The Saltless Barrow

One of the unmarked dead the Bonesung will not name — older than the Unclosed, cut by a making the gravesinger's prophecy does not cover. The Cinder Quorum is mid-dig.

No ancestor-poles mark it. No tribe claims it. The barrow road passes within fifty yards and nobody who lives in the Crags has ever put a cairn stone near it. The Cinder Quorum's diggers opened the first ante-chamber two months ago and found stonework they cannot date — before the Imperium, maybe before the tribes, a burial language that writes names in script the prophecy's litany does not recognise. The wights inside answer the wrong names. One digger has not spoken since the second excavation day, and Sevda Ash-Tongue has begun to question whether the prophecy's silence on these dead means they are safe to dig.