Ossification

Overview

Ossification is the stiffness that does not stop. It begins like the aches of age, in a knee that will not bend in the morning, and runs on until the whole body is bone, smooth and ivory-pale, still seeing and hearing. It does not hurt. That is part of its danger, because those it takes rarely fight it, and their families often think they are only growing old.

Cause

It comes from the Bone Singer, a Cast-Out of Terra who came to think memory too fragile for the living. One note of its song turns flesh towards bone: muscles stiffen, blood thickens, and skin hardens. Around it, its Calcified Field stops water, wind, and thought. The finished are the Bone Statues, and the Singer may raise their remains as Bone-Choirs.

Who It Strikes

The Singer seeks out the ageing and the grieving, and anyone facing a change they dread, so the old and the newly bereaved are taken most. Any people can be ossified. Farmers in a furrow and travellers on the road are taken where the Trail runs. Those who sit long in a statue's shade find their own joints stiff.

Signs and Course

• The stiffening. Joints are slow to bend, worst after sitting still. The sufferer moves less and finds that they mind it less.
• The thickening. The pulse slows and grows heavy, and lips and nail-beds pale. Cuts bleed slowly and darkly. Water left by the bedside thickens.
• The hardening. Patches of skin go smooth, cool, and chalky, beginning at the hands and face.
• The statue. The body sets in its last posture, ivory bone throughout, with the face at peace.

Contagion

It does not pass from one sufferer to another. It is caught from the song and the field, and in small from the statues, whose stillness clings to the ground around them. A household that sits in mourning beside a new statue may stiffen together.

Treatment and Its Limits

The treatment is motion. The stiffening are got up, walked, and kept walking, and their joints are worked and washed in running water. Above all they are made to sing, loudly and badly, over the hum. A living plant, a river stone, or anything else that grows or wears away is kept near them. Ordinary liniments and warm wraps ease ordinary stiffness and do nothing here.

Spells that preserve, harden, or freeze turn under the Singer's influence and speed the bone; spells of growth and flow hold. No working undoes finished bone. The tales say only the passage of time and the press of motion, coming from beyond any mortal, can reach the Singer's stone. Even then the freed would only go on with their dying.

Mortality

A finished statue does not die and does not decay, and it watches for centuries. Whether that awareness suffers is not known, since the song takes feeling with the rest. Those stopped at the hardening keep chalky patches on the skin and joints that never loosen fully.

Lore and Belief

Because its first signs are the signs of age, many families never know what took their elder until the statue stands. Some peoples revere the statues as the honoured dead and decorate them on feast days. Others smash them as an act of mercy, believing the breaking frees the one inside; no one can say what it does. In markets, bone dust from the City of Stone is sold as a cure for brittle bones. It does nothing.

Grave-robbers and treasure-seekers who break into the Singer's fields for the jewels on the stone dead say the statues' eyes follow them, and many leave the jewels where they lie.

In the Medieval Era

Ossification is rare and follows the Singer's road. Near the Calcified Trail, villages keep their rivers clean and running, wake their old people early and walk them, and sing their work songs loudly. Bone-setters and folk healers there are the first to be called, and the good ones learn to tell stiff bone from a stiff joint by the chill of the skin.

Where It Appears

• The Bone Singer (the Song of Ossification, the Calcified Field, the City of Stone, Travel Notes for Mortals)
• Bone Statues
• Bone-Choirs
• the Writers' Guide chapter What Waits Outside