Many of these skeletons appear to have been human once, but plenty of them were clearly animals, nonhuman humanoids, or beasts that are difficult to recognize. Those that fall into this latter category appear to be random collections of bones assembled into the forms of no creatures that ever lived. Multiarmed bears with three toothy skulls, serpents with the skulls of lions, and horses with human spinal columns for legs. Some seem more like works of macabre art than efficient servants.
So you are a Necromancer who happens to have a lot of bones lying around. This time, however, ordinary skeleton soldiers won't cut it. Maybe you need a big hitter. Maybe most skeletons are too incomplete to be fully reassembled. Maybe you're just feeling... creative. Whatever the reason, enter the Walking Ossuary!
A Walking Ossuary is an undead being containing bones from many skeletons, sometimes even from different species. It may be formed in mockery of a hulking humanoid, assembled to resemble a fearsome beast, or take even more grotesque forms. In addition to increased size, power, and durability, it might even be able to assimilate the corpses of its victims into its bulk, to repair damaged parts and to grow even further in power and size.
A particular appeal of making this kind of amalgam with skeletons rather than fleshier bodies is that skeletons are composed of multiple visually distinct parts that can be easily imagined as being swapped around, replaced, and reassembled in various shapes, whereas muscles and skin would need to be stitched together. In addition, since bones mostly look like one another regardless of where they're from, a creature cobbled out of mismatched bones will often still look more visually cohesive than one stitched from parts that still have their meat and skin. In real life, of course, it's a little more complicated than that — bones fit with one another in very specific ways, and aren't like Legos than can be swapped around at random — but the motif persists.
For this trope's fleshier counterpart, see Flesh Golem. Subtrope of Body of Bodies and Dem Bones. Supertrope to Gashadokuro, a mythical being composed of multiple people's combined skeletons, although the latter is not usually visibly an example. Overlap is common with Non-Human Undead and Raising the Steaks, as these amalgams often incorporate parts from several distinct species. In cases where these entities go from being merely chimeric to being something that fundamentally should not exist, see Undead Abomination. If a character is only dressed like a walking ossuary, see Skeletons in the Coat Closet.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Kyo Kara Maoh!: One of Yuuri's first magic spells is creating a garbage monster composed of the discarded bones from various meat meals served aboard the ship they're on to achieve his goals.
Fan Works
- A Song of Silk and Saplings: Omega, which in-game is seen only as a disembodied eye and two hands, is revealed to consist of the spines of three or four humans wound into a snakelike shape, with a dozen arms serving as legs and a human skull for a head, with a yellow eye in its jaws.
Literature
- Fighting Fantasy: In the gamebook Vault of the Vampire, the dreaded "Thasoloss" (major and minor) are guardians to items crucial in beating the titular Vampire, Count Heydrich. They are presumably each cobbled together from the bones of two giants, as they are individually four-armed giant skeletons that wield a scythe in each pair and shoot cold fire from their eyes.
- The Last Kids On Earth: Book 6 of the series has the Death Fossil, constructed from the bones of different species of dinosaurs and various other prehistoric creatures.
- The Locked Tomb: The more powerful or adept necromancers tend to create monsters in this vein when the situation is dire enough to call for it.
- Reign of the Seven Spellblades: In volume 1, Oliver, Pete, Chela, and Nanao get caught in a battle between two upperclassmen, the chimera breeder Ophelia Salvadori and the skeletal golem-maker Cyrus Rivermoore. As their creations duke it out, Ophelia remarks to Cyrus that the spinal column on his bone creature is new and mentions him pillaging monster corpses deeper in the labyrinth, implying that it's a composite skeleton. Later on, Cyrus' new project involves stealing one bone at a time from other students' living bodies, apparently to create a composite human skeleton. He turns out to be trying to craft a temporary body for Fau, the ghost of an ancient necromancer whose body his family has been keeping preserved for centuries, so that she can pass on her lost knowledge of the art before The Grim Reaper comes to claim her.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons has had several monsters made from the bones of multiple creatures over its editions. One example is simply called a boneyard, and another is called a charnel hound, which is a Pun on charnel house, a building where bones are kept. Skull lords are undead spellcasters made from bones taken from multiple people and appear as a three-headed skeleton wielding a staff also made from skulls and bones. In third edition, two of the monsters that skull lords have the ability to create, bonespurs and serpentirs, also are made from multiple creature's bones. The bonespur is a massive amount of bones shaped into a tower with a single scythe-like arm that can also change shape to resemble a rhino made of bones. The serpentir is made from two skeletons with their legs replaced with a long spine joining them together to create a snake-like form with heads and arms on both ends.
- Exalted: Spine chains are created by Deathknights fusing the legless torsos of many human skeletons together by shoving the head of each into the next one's ribcage. They crawl around like giant centipedes on their hands, and wield numerous weapons with their front "segments".
- Godforsaken: Many of the skeletons that serve Crumellia the necromancer are chimeric hodgepodges of mismatched bones, many of which were likely created more as grotesque works of art than anything else.
- Magic: The Gathering:
- Boneyard Aberration
is a quadrupedal skeletal construct with three necks formed by spines tipped with human skulls. When killed, its remains reassemble into three weaker, randomly-structured skeletons.
- Dread Osseosaur, the reverse side of the artifact Visage of Dread, is a hulking skeletal dinosaur with three heads. Since you need to use two of your creatures (living or dead) to "craft" the Osseosaur, it's implied that two of the heads come from the skeletons of those creatures, with the third being the Visage itself.
- Boneyard Aberration
- Pathfinder: Bestiary 4 depicts the bone golem as a vaguely bipedal mass of jumbled bones and skulls. Its stronger cousin, the fossil golem, is depicted as a mishmash of dinosaur skeletons, complete with Triceratops skulls as pauldrons and theropod skulls as hands.
- Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: The Ossiarch Bonereapers are an entire faction of this, being a legion of undead constructs composed of many bones and souls each. They replenish and restore their numbers through the Tithe of Bone, a ritual wherein they collect the bones of the fallen from either subject states or from battlefields. In particular, several of their larger constructs such as the Mortek Crawlers and Gothizzar Harvesters are comprised of multiple bones that have been fused together. The faction is basically a giant Death and Taxes pun.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! has Miscellaneousaurus, a monster that visually is a dinosaur skeleton comprised of the bones of various species such as a Triceratops, a T. rex and a Stegosaurus.
Toys
- Transformers: Using certain sets under the F.O.S.S.I.L. Technology line, which resemble the skeletons of prehistoric creatures, a Fossilizer Combiner can be made that resembles a humanoid made out of the bones of multiple distinct beings.
Video Games
- Age of Wonders: The Bone Horror is described as this and takes the form of a gigantic beast. In the third game's Eternal Lord expansion, they are replaced by Bone Collectors, gigantic heaps of bones in the form of a fiddler crab (with a dragon's skull serving as the claw) that can consume corpses (or Cadavers) on the battlefield for healing and a stacking buff to health, resistance and attack.
- Castlevania: Rondo of Blood: The Bone Golem boss starts out as some hybrid of biped and quadruped skeletons, picks up wings somewhere for its second form, and then degenerates into a writhing mass of bones and skulls for its final form.
- In Chrono Trigger, after the party have cleared the Zenan Bridge of invading undead, Ozzie magically combines the remnants of his skeletal soldiers to form Zombor (Junk Dragger in Japanese) as a final challenge.
- In the First Dark Souls Game, Grave Lord Nito, The Embodiment of Death and Disease Itself in Lordran, is comprised of countless entire human skeletons pressed together in a 25 foot bipedal humanoid shape wrapped in a wispy cloak shaped cloud of black smoke, with a large central skull being his "head." He is appropriately accompanied by an equally intimidating Praetorian Guard of 10-foot tall scimitar-wielding giant skeletons. Rubbing salt in the wounds for any hero brave (or foolish) enough to confront him, Nito is able to make blades made of the very shadows explode from beneath his or her feet, or summon one to his hand to cleave said hero in half himself.
- The Elder Scrolls:
- The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind: Bonelords are pairs of skeletal humanoid torsos glued one on top of the other, with a single skull and four arms.
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: The Shivering Isles expansion has Shambles, undead constructs made from an assortment of bones that are lashed together with bits of wire and cloth.
- The Elder Scrolls Online: Bone colossi are large necromantic creations of many skeletons' worth of bones; at least three skulls are visible, as well as multiple ribcages, and they generally serve as elite enemies. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's Creation Club adds a spell to summon these in the purchasable Creations.
- EverQuest II: Within the Altar of Malice expansion, the Cult of Primordial Malice is composed of many deranged necromancers who create numerous bone golems inside the Ossuary of Malevolence. The golems are often nothing more than assorted bones held together by magic. During the ritual in which the Goddess of Malice, Lanys T'Vyl, is resurrected, she summons the massive Construct of Malice to fend off adventurers, formed from the bones sewn into the very Ossuary itself.
- Grim Dawn: The Skeletal Monstrosity and Skeletal Gargantuan are Elite Mooks among the Arkovian undead, being towering monsters composed of the bones of dozens of skeletons. Three separate boss variants (Karnath Chillblood, Moosilauke the Chillwind, and Ilgorr the Eternal) can reconstruct themselves after being killed to enter a second phase.
- MediEvil 2: The first boss, Tyrannosaurus Wrecks, is a museum exhibit brought to life, and since the story takes place in the 1800s, it's a wholly inaccurate reconstruction of dinosaur fossils. It has a triceratops-like head, a stegosaurus body with an extra set of t-rex arms grafted onto it, and an ankylosaurus-like tail. Upon defeating its first form, its body reforms into that of a pterodactyl while maintaining the triceratops head.
- Path of Exile: The Dried Lake area contains Knitted Horrors made by several of the local undead fusing together. They have a variety of nasty attacks thanks to their many limbs and the bows that some of those limbs are still holding, and when killed they break apart into their component revenants.
- Pokémon Sword and Shield does this with that region's Fossil Pokemon. The premise is that the four fossils available are partial fossils of four distinct species and thus must be cobbled together as chimeras.
- RuneScape has a series of quests where an odd old man with a big sack on his back which he sometimes talks to asks you to collect and clean specific bones from a wide variety of monsters which he says are for a museum. Collecting the entire collection reveals that the odd old man was being mind controlled by an undead skull that wanted the bones to construct a body for itself, which becomes the skeletal horror boss. The skeletal horror can be fought once per month after it is unlocked.
- Songs of Conquest: Loth has Scavenged Bones, units made from the bones of many different people animated as a singular undead.
- Valheim: Not so much walking as crawling, Bonemass is a monstrous amalgamation of slime and bones who continuously spawns blobs and skeletons. Once defeated it drops the Wishbone, an item that makes noise when near buried treasure or metal.
- World of Warcraft: Bone golems and bone wraiths are Scourge constructs made from amalgamated skeletons. Bone golems appear as giants with feline legs, multiple skulls making up their torso, and humungous ribs in place of their hands that serve as scythes. Bone wraiths look like a swirling tornado of random bones with four skeletal wings on their backs and four different heads. One of the most prominent examples is Lord Marrowgar, the first boss of the Icecrown Citadel raid.
Western Animation
- Aladdin: The Series: One episode features a villain with skeleton minions. The main characters try to deal with them by knocking them into a pile of bones, only for the skeletons to pull themselves back together into new shapes, including two who get smashed together to form a centaur with four arms and two heads.
- Extreme Dinosaurs: In one episode, dinosaur fossils come to life to attack the construction crew that were building a mall on their resting place. After getting broken apart a few times, they recombine into a larger skeleton with the base of a T. Rex, the plates of a Stegosaurus on its spine, and the heads of other dinosaurs for hands and at the tip of its tail.
- Extreme Ghostbusters: The Monster of the Week in the episode "Eyes of a Dragon," Gu Mo, creates skeletal creatures from the bones he stole from his victims, some of which combine to resemble Big Creepy-Crawlies.
- The Skeleton Dance: Played for Laughs at the end. When dawn breaks, the skeletons scramble for cover and crash into each other, falling into a pile of bones. They reassemble as a large, multi-headed, multi-limbed skeleton that jumps into an open grave.
