NOVPUB
Chapter 30 - At Last, the Bell Tolls
The walk to the bell tower was colder and longer than Lucian remembered. Its stones no longer hummed with restrained silence—it nearly cracked underneath its weight. Multiple hairline fractures crawled across the walls like a ribbon worm's tongue.
Lucian's skin felt far too taut across his body, just like the air. He had the strangest impulse to escape from within, like a pupa bursting into a butterfly from its' cocoon. Instead of giving in, Lucian merely continued climbing. The tower didn't feel like a ritual site.
It felt like climbing into a gaping wound.
Lucian continued to climb, his boots echoing along the stone. His walking cane ensured he was steady even as the mourning clapper was pressed to his chest, like it was a precious key. Behind him was Alice—the spirit dwelling inside Rosa—and she stood at the base of the stairs, watching.
She didn't ask to come, nor did she say goodbye. Alice just said, "I'll wait."
That was enough.
As she slowly disappeared from his sight, Lucian had to admit—it was nice to see Rosa's hands steady this time around.
Sweat dripped down his brow and as he reached the summit, Lucian removed the thick overcoat that held his coffin-shaped pin and gently placed it on top of a smooth wooden table.
The bell loomed like an ancient and exhausted turtle. There was a deep crack on its' left side that was sealed in ritual bronze. Like the metalworker truly loved it. Its weight hung over Staesis like a forgotten sentence.
Carefully, Lucian placed the mourning clapper in the center of the altar. He tied his hair back with a piece of ribbon, then grabbed the scroll bearing Alaric's final confession. Lastly, he took a memory of his own: a page torn from the Grimoire itself, scrawled in his hand:
"Let the silence end. Let the story begin again."
His cane pulsed once as he planted it in the circle.
The ritual lines flared.
+ Below the Tower +
Mayor Gray stormed through the inner sanctum of the Queen's mausoleum, his polished boots trailing wax and dust.
The Queen sat on her bone dais, scrying glass open before her, expression unreadable.
He stopped ten feet from her and didn't bow.
"What is your mortician doing?" he demanded.
The Queen did not answer at first. Her eyes were fixed on the scrying pool, where Lucian stood in the bell tower, drawing runes over faded stone.
She finally spoke. "Fulfilling a request."
Mayor Gray blinked. "A request?"
She nodded. "Someone from Staesis wrote to me asking for aid."
The Mayor's face paled.
"I wrote no such thing."
The Queen raised her hand, and from the air pulled a scroll—thin, ivory, sealed with the mark of a civic administrator.
She held it up, then cast it gently down to him.
He caught it.
His face fell.
The parchment was old. Familiar.
Stamped in violet ink:
From the desk of the Head Archivist, Staesis Annex.
"You must be mistaken, your highness," he said tightly. "The archivist has been out of a job since she refused to keep the official records clean."
The Queen turned her head slowly.
"Official records?" she repeated, voice slow and hollow.
Mayor Gray stiffened.
The Queen's voice sharpened, bones along her arms glinting. "What is it you've kept from me, Mayor?"
He said nothing.
Behind them, Gethra stepped from the shadows, arms folded, eyes glittering.
"I only cleaned what he asked me to," she said. "Until I realized the records were erasing more than clerical errors. They were erasing names. Histories. Causes of death. Entire lives."
Mayor Gray turned sharply. "You have no authority here."
"No," Gethra said, smiling. "But the Mortician does."
+ At the Bell Tower +
The ritual was ready.
Lucian stood with the cane in one hand, the bell clapper in the other.
The symbols carved into the tower walls had begun to glow—faint at first, then pulsing like heartbeats.
One beat for every name forgotten.
One beat for every lie written in clean, official ink.
He looked up at the bell.
Alaric had written the rite to seal it.
Lucian was here to unwrite it.
He took one last breath.
And struck the bell.
The sound was not a chime.
It was a crack in the world.
It didn't echo—it carved.
Through air. Through bone. Through memory.
The fog above Staesis tore open like fabric soaked too long in silence. The streets below vibrated. Laborers collapsed mid-motion. Some screamed. Others wept. Others simply looked up at the sky and remembered their own names.
The lake boiled.
The fish rose to the surface, unafraid.
Death remembered.
And it came looking.
+ The Queen's Mausoleum +
The Queen stumbled.
The scrying glass shattered. Bone shards flew across the chamber.
Mayor Gray covered his face. Gethra did not flinch.
"What... did he do?" the Queen hissed.
"He woke the dead," Gethra said. "And the truth."
Mayor Gray stepped forward, rage overtaking panic.
"You've undone the balance," he snapped. "This town will tear itself apart."
Gethra looked him in the eye.
"Then let it--civil agreements be damned. As far as I'm concerned, Mayor, your authority ended when the Crown Prince disappeared."
+ In the Tower +
Lucian fell to one knee.
The bell still vibrated, humming beneath his skin like a second heartbeat. His cane had cracked—but not broken.
The circle beneath him was smoking. The runes had blackened.
And in the center of it all—the Grimoire.
Its cover was open.
Pages flipped without wind.
New entries wrote themselves in real time:
"Death is awake."
"Cycle breached."
"Witnessed by the 13th."
Lucian looked at the lake in the distance.
Fish still swam.
But they no longer feared the surface.
And this time, neither did he.
If only he knew how deeply wrong he was.
