His second Black Library short story, Michael R. Fletcher’s Strong Bones is another tale of the Ossiarch Bonereapers, this time from the perspective of a trio of young ogors. Bored of eating leftovers and waiting behind when their elders head off to raid, Stugkor and his mates Algok and Chidder have the bright idea to go out on their own raid, just the three of them. Forging off into the frozen wilds of Ghur, the youngsters find raiding to be less exciting than they expected, until they stumble across a human settlement presided over by an army of strange-looking deaders.
It’s a story about others’ perception of the Bonereapers, focusing for much of the time on adding depth and character to Stugkor and his mates so that when the Ossiarch appear they have real impact. The ogors make for entertaining and sympathetic protagonists, musing on profound topics such as the correlation between a meal’s intelligence and its flavour and why humans make so many plans when they know they’re going to be eaten. At first, the Bonereapers’ baffling focus on bones and wastage of good meat is anathema to the ogors, who quickly go from puzzlement to genuine fear as their worldview shifts from hunter to hunted. It’s another cleverly thought-out and constructed story from Fletcher, using the naive but physically powerful ogors to show just how scary the Ossiarch can be. Great stuff.
This was released as part of the 2019 Black Library Advent Calendar – click here to see the main page for the Advent Calendar, with links to all of the reviews.
Check out the main Age of Sigmar reviews page on Track of Words.
