Sean E. Britten

All There in the (Monster) Manual are stories based on creatures from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Over 2022 I released a different story fitting the theme every single week and I’ve now expanded to Dungeons & Dragons’ Monsters of the Multiverse and even the Pathfinder Bestiary. Could be fantasy, science fiction, horror, or something else entirely! Check them out on the main page of the website.

This Week’s Inspiration: Skeleton

The village of Diese Knochen have been dealing with unusual weather patterns for some time now. Every so often, human bones shower from the sky to bury roads, houses, and people.

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Haeley stood a safe distance back from the window, watching the yard and listening to the bones hitting the roof. After a while, you got to recognise the different types of bone just by the sound that they made. The clatter of ribs or longer bones, femurs, fibulas, tibias, humeruses. The clacking of individual vertebrae bouncing off the shingles, the softer clicks of metacarpals and metatarsals, phalanges and teeth and all the other little bits and pieces that she didn’t have names for. The solid thunk of a pelvis and the even heavier thump of a skull hitting the roof and then bouncing its way down.

Through the window, Haeley could see bones falling from the eaves and filling the yard. She stood back because the bones landed with enough force that a larger one, a skull or a femur, could rebound and hit the glass with enough momentum to break it. Even as she thought it, she heard a window break from somewhere in the rear of the house. The storm had come on so quickly she hadn’t had time to get the shutters in place. A single candle fluttered beside her. At the height of the storm, the light outside dipped until it was as dark as late evening. It rapidly improved again over the following minutes as the storm moved on.

Bonestorms only lasted for a few minutes. Haeley waited for a couple of beats after the last noises petered out then went to the front door. A few ribs and vertebrae tumbled over the threshold as she opened it. She swept them back out with her foot and booted some odds and ends off the stoop. The sky cleared, the last streamers of dark cloud trailing into the distance. Picking her way across the yard, she looked back at the house. One window broken and some fresh chips taken out of the shingles, it looked unchanged otherwise. Bones, of course, covered the roof and carpeted the yard, piling up around the sides of the house. She cringed at the thought of the work ahead but it could have been worse.

Haeley’s father would have been at work. He should be perfectly safe but she started toward the village all the same. Bones lay thick on the road. There was generally enough space to pick her way over and around them, finding gaps to step in, although in some places the skeletons gathered in drifts as high as her knees. As always, all the bones were picked clean of any skerrick of flesh. Some looked as if they’d begun to yellow with age but the vast majority were clean and white, bearing no stains and usually little injury from falling from the clouds. In a couple of places, she saw a few vertebrae tumbling together as if pushed by an unfelt breeze. A few carpals and phalanges piled together like dust. She kicked them apart without breaking stride.

Most of Haeley’s neighbours had already emerged as she made her way into the village of Diese Knochen. Gathering or picking their way through their yards, they assessed. Windows had been broken, walls and roofs dented and cracked. Besides the houses there were trees denuded of branches. Crops flattened, gardens bashed to pieces, animals in disarray, carts and anything left outside damaged. A lot of it they were used to, however, and life in the village had adjusted. She only saw one injury. One of her neighbours, Joahn Hoachim, must have been working in the field when the storm appeared. His family and several others were on his porch trying to stem the bleeding from a gash on his scalp while someone ran for the physician. Haeley wondered whether to stop but the situation already seemed well in hand.

Haeley met her father, Rychard, leaving his blacksmith shop. The storm had dumped skeletons, in pieces, just as thickly across the centre of the village as its outskirts. The two of them hurried toward one another as best they could while minding their footing and embraced.

“Honey, are you alright?” Rychard asked.

“A window broke but the rest of the house is okay,” Haeley said.

“I asked about you, are you okay?”

“Of course, I’m fine. I was already inside and I didn’t see it coming until it was almost on top of us.”

Rychard shook his head. “These bonestorms are getting more frequent, I’d swear it. And they happen upon us faster.”

“I guess we should get started on the cleanup.”

“I’ll meet you at home soon, I have to help here first.”

Rychard’s smithy attached to the village stables. Inside, startled by the storm, horses whinnied and refused to be calmed. Holes had been punched in the roofs of several buildings, awnings shattered. Bones had fragmented on the village square’s cobblestones and left dangerous shards underfoot. Haeley gave her father another hug and negotiated her way back out of the square.

Bone carts were already being wheeled out and the whole village went into action. When the bonestorms first started, the village council tried to manage the aftermath of each storm. They sketched out endless plans and recruited teams of volunteers as well as petitioning the state for more resources. They made some progress, but too slowly. Skeletons piled up in parts of the village and its outskirts, most of the action concentrated around the houses of the council themselves and those that paid the highest taxes. Private enterprise took over, some local businessmen banding together to sell services in bone disposal and cleanup, but they couldn’t keep up with demand. Collective action was really the only solution with everyone in the village pooling resources such as carts and tools and falling selflessly into the work after the passing of each storm.

When Haeley returned home, she collected her wheelbarrow and a shovel. Relatively new, the shovel had a wide, shallow blade for scooping rather than digging. She parked the wheelbarrow in the front yard and got to work, making her way outwards from the drifts surrounding the house. Throwing herself into the work, she shovelled up ribs and arm bones and leg bones and sternums and scapulas. Skulls were the heaviest, denser than they looked. Balanced on the tip of her shovel, they grinned crookedly at her as she dumped them into the wheelbarrow. From surrounding houses, she could hear the crunch and grunts as her neighbours did the same. It didn’t take long for the wheelbarrow to fill to overflowing. The visible impact on the yard was pretty minimal.

A horse drawn cart rolled down the road from the village. The horse moved carefully, studying where it put its hooves before committing, and the wooden wheels crackled over bones left in the road even as a few locals hurried to sweep the path clear. Haeley negotiated the leading wheel of her wheelbarrow through the bones and ruts, unloading it into the bone cart. The horse whickered, ivory odds and ends rattling around the bed of the cart.

“How did you go?” another neighbour, Tomm, asked.

“Not so bad, a broken window is all, I think,” Haeley said.

“I think a skull hit the side of our chimney and knocked out a few bricks. The storm seemed like a long one, don’t you think?”

“I guess so, six or seven minutes?”

“More like eight and a half. I started counting when I heard it overhead. They seem to be getting longer, a little bit longer, every time.”

Haeley shrugged and returned to her work. When the bonestorms first began, the village tried to make the best of their strange bounty. Skeletons had been sold on to be ground up as fertiliser. Bone had become a common building material, especially given the fact the storms often inflicted a need for repairs. Many houses had taken on a slightly macabre, haunted appearance. Walls had been built out of stacked bones, mortared rows of skulls staring at passersby. Some of the tools and carts people used were made out of bones, including the shaft of Haeley’s shovel. The shutters that Haeley had failed to get up earlier were made from femurs and ribs all twined together. But the storms simply left too many bones behind. The only option was to dispose of the vast majority of them, especially with the bone golems.

Haeley and her father’s house sat near the end of their street. Beyond their property, bones lay thick in the grass all the way to the woods. As she returned home, she saw some of the loose bones rolling together. A skinny, mostly white figure began to pick itself up from the grass. Bones clicked together like puzzle pieces. The bone golem supported itself on one leg, bending forward and back, despite having reinforced itself with a number of extra tibias and fibulas. Its spine looked too long and snakey. Half a rib cage attached to its shoulder blades with two arms both hanging from its left side. The golems rarely managed to assemble themselves into truly human shapes, often looking more like spiders or insects, living wheels, or particularly wonky dogs. As she watched, the golem picked up a skull and juggled it onto its neck.

“Oh, no you don’t!” Haeley said.

Hefting her shovel, Haeley hurried over. She nearly tripped on some bones half-hidden in the grass. Behind her, someone laughed. The bone golem swivelled, goggling at her with empty eye sockets, bottom jaw missing. She felt a pang of guilt. Balanced on its single leg it looked goofy and harmless, but bone golems were creatures of the storm. Left to their own devices they would run around causing chaos, breaking windows, ruining fences and gardens, frightening animals and small children.

Haeley swung the shovel and knocked off one of the golem’s arms with a crack. The golem watched it spiral away and come apart. Haeley hit it again, knocking free some ribs. With half a dozen swings, she scattered the bones over a wide radius. Once the golems were strewn apart they didn’t come back, but they did have to be spread out. When she was finished, a few watching neighbours gave a cheer.

All other chores and work took second priority for the rest of the day as Haeley and her neighbours focused on the cleanup. Bone carts came and went. Most of the yards and rooftops were cleared, along with the roadway. No matter how good of a job they did, the people of Diese Knochen had gotten used to the sight of bones in ditches and fields, wedged in hard-to-reach places among eaves and branches. If they didn’t get straight into clearing the majority though, the bones and bone golems had ways of piling up.

Rychard didn’t make it home until after dark. Haeley warmed some stew on the woodstove and put it on the table in front of him. It had been just the two of them for some time now and they had fallen into a kind of routine.

“We cleared most of the village,” Rychard said. “Not much damage, or any serious injuries. It’s pretty good given how fast it came on. People are used to the storms. But the edges of the storm seem to be spreading wider each time. There’s nothing to be done in the woods, it’s not as if we can go tree to tree clearing them out.”

“Any bone golems?”

“A couple.”

“We had one here, at the end of the road. I took care of it before it could fully take shape though.”

“Very good! Very good, but be careful.”

“Why? They’re not dangerous, just annoying.”

“They’ve never been dangerous so far, but, I don’t know. Things could always change.”

The next morning, Haeley and Rychard and the rest of the village got back to work. Bone carts clattered through the streets from dawn. Haeley took her shovel and started to move further along the street. She was surprised to see two of her neighbours and their children, the Walliams, with a carriage outside of their house. Two horses were yoked to the carriage which was filled with furniture as well as other odds and ends.

“Going somewhere?” Haeley asked.

“It’s enough, we’ve had enough!” Mrs Walliams said. “We said one more storm and we would go.”

Trails from tears marked Mrs Walliams’ doughy cheeks. She wadded a handkerchief between her fingers as she spoke but her expression was a determined one. Her mind seemed completely made up.

“Why? I mean, why now?” Haeley asked.

“Too many crops destroyed, the crops and the vegetable gardens. It goes on, we won’t have enough to harvest for winter. Every time we clear them away and try to recoup, the storms come again. No, not anymore. Luca has a brother in Kuhstadt, we’re going to stay with him until we get on our feet again.”

Haeley told her the family would be missed and they talked a little longer about the Walliams’ plans. She avoided discussing the decision to leave. The Walliams weren’t the first to move away since the bonestorms started. Always implicit in their leaving was the judgement that those that stayed behind were doing something wrong, something stupid, by staying. As they stood there talking, Haeley took a couple of surreptitious glances inside the Walliams’ cart. In spite of leaving Diese Knochen because of the bonestorms, the Walliams were taking some of it with them. Amidst the furniture and tools were stacks of organised bones. Femurs tied in heavy bundles. Rows of grinning skulls. Perhaps the pieces for a couple of largely complete skeletons. When they reached Mr Walliams’ brother, they probably intended on selling them for building materials or curios. The village had a great deal more travellers since the bonestorms started, wanting to see the place where the strange phenomena took place and to take home a piece of it for themselves. A few medical schools had also bought complete skeletons in the early days but the market had become oversaturated. Still, the Walliams might find some buyers.

By the afternoon, most of the village’s open spaces and thoroughfares were clear. People went about picking larger bones out of their fields and gardens, tossing them in barrels and barrows for the bone carts. Carpals and metacarpals and phalanges and metatarsals and cuneiforms and teeth and ossicles and other tiny bones and bits of bone were trodden into the soil. Eventually, they would all become part of the dirt. Drifts gathering in wooden and out of the way areas were ignored for another day. Haeley wheeled a last load over to the bone cart waiting at the end of her street. Edan, a boy roughly her age, sat up front with the reins.

“Would you like to help me come offload this lot?” Edan asked.

“Sure, why not?”

Edan and a couple of other young men steered the cart onto the road leading out of the village. Leaving behind her wheelbarrow and shovel, trusting they would be in the same place when she got back, Haeley climbed onto the back of the cart and held on. Although they were nearing the end of the cleanup of the village, the cart’s bed was filled to its brim. Its load clicked and rattled as the wheels ran over ruts in the road.

More bones clogged the grass and ditches to either side of the road as they rolled out of the village. Some, from previous storms, were swept into large cairns. They’d begun to take on sod and weeds as if slowly being absorbed into the land. A nearby stream moved in and out of the woods to intersect with the road. Drifts of skeletons reefed it in places. Peering down into one valley, Haeley even saw a crew of industrious beavers building a dam from bones as well as wood and mud. It wasn’t complete yet and river water sieved through cages of ribs and arms and leg bones. It was obvious when they’d reached the border of the area affected by the storm, always centred over Diese Knochen itself. All the fresh skulls and tibias and vertebrae petered out from the road and surrounding area and disappeared.

Between their village and the next was the old quarry. Years ago, it had fallen into disuse. Groundwater started to fill the bottom of the quarry and its sides began to crumble. When Diese Knochen needed a place to put all the bones that kept falling from the sky it was the obvious choice. A narrow ramp started at ground level and curved down the sides of the uneven crater that earlier generations had torn from the earth. Vast piles of refuse shored up the sides of the hole. Haeley only tended to find herself at the boneyard every few storms. While Edan and the others carefully steered the horses down the descending ramp, she looked over the crater in dismay. The level of bones at the base of the quarry seemed to have risen significantly since the last time she was here. All signs of the quarry’s bottom and the groundwater had disappeared beneath layers of bone. Squinting, it looked like an enormous bowl filled with oatmeal or some other whitish, lumpish dish.

Edan cajoled the horses into backing the cart up all the way to the edge of the pit. With practised efficiency, they opened the back of the cart and began clearing it out. Hundreds upon hundreds of bones clattered out of the rear of the wagon and into the mass below. Haeley helped, climbing into the bed itself, pricked and prodded by bones, to sweep and toss and kick out the last of them.

When the bone cart was clear, Haeley climbed down beside Edan and took another long look into the old quarry. Edan, who’d seen plenty of it over the last couple of days, stared into the middle distance instead. Between his hands, he lightly tossed the smooth, white curve of a patella, or knee bone. Famously attached to the shin bone, then the leg bone, attached to the hip bone attached to the backbone.

“Where are we going to keep putting them when this place is too full?” Haeley asked.

“Huh?”

“I mean, when this place is filled up, where are we going to keep putting all these bones? If the storms keep coming.”

“I don’t know, we’ll find some other place I guess.”

“It doesn’t worry you?”

“Nah, not really.”

Like skipping a stone, Edan drew his arm back and cast around as hard as he could. He released the patella at the end of the parabola and sent it skimming through the air. It clicked and bounced across the top of the bone mass before disappearing.

Movement quaked at five different corners of the quarry. Bones shivered on the surface and Haeley took a wary step backward. Edan and the other boys from the bone cart were suddenly curious while on the other side of the cart the horses whickered nervously.

“What is it?” Edan said.

A vast, spidery limb erupted from the pile of bones. Extended, it reached more than halfway across the quarry. When it came down, it scarred the edge of the pit not far from where Haeley and the boys were standing. While they recovered from that surprise, the first leg was followed by a second, and a third.

A tremendous bone golem rose out of the quarry. Shaking itself off like a wet dog, it dropped dozens upon dozens of loose bones back into the pit. The golem didn’t seem to have much of a body, it was all limbs. Five towering spider legs with multiple joints that bent back and forth at random as well as another dozen limbs that dangled or snatched at the air. All of them constructed, of course, from bones, human bones, skeletons. Arms and legs and ribs and pelvis bones and spines, sternums, skulls, every kind of internal human strut and hinge massed together to form the biggest bone golem Haeley had ever seen. Big enough to walk over entire buildings in a single step. To pick up the whole bone cart and horses and carry them away with it if it so desired.

Haeley and the others could only watch as the giant bone golem straightened to its full height. Gingerly, the creature picked its way out of the quarry. Like a massive insect, it climbed over the lip of the quarry and disappeared. They could only track it as flights of birds scattered out of its path. Haeley was relieved to see its path appeared to be heading away from their village.

“Uh, is that going to be a problem, do you think?” Edan said.

“Definitely a problem for someone,” Haeley agreed.

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Sean: If you’re anything like me, throughout the day random Simpsons quotes will just ring around your head for no particular reason. I was driving back from the shops by myself and my brain is telling me, “Buy me Bonestorm or go to hell!” and looking up at the sky it happened to be getting a little bit grey and drizzly, so that’s where this one came from.

As I’m doing the latest edit on this story, I’ve got the Tome of Beasts II open in another window doing some idle scrolling and I happened to come across the Bone Colossus. Maybe that would have been a suitable inspiration for this story if I’d come across it earlier, but I didn’t! I usually have some sort of creature collection in a tab or a PDF which I scroll through during the day, looking for inspiration.

If you’ve ever thought, jeez, Sean, I really enjoy these stories that you put out for free on the website with great regularity but I sure wish there were more words in them, you’re in luck! I have a number of older novel-length stories that I finished and never did anything more with, and I’ve been thinking it might be a nice idea to start putting some of them out there on a chapter by chapter basis. I’m thinking of exploring the idea of a Patreon if they’re something that gets some attention to keep them going but we’ll see! Keep your eyes on the website for more news on that, or there’ll be more news on my socials, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram.