1034: Story 1034: The Bell Tower Bleeds 1034: Story 1034: The Bell Tower Bleeds They said the bell hadn’t rung in fifty years.
Not since the final sermon, when Reverend Alden Grieves locked himself in the tower and set the church ablaze, his screams muffled by the roaring flames.
The congregation called it divine punishment; others whispered of forbidden gospels and blood sacrifices.
The town of Marrow’s Reach buried the ruins, planted thornbrush around the old church, and forgot.
Until the bell tolled again.
Once.
At midnight.
Talia Grimm stood beneath the skeletal remains of the church, her boots crunching bone-dry petals left by the wind.
Her sketchbook trembled in her hands, stained with charcoal and crimson.
She had drawn the bell.
Days before it rang.
She had never been here.
Her mute lips trembled.
The drawings were never hers—not really.
Something guided her hand.
Something trapped above.
The bell tower was still standing—barely—its stones veined with moss and black ichor that oozed like sap.
The bell itself looked wrong now.
Not rusted, not worn, but…
alive.
Veined and pulsing.
Its mouth was cracked like a grin.
From the shadows above, came a soft, wet weeping.
Talia climbed.
Each step up the winding staircase groaned like a coffin lid.
Crimson moss clung to the walls, writhing in response to her presence.
A distant hum rang in her ears—a chorus of whispers layered over the memory of chimes.
When she reached the top, she found him.
Reverend Grieves.
Or what was left of him.
His flesh hung in strips, suspended in midair by tendrils of hair and nail.
His eyes were gouged out, replaced by tiny bells fused into his sockets, tolling faintly with each breath.
“Toll for me,” he croaked.
“Toll…
for the blood.”
The bell pulsed.
A low groan shook the rafters.
Talia’s sketches fell from her grasp, fluttering down the tower like dead leaves.
Each one now bore a single word, written in blood.
“Remember.”
A wind howled, though no windows were open.
From the bell’s gaping mouth, black ichor spilled, coating the floor in a spreading sigil.
Talia was frozen.
Not with fear.
With understanding.
This was no church.
It was a prison.
The bell was its wound, and the tolling was the heartbeat of something buried below.
She stepped forward, eyes vacant, arms outstretched—
—and rang the bell.
The sound shattered every mirror in Marrow’s Reach.
From the soil, hands clawed upward.
Children awoke screaming.
And far below the church, something ancient stirred, its voice echoing through every chime—
“One toll for blood.
One toll for bone.
The third shall open the gate.”
The bell rings twice now.
No one dares wait for the third.
But Talia’s next drawing shows a broken sky, a tower crumbling into an open mouth, and the words:
“He is almost free.”