Quietbell

Overview

Quietbell is a low white bellflower that grows on graves, and only on some. It comes up over the dead who have settled and passed on, and it does not grow, or withers, where a death's residue is hardening into a hostile remnant. Every people that buries its dead has learnt to read it, and the mortuary trades and the necromancers use it.

Appearance

A small, tufted plant the height of a finger or two, with a rosette of narrow, soft, grey-green leaves and in early summer several thread-thin stems bearing nodding bells no bigger than a fingernail. The bells are white, sometimes touched with the faintest blue at the rim, and move in the slightest air. A grave grown over with them looks frosted from a distance. They have a faint, clean scent like linen dried in the sun, noticeable only in the evening.

Habitat and Range

It grows in churchyards, burial fields, barrows, and the family grounds of the forest and the holds alike, on any people's graves, wherever the ground is left undug long enough. It does not grow away from the dead.

Behaviour and Temperament

It is slow to come. A new grave stays bare of it for a year or more, and the bells arrive, if they arrive, once the dead beneath have passed into memory or Record. Over a grave where the residue stays restless the plants never take, and where a settled grave is disturbed the bells wither within days.

Life Cycle

A perennial that spreads by short runners and fine seed, forming mats over old graves that last for generations. Mats that wither over a disturbed grave can return once the grave is quiet again.

Uses and Dangers

Mortuary staff, trace-readers of Trace Magic such as the Grey Lantern Mortuary, and sextons of every kind walk the burial grounds and read the bells: a bare grave among flowered ones is watched, and a withering mat sends someone for help. Temple necromancers of Necromancy strew the dried flowers in rites of Grave Quiet, counting them among the funerary symbols that help the dead settle again. It is harmless.

Lore and Belief

Mourners take the first bells on a grave for a sign that the dead are at peace, and in many villages they are not picked there. Children say the bells ring for the dead at night, too softly for the living to hear. The mortuary trades warn that the bells read the grave and not the person: they show a residue settled or not, and a grave can be quiet for reasons nobody would wish. Some families plant Quietbell on a fresh grave in hope; it does not take until it would have come by itself.

Grave-robbers read the bells too: a barrow with no bells on it is a barrow they leave alone, since its dead may not be resting.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Plants and Fungi