The HollowRind Totem

Unearthed from a furrow in a field that has not turned a living season in three hundred years. The rind is stone-hard and thick as a shield, its surface vortex-carved into layered filigree that climbs the crown in curling bands of ember and black. Marigold rosettes sit sunk deep in the sockets where the flesh gave way, petals ridged and calcified. The lower jaw has split open into a ring of tapering fangs, each one weathered smooth at the tip, as though something inside chewed its way toward the light and nearly made it. The harvest wardens grew these in bone-fed soil and hollowed them by hand, carving the lace as a ledger — one curl for every name the season claimed. On the last night they set the totems at the field's edge, mouths open, and left them to keep the count. The wardens are gone. The fields are ash. The totems are still counting. Every striation you see was laid down one pass at a time, the layer lines running with the carving rather than against it, so the machine's own grain becomes part of the relic's weathering.