The Barrow's Unwritten Verse

The cut stanza of the Bonesung barrow prophecy that Nali Gravesinger has not sung aloud in years — it names an outlander hand at the ash-sealed barrow's threshold.

Nali keeps the verse in her own notation on a strip of bark she has never shown anyone. The words name a hand 'pale as the drift, smelling of the road' drawing something from the elder-dead vault — and then go quiet, as prophecy always does, before saying what happens next. The ambiguity is the thing: the tribe reads it as warning; Nali reads it as instruction she has not yet understood.