The BoneLatch Spire

Recovered whole from a burial niche cut into the Skullwood rock, empty of whatever it was built to hold. The frame is jointed bone — segmented rails pinned at every knuckle, running the long hexagon of a casket lid and swelling at each joint the way a finger does. Behind the shelves the webs are strung in open lattice, spun thick enough to carry weight and left unbroken. Rosettes crown the head and the foot, layered petals folded around a central boss, cut with the same patience as the rest. Three tiers inside, the lowest the deepest, its back panel worked in fine quilted scale. Graveyard record calls these reliquaries — coffin-frames hung on the walls of the deep vaults, each one built to hold what was too small to bury and too dangerous to leave loose. The webs were never an accident of neglect. They were spun into the frame at the forge, a second lock on whatever sat in the niche. The empty ones are the ones worth worrying about. Color is stacked in layers rather than laid on top, so the bone rails and the rosettes surface separately from the black behind them, and the web catches light along the raised edge of every strand.