Bone-Choirs

Overview

The Bone-Choirs are the Chorus of the Dead of the Bone Singer, a Cast-Out that would preserve everything by turning it to bone. It raises them from calcified remains, and its song moves them. Where its Bone Statues stand still and watch, a Bone-Choir walks and sings and hunts the living to "preserve" them, and each victim joins the choir.

Appearance

A Bone-Choir is a crowd of skeletons, a few dozen or a few hundred, joined in places where the calcium has run between them like candle wax: a hand fused to a neighbour's shoulder, two ribcages grown into one. The bone is pale ivory turning grey, crusted here and there with glittering calcified crystal where blood once was. In each skull's sockets burns a faint blue light, the same cold blue as the Singer's own.

They move together, slowly, clicking at every joint, in a rhythm that is the Singer's song carried in many bodies. The choir sings: a low hum with no words, felt in the marrow more than heard, rising and falling through the whole crowd. Near a choir the air is still and dry and smells of chalk, old dust, and the cold breath of a cellar.

Habitat and Range

Choirs rise where the Singer has calcified the dead: ossuaries and charnel houses, old battlefields it made into monuments so that their soldiers would never die again, and the ground along its Calcified Trail. They go out from there after the living, and a choir that has hunted long may wander far from its first ground, swollen with those it has taken.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Bone-Choir hunts the living to preserve them. It does not kill in rage. It comes on steadily, humming, and surrounds whoever it finds, and the song presses in until the victim stiffens, hardens, and steps into the choir. It turns back from no wall and does not tire. It does not hunt the dead or the already still.

There is no mind in a choir, only the Singer's will; but some who have heard one say that faces among the newly joined still look frightened.

Abilities

The choir carries the Song of Ossification in many throats. Close to it, muscles stiffen, blood thickens, and skin hardens, and the listener wants to stand still and let it happen. The ground it crosses hardens and its grass turns brittle. Its fused bone is hard to break, and a skeleton struck down rises again while the song goes on.

It is weakened by change and flow: running water, a living plant, a song sung over its hum, badly if need be, and the plain will to keep moving, age, and die.

Life Cycle

Choirs grow by joining. Every person they catch becomes, in time, another skeleton in the crowd. When the Singer's song leaves a choir, it falls apart into heaps of ordinary bone, and those bones can at last be buried, though the fused ones must be buried together.

Uses and Dangers

A Bone-Choir takes whole villages, and the taken come back walking with it. The danger is worst for the grieving, who hear their own dead in the hum and walk toward it. Communities near the Calcified Trail keep their ossuaries locked and their rivers running through the town.

Lore and Belief

Many people take the choirs for the angry dead of an unburied battle and try to lay them with rites of burial, which does nothing while the Singer sings. Some of the grieving believe that the hum is a hymn and that joining a choir is joining the saints. A few who sought the Singer to win a loved one back from a choir were told that the freed would age and die, and turned away.

Grave-robbers who dig old battlefields for arms and rings tell of the hum rising out of the ground as the spade bit, and of a digger who was found the next spring standing in the choir, his spade still in his hands.

Where It Appears

• The Bone Singer