The Hollow Bell

Overview

The Hollow Bell is the walled-up bell hall of an empty upper hold in the Ironspine. After the deep war with the Dark Elves the hold's last smiths cast a bell to call its dead back, and cast it wrong. The hall was walled up behind it, and the hold has stood empty ever since. It is one of the few off-key places known on Caeldon, where the Dissonance lies close under the true world, and the holds know it by tale far better than by sight.

The Place

The empty hold lies high on the western face, a day's climb above the nearest living gate, its yards open to the snow. Nobody says its name. Its halls are only empty; the deeper hall is wrong. A wall of fitted stone shuts the passage to it, laid without mortar in the old manner and cut with no mark of any hold.

The tales give the bell as tall as three Dwarves, cast in one pour from every metal the hold still owned, its rim cut with the names of the dead. They say it was rung once, and that what answered was not the dead.

Keepers and Users

The nearest living hold keeps the wall, because the hold was its neighbour and its dead were kin. Its wardens climb to the gate twice a year to look at the stones and come down again; no one is posted there. Grave-robbers come anyway, after the treasury the tales say was left behind. Hold children add a rule to the one about the seals: if the stone hums, go home.

The true keepers are a single household in the living hold, descended from the few who walked out of the empty one. They carried nothing out but the hold's archive tablets, and those tablets are theirs to keep.

The Medieval Present

Every year on the night the hold fell, an elder of that household climbs to the wall with a lamp and the tablets, and reads the empty hold's dead aloud, every name, before the stones. It takes until morning. The living hold rings its gate bell once at dusk while the elder climbs, cast true and tuned by its own smiths, and the household says the hum has never come on a reading night. Children of the household learn the names before their own trade, and a child who can read the whole tablet without a stumble is called old enough to climb.

In the years the hum comes most often, the household's sleepless and grieving are watched. Twice in living memory one of them has been found on the old road at dawn, walking up towards the gate.

History

The hold was emptied in the deep war with the Dark Elves (c. 330,000-c. 305,000 BR), when its gate did not hold; the war itself belongs to the Stonewake Deeps. How the bell was made to answer, and who taught its smiths to cast it so, nobody knows. The living hold walled the hall in the same generation.

Tensions

• The treasury. A sellsword company has bought a map of the empty hold and the treasury the tales say was left behind when the metal for the bell ran short.
• A name too few. The household's eldest has found that the tablets hold one name fewer than the hold's own count of its dead.
• The moving stone. The hum has come three times this winter, more than in any year the household remembers, and one of the wardens swears a stone in the wall has moved outward.