Lace of the Dead

The forest wrapped its dead in this and the lace outlasted the cloth. Every skull in the pattern is one the roots took, worked into the weave by whoever did the wrapping. It is a ledger like the totems in the Ash Fields are a ledger, only softer, and the count runs to the edge of the cloth and stops there because the cloth ran out. The Bloomrot grows from the same ground. The archivists have never decided whether the lace was meant to keep it in or keep it out.

The impossible detail of the lacework emerges without paint, baked into the geometry, layer by layer. Vault-sealed. The dead have always had the finest taste in fabric.