color from having a body buried underneath one.
- In most versions of the Japanese folktale of Tamamo-no-Mae, after the malevolent kitsune is killed her corpse petrifies into a cursed stone called the Sesshōseki, which emits a deadly miasma that kills anyone who goes near it.
Literature
- In the Alcatraz Series, the grave of Alcatraz Smedry's ancestor Allekatrase the First exists in a state of perfect stasis, owing to Allekatrase using his Breaking Talent on time itself there.
- In the Arcia Chronicles, when the Elven lord Asten is killed, nothing special happens to his body or the place the murder took place. However, that doesn't sit well with Gerika, so she causes the earth to magically envelop it, then transmutes the earth into a giant amethyst.
- Invoked in one of the Tiffany Aching Discworld books. After an old woman was accused of witchcraft, evicted from her house with her cat, and shunned until she starved or froze to death, Tiffany makes a point of planting flowers and catnip on the woman's grave to make people think this has happened.
- In Eragon, when Brom is buried, Saphira uses dragon magic to transmute his tomb into diamond, which Eragon has to go back and make magically impregnable because a giant diamond sitting out in the open is just begging for someone to chip pieces off.
- Harry Potter:
- When Dumbledore dies in The Half-Blood Prince, he is entombed in a magically created sarcophagus of solid white marble.
- Downplayed with Dobby in The Deathly Hallows. The only magic used is engraving his name onto his headstone. Harry wants to avert this trope by digging his grave without using magic.
- In Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Thalia's tree, and more importantly, the barrier that keeps out the various monsters, fits the bill.
- In C. B. Colby's Strangely Enough! story "No Grass on the Grave", a man named John Newton was sentenced to death by hanging. He maintained that he was not guilty of the crime he was accused of and that as proof, no grass would grow on his grave for a generation. Despite the best efforts of the townsfolk, not only would grass not grow on his grave but the grassless area was in the shape of a coffin. More than sixty years later grass finally grew on the grave...in the shape of a cross.
- Happens many, many times in Tolkien's Legendarium. Some specifics:
- The Dead Marshes are a former battlefield, the site of the last great battle of the alliance of Elves and Men against Sauron. The land has never recovered, and puddles contain corpses of soldiers from either side in a perpetual state of semi-decomposition, their spirits seeking to lure the living to join them. Gollum also notes that while you can see the bodies, you cannot actually touch or reach them. Similar wastelands mark other major battles which took place during The Silmarillion.
- The flower Simbelmynë grows in Rohan, almost exclusively on the grave mounds of the kings, and most profusely for the most famous king, Helm Hammerhand.
- In The Two Towers, a band of orcs is destroyed by Rohirrim and their bodies made into a pyre. The narration states that the ground never returns to health.
- In The Return of the King, the grass on Snowmane's grave grows long and green (presumably because he was from a line of Cool Horses), even though he inadvertently caused his master's death. By contrast, the place where the Nazgûl's Giant Flyer perishes is barren.
- In The Silmarillion, Tol Morwen, the grave of Túrin, Niënor, and Morwen, survived the sinking of Beleriand as an island.
- The spot where Glaurung, Father of Dragons, was burned was also forever barren.
- After the cataclysmic defeat of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, the bodies of slain Elves and Men were thrown into a great heap, the Hill of the Slain. Grass grew atop it, so it alone was a place of life in an otherwise burned and ruined wasteland.
- Glorfindel, leader of the House of the Golden Flower, was buried high in the cliffs of the mountains surrounding Gondolin. Despite this rocky location, yellow flowers (possibly celandine) grew upon his mound.
- The Wheel of Time:
- In the prologue, Lews Therin Telamon is so overcome with despair upon the realisation that he has been driven mad and slain everyone he loved, that he kills himself with a beam of energy that pierces the earth and raises a colossal volcano on an otherwise featureless plain. It comes to be called Dragonmount and is the site of his reincarnation's birth.
- Someshta, the Green Man, dies while using his Green Thumb powers to take out one of the forsaken, and a large tree grows where he dies. The next morning, it has a growth of flowers at its base, and Loial uses his own abilities to make sure the tree will not be claimed by the Blight.
- In the last book, Egwene discovers the antithesis to Balefire, and channels so much of it in a Beam-O-War that she obliterates herself, transforming the surroundings and all of her opponents into indestructible crystal.
- There's a myth that when the original Band of the Red Hand, the Praetorian Guard of the king of Manetheren, perished, a spring arose to commemorate them, but the person relating this myth supposes that the spring was probably already there.
- Discussed at the end of Where the Red Fern Grows: Billy's dogs' grave is marked by a large red fern, which legend says only angels can plant.
Live-Action TV
- The Doctor Who episode "The Name of the Doctor" reveals that the Doctor's own eventual grave on the planet Trenzalore is (will be?) one of these: marked with the near-dead TARDIS, grown to the size of a mountain, with the Doctor's "corpse" at its heart — actually a temporal rift leading to every point in history the Doctor has ever influenced.
- Supernatural:
- In "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things", Dean notices a grave surrounded by dead grass, which is the first clue that the college student who's supposed to be buried there has become a murdering zombie.
- Another episode has Sam noticing an outgrowth of a unique plant, which is never mentioned before or again, that only sprouts that way around the graves of active ghosts.
Tabletop Games
- In the Call of Cthulhu adventure "The Underground Menace" from the supplement Fragments of Fear, if the Investigators manage to kill the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, it melts, leaving a loathsomely-damp spot on the earth in which all the plants have been killed. No new plants will grow there for decades to come.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- When a dragon dies, the elemental magic that powers its Breath Weapon can diffuse into the environment around its body — one of the many dangers in Dragon Graveyards are spontaneous storms of fire, lightning, etc., or hordes of elementals spawned by all the residual magic. The Draconomicon sourcebook adds that a dying wyrm can consume its Dragon Hoard and merge with the natural world, forming a dragon-shaped landform like a hill or lake that offers supernatural protection to any dragon eggs laid there.
- In the Forgotten Realms setting, after then-death god Myrkul was killed by Mystra during the Time of Troubles, dust from his bones landed in the Mere of Dead Men south of Neverwinter, causing occasional undead outbreaks there.
- In 5th edition, dead krakens leave behind a supernaturally charged stain on the seafloor as their bodies decompose. Anything which swims too close to this stain risks disturbing the kraken's grave, which results in the offending creature getting electrocuted by the kraken's residual magic.
- Magic: The Gathering has Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth.
Lord Windgrace: Yawgmoth's corpse is a wound in the universe. His foul blood seeps out, infecting the land with his final curse.
- In the Shadowrun universe, when the great dragon Dunkelzahn is assassinated right after winning the presidency of the United Canadian and American States, an "astral rift" forms at the place of his death which remains, killing all mages who dare to investigate the hitherto unknown phenomena.
Video Games
- Dead humans in Doshin the Giant will float up to the sky and leave a flower behind that will grow into a tree the next day.
- In Grim Fandango, dead souls infected with "sproutella" are transformed into flowers, rendering them Deader than Dead and leaving a patch reminiscent of a grave. This is kind of an inversion, since here the creation of the grave is itself the cause of death.
- In Guild Wars: Factions, Shiro Tagachi caused this on a massive scale, unleashing the "Jade Wind" with his last breath which transformed everything for miles into stone or jade.
- Enemies in Ōkami turn into flowers when they are killed.
- In Quest for Glory IV, Piotyr the Paladin's grave (which doubles as the faerie wizard Erana's grave-in-absence) is a mound in the town square of Mordavia. Naturally, the mound has sprouted many colorful flowers.
- Bloodwood trees in RuneScape only grow in places where much blood has been spilled. The trees literally bleed when they are cut down. Their wood can be fletched into a special kind of crossbow bolt that is more effective against other players, but if you take the wood too far away from the trees without adding the special bolt tips that stabilizes it, the wood will turn to ash.
- Touhou Youyoumu ~ Perfect Cherry Blossom plays upon the above example from Japanese mythology. Yuyuko Saigyouji, the ghostly princess of the Netherworld, is trying to revive the girl buried beneath the Saigyou Ayakashi, a Youkai cherry tree that lured victims to a fatal slumber beneath its branches until it was put into magical dormancy. Unfortunately, she forgot that it's her body buried there — a thousand years ago, Yuyuko killed herself in dismay over her power to invoke death in others, and her friend used her body to complete the seal on the tree.
Web Originals
- In the Creepypasta "A Candle Cove Anecdote", a leafless tree grows where the narrator buried his Horrible Horace doll. Every summer, it attracts a disturbing amount of flies.
Western Animation
- The Courage the Cowardly Dog episode "Last of the Starmakers" has a dying Starmaker trying to protect her clutch of eggs. When the eggs have hatched safely, she is able to die in peace, and a flower garden grows where her body dissolved into the earth.
