“Ready your blade.” As one, the novitiates knelt in the snow, their weapons held high on upturned palms. For valkyrs like Wren, it was a blade fashioned from dead bone. For reapyrs, a scythe of gleaming steel. The sun had set, the sky inky black and riddled with stars—the Gravedigger’s hour was upon them. Any moment now, the sickle moon would crest the would-be trees. Any moment now, the trial would begin. Wren’s heart thundered in anticipation. The branches of the forest stood pale and stark before them, sharp with reaching hands and gaping mouths. With splintered spines and cracked ribs. This was no ordinary forest, after all. This was the Bonewood. Arms and legs soared up from the ground, twisted and warped. Bent and broken. Dead, soulless bones. Undead, haunted bones. Human bones, yes, but other creatures too. Reindeer with spiky antlers and great woolly mammoths with arching tusks. Ancient bones from unknowable beasts. Bones from the dawn of time. The Bonewood was at once a graveyard and a training ground.

It was here that bonesmiths tested their skills, extended their magic… and showed their mastery over the undead. Now, after years of training and a lifetime of living in its shadow, Wren would traverse the Bonewood and compete in the Bonewood Trial. She lifted her head slightly, considering the novitiates kneeling on either side of her. There were ten of them total, each dressed in Bone House black and with black grease lining their eyes, making their sockets look sunken like skulls. Ghostlight was bright enough on its own but turned blinding when it flashed against the snow, so they used the wax-and-charcoal mixture to reduce glare. It also made the mark of their magic—their pale, bone-white irises—stand out all the more.

Sometimes Wren extended the eye black into her hairline or painted her lips for a more dramatic effect, though her teachers usually told her to wipe it off. Sometimes she spread it on her teeth and smiled wide, just to give them a fright. There wasn’t much to entertain in the House of Bone, frigid and isolated on the northernmost tip of the Dominions, so Wren had to make do. Not tonight, though. Tonight Wren would play by the rules… for once.

If she passed the trial, she would serve for life as a valkyr of the House of Bone. In the Dominions, where magic welled up from deep in the earth, the dead lingered—violent and unpredictable—unless a bonesmith severed the ghost from its earthly remains. That was the duty of the reapyr. But not all ghosts went quietly. Some put up a fight, so it was the valkyr’s task to defend the reapyr from the undead. Without the House of Bone, ghosts would overrun their land, making it uninhabitable, as it had been for centuries. Their work was more than a job or a calling. It was a necessity. But that didn’t mean Wren couldn’t enjoy it. In contrast to their blacks, the valkyrs also wore bones. They wore them fastened to their forearms as gauntlets and their chests as breastplates, and bone weapons were strapped across shoulders and in belts or loaded as artillery into bandoliers. They all had their favorites—Wren wore twin swords in sheaths on her back, while Leif had a broad ax made of sharpened pelvic bone and Inara carried a flail with a spiked skull on the end. In short, they were dressed for war. The battlefield was the Bonewood, and the enemy was the undead.