"The Day the Bell Was Silent"
(safe to read, zero spoilers, zero mercy)
1
The bell in the sky rang only on days that would later need names.
Scholars would call it the Resonance Pulse, the Zero Hour, the Moment We Learned Gods Could Be Late.
Children would call it the Hiccup, because the world skipped a beat and nobody knew whose throat it got stuck in.
Sailors called it the Hollow Tide: every ocean dropped three inches at once, then sloshed back as if embarrassed.
Farmers called it "that damn noise," because it cracked every wineglass in the county and they had to drink from tin like peasants.
But on the day itself, it was simply loud—a single note, middle-C stretched until it tore, audible in every skull regardless of ears, distance, or desire.
Then came the silence.
Not quiet.
Silence as a presence—a negative sound that sucked birds from the air and prayers from monks' mouths.
For exactly thirteen heartbeats the planet forgot how to echo.
When memory returned, so did the damage.
2
In the capital's observatory, Grand Astrologer Veyra dropped her quartz pendulum.
The sphere shattered, but the shards hovered, orbiting her head like embarrassed moons.
She tasted copper, then words that were not hers:
> Calibration mismatch detected.
Rebooting local physics… 3 % complete.
She tried to scream.
The scream came out alphabetical, printed in small blue letters across her tongue.
3
Three thousand miles west, under the glacier called Final Laugh, an ice-core the width of a cathedral bell sang.
Not wind—ice itself vibrating, harmonising with nothing.
Frozen within it, a long-extinct dragon opened one eye.
4
In the sewer beneath an academy that would later burn, a boy no one bothered to rank pressed his face to a brick wall and listened.
He heard the sky-bell, heard the silence, and—most importantly—heard the after-ring: a second tone, off-key, secret.
It tasted like pennies and possibilities.
He swallowed both.
His name was not yet Dylan Ashfall.
His name was "you, rat-bait," but the after-ring wrote another syllable inside his eardrum.
He would spend the next four thousand pages learning how to pronounce it.
5
On the trading route between nowhere and nopay, a caravan of storytellers found their campfire narrating itself.
Flames rose in the shape of letters, spelling:
> Once upon a now, the story learns you.
The eldest raconteur tried to edit the sentence with her walking stick.
The stick corrected her grammar and burst into chapter headings.
6
In the royal treasury, vault door number nine (reserved for "miscellaneous apocalypses") swung open without audible cue.
Inside: one empty pedestal, one faint smell of ozone, one dragon-shaped absence still warm to the touch.
7
In the cathedral of the Seven-Petaled God, every stained-glass saint turned.
Not shattered—pivoted on their lead-came frames, facing inward, bowing.
The priest interpreted this as humility.
The glass interpreted this as warning.
8
Exactly twelve babies were born during the thirteen heartbeats of silence.
Each entered the world clutching a different object that had not previously existed:
a gear made of song,
a drop of solidified sunset,
a single page in a language that tasted like forgiveness,
a copper coin stamped with tomorrow's date,
a feather that hummed middle-C when stroked,
a mirror reflecting someone else's childhood,
a seed that grew only in negative space,
a dice with faces numbered zero,
a snowflake perpetually on fire,
a knot that untied itself into the shape of a question,
a tear belonging to no one,
and, in a village too small for cartographers, a boy gripping a dragon's tooth still wet with echo.
All twelve cried at once.
The sound mixed with the returning heartbeat of the world, creating the first chord.
Musicians would spend centuries trying to replay it; most vanished into audiences.
9
High above the clouds, an airship named The Unanswered Question recorded barometric readings that spelled, in Morse, the word "Oops."
The captain, a man who had laughed at cannonballs, locked himself in his cabin and refused to emerge until language apologised.
10
In the space between seconds, a committee of things that had never been mortal held an emergency meeting.
The minutes were written on the back of every mirror ever manufactured; they self-deleted as soon as read.
Only one phrase leaked:
> "The bet is due."
11
Back inside the capital, Veyra finally succeeded in screaming—out loud.
The alphabetical letters scattered from her tongue like startled sparrows, rearranging mid-air into a single sentence that hovered before her eyes:
> Protagonist not found.
Generate? Y/N
She reached for the Y.
Her finger passed through it, cold as absent consequence.
Behind her, the shattered pendulum pieces reassembled, then reversed, swinging upward, rewriting gravity for a diameter of six feet.
Time inside the observatory began to run counterclockwise, just long enough for her to watch herself not open the vault door nine hours into the future.
The loop snapped.
She collapsed, aged exactly one day older in reverse.
12
In a library that existed only on Tuesdays, a book catalogued under "Dewey Decimal: Impossible" added its own prologue.
The ink was still wet when the librarian closed it.
The page read:
> This is not the beginning.
This is the echo of a choice that hasn't been offered yet.
When you hear the second bell, finish reading.
13
The second bell never came.
Instead, the world exhaled, clocks remembered their duty, and the silence folded itself into the spaces between heartbeats, waiting.
14
But somewhere beneath forty thousand feet of ordinary noise—carts creaking, lovers lying, teachers failing, coins clinking—a boy who had not yet earned a last name swallowed the after-ring and hummed.
The note he carried was off-key, sharp, hungry.
It would travel through veins, vaults, glaciers, cathedrals, fire, ink, and blood, until it became loud enough to name.
Four thousand pages from now, that note will be called Dragon-Slayer.
Tonight, it is only the sound of a bell that refuses to end.
---
End of Prologue