Bone Statues

Overview

The Bone Statues are those whom the Bone Singer has "saved". The Singer is a Cast-Out, once the Archivist of Bones under Terra, who came to think memory too fragile for the living and began to freeze lives in bone. Its Song of Ossification turns flesh to bone and blood to calcified crystal. What is left is a statue that is still a person inside: it sees and hears, and cannot move, speak, or feel.

Appearance

A Bone Statue is the person it was, at life size, caught in the moment the song took them: a baker turning from her oven, an old man in his chair, a soldier mid-stride. Every surface is bone, smooth and ivory-pale, faintly porous at the joints and polished where the wind has worked it. Hair has become fine bony filaments, cloth has stiffened into folds of the same ivory, and the eyes are bone too, yet they seem to follow whoever walks past. Faces are set in peace; the song does not hurt.

Bone Statues are utterly still and silent. Wind makes a thin whistle in the pores of the older ones. They are cool to the touch even in sunlight and smell faintly of chalk and dust.

Habitat and Range

They stand where the Singer sang. Along its Calcified Trail, where grass has become brittle silica and soil has packed to clay, a farmer may stand in a furrow or a traveller on the road. In the City of Stone, a city wasting with age that begged it for preservation, every citizen stands as a statue in their last moment, and the city has not changed since. A mother and her child stand together in one town square, the mother turned at her own asking.

Behaviour and Temperament

They have no behaviour, only awareness. A Bone Statue cannot act, speak, or feel, but it watches and listens without end, through every season, while those it knew age and die and while strangers forget who it was. Whether that awareness suffers is not known, since the song took the capacity to feel along with the rest.

Abilities

A Bone Statue has no power of its own. It is the work of the Singer's song, and it carries a little of the Calcified Field about it: water left beside one thickens, and those who sit long in its shade find their own joints stiff. It does not decay, and the Singer's stillness keeps it from crumbling for centuries.

Life Cycle

The change happens in a single note and does not reverse of its own accord. A statue does not age. What frees one, if anything does, is the Singer's undoing or the Singer's absence from the world for good, and even then the freed would only resume their dying; a few who sought the Singer to win back a loved one learned they would have to accept that.

Uses and Dangers

The statues themselves harm no one. Their danger is the despair they breed and the sign they are: where bone statues stand fresh in a field, the Bone Singer is close. Communities near the Calcified Trail keep moving, keep their rivers clean and running, and sing their own songs, badly and loudly, to drown its hum.

Lore and Belief

Some peoples revere the statues as honoured dead, decorate them on feast days, and believe their ancestors watch over them from the bone. That is truer than they know, since the statues do watch. Others smash them as an act of mercy, believing that breaking the bone frees the one held inside it; that is a belief, and what the breaking does to the one inside no one can say. Bone dust from the City of Stone is sold in markets as a cure for brittle bones, and does nothing.

Where It Appears

• The Bone Singer