They arrived just as suddenly as they left, all huddled across the shoreline clutching strange bones in their scarred hands. They all wore the same tattered robes, all colour faded to the same silt-brown and masks over their faces that made them all appear to be screaming.
They neither spoke nor ate, they just stood with their hands outstretched as if they were offering the bones to anyone brave enough to meet them. It only took an hour or so for someone to approach and take a deformed vertebrae, expecting to just walk away without giving anything in return.
He was dead before he hit the ground, his lower jaw now clutched in the same scarred hands he'd carelessly robbed mere seconds ago. The next fool came prepared with a bag of chicken bones from her dinner, offering them and accepting several jagged teeth.
A handful of others made similar trades - fish bones, roadkill and even a taxidermied stag's head over the two days the strange crowd stood on the shoreline. They left some time during the second night, leaving a few footprints just past the tidal point and a child-sized mask that has since been mounted by the shore in case they ever come back for it.
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