Story 1174: The Black Bell

They said the bell hadn’t rung in a hundred years.

Above the abandoned Cathedral of St. Elian, it hung like a blackened fang in the sky, cloaked in soot and rust, heavy with silence. The priests once claimed it tolled only when the veil between the world and the afterlife thinned.

Then one night, it tolled again.

A single, thunderous chime rolled across the gaslit streets of Greyhall, cracking windows, shattering sleep. Stray dogs howled. The birds in the cemetery trees flew in spirals until they dropped like stones. Those who remembered the old warnings stayed inside and locked their doors.

But Clara Veil did not stay inside.

She had heard the bell in her dreams for weeks—a hollow sound underwater, each chime drawing her closer to that lonely tower where time had rusted to stillness. And when the true bell tolled, her eyes opened and her feet moved without thought.

The cathedral was wrong.