Every Ossiarch legion is built to endure, but the Petrifex Elite have made endurance an obsession. Their Boneshapers work each construct through additional rites of ossification, compressing the bone until it turns blades like fortress masonry and shrugs off blows that would shatter lesser bone. A Petrifex phalanx does not so much defend a position as become terrain — an outcrop of animated stone an enemy must quarry through, at ruinous cost, to advance a single pace.
That quarryman's patience defines their way of war. The Petrifex treat a campaign the way miners treat a mountain: methodical, tireless extraction, indifferent to the century it takes. Lands they conquer are stripped to the marrow, their dead levied down to the last pauper's bone, until even the graveyards have marched away in Ossiarch ranks and nothing remains to mark that anyone lived there at all.
Such results breed pride, and the Petrifex are held the most arrogant of the Ossiarch Bonereapers — a reputation earned partly in battle and partly in the intrigues of court, where their lords once schemed too openly for Nagash's favour and were reminded that permanence is the god's prerogative, not theirs.
Ossiarch Bonereapers
Order of battle
The Petrifex Elite field the units of the Ossiarch Bonereapers — a detachment from the roster:
Kindred formations
Other Ossiarch Bonereapers formations
Ivory HostThe flawed legion, its soul-blends contaminated by the spirits of great beasts and the berserkers who hunted them, leaving a seam of fury through every warrior. In battle the Ivory Host's composure cracks into shocking savagery, and the other legions wield them the way a duelist draws a knife he does not quite trust.
Mortis PraetoriansThe first and greatest of the Ossiarch legions, crafted under Katakros's exacting eye from the souls of history's finest soldiers. The Mortis Praetorians garrison the heartlands of the Ossiarch Empire and guard the approaches to Nagashizzar, and their pale ranks are the standard against which every other legion is measured.
Stalliarch LordsA legion built around the charge, its ranks thick with Kavalos Deathriders poured from the souls of horse-lords, outriders, and steppe khans. The Stalliarch Lords wage wars of encirclement and pursuit, running down the routed so that not one skeleton escapes the tithe, and they honor the hunt as other legions honor the phalanx.