Thargrin Ossuary

Thargrin Ossuaries are said to be the accidental legacies of quarry cults that once venerated raw stone and the grinding, indifferent patience of earth. Priests of the old rites bound fragments of sacred rock to willing acolytes and attempted to graft stony endurance to mortal frames. When the rites backfired, the bindings animated only bone and grit: skeletons reassembled with a stony calculus in their ribcages and palms. They do not remember their former lives; they remember only the sensation of impact and the command to strike stone against flesh and timber. These creatures haunt ruined quarries, collapsed keeps, and the lee of cliff‑faced roads where landslides still fall. Bands of Ossuaries patrol broken walls like sentries, hurling loose masonry at anything that disturbs the drift. The Riven Chorus — a guild of spelunking antiquarians — keeps a brittle notebook of sightings and prescribes a single reliable avoidance: never let one corner you in wide open ground. Scholar Malrek of the Grey Ledger once trapped three Ossuaries in a narrow shaft and survived; his notes emphasize chain tactics and a sacrificial block to distract their throws.

A full‑height skeletal figure standing roughly 9 feet tall from heel to top vertebra, assembled from chalky white bones and bound with rusted iron filaments. Large, clubbed forearms have flattened carpals formed into natural slings; the palms contain cup‑like grooves where fist‑stones nest. Between the ribs, a compact heap of stones — riverpebbles, shale fragments, and a few larger fiststones — is fused to the sternum with thin veins of mineralized marrow. Joints are overbuilt: extra bony plates at the shoulders and hips suggest brute torque and weight. Cracks and hairline fissures run through many bones, showing crosshatched textures where the bone has been weathered; small stalactite‑like deposits of mineral cling to the spine. When tipped back to throw, the skull tilts forward with a jaw that clicks like falling gravel. Scale reference: beside a standard wooden doorway (about 7 ft high), a Thargrin towers, its shoulders nearly level with the lintel and its thrown stones the size of a man's fist.