The Boneborn Sentinel

The Sentinels were posted across the Graveyard and never recalled. Most of them the bone took slowly, under the armor, and the armor stayed on. The Boneborn stood on the open ridge between the cairns with nothing over it, and the Rule of the Ground worked on it the way it works on everything here. Flesh to bone. It has not gone further than that, and the archivists doubt it will. The corvid orders under the Ninth Cairn used to hang a Gravecaller near it every winter, and the bird never once spoke a name.

The bone texture and the shadowed hollows are stacked layer by layer. Anatomy as architecture. Some sentinels outlast the things they were built to protect.