The caravan did not follow.
It simply stood in its broken circle. Gates open. The mountain of corpses stared after them with wagon-wheel eyes that never blinked.
The boy in the cage watched Sunny leave without a word. Something had changed—recognition, or the beginning of it. Sunny felt it like a knife through the ribs he no longer had.
Ash walked ahead, spear across her shoulders, flame dimmed to a sullen ember. She had not spoken since the red beam split the sky.
The water had receded. The ground was slick and black, littered with salt-crusted corpses that dissolved into brine under each step.
They walked west, toward where the Dark City had once stood.
(SFX: dong… dong… dong…)
The bells began at dusk that never came.
First one, low, mournful.
Then a second, higher, answering.
Seven in total, ringing slowly across drowned ruins. Each note hung in the air like a body on a gibbet.
Ash stopped.
"That's new," she said quietly.
Seven bells. He remembered them—ancient, marking stages of descent into hell.
Then came the eighth. Wrong. Cracked. Raw. A child screaming through a throat full of broken glass.
Everywhere and nowhere at once. Vibrating in bones, teeth, soul.
Ash's flame flared instinctively. Sunny felt the white fire over his heart—the piece of Nephis he carried—flicker in recognition.
The eighth bell rang again, rising into a wail that made black water tremble.
Ash whispered, voice tight:
"They started ringing the day the sky cracked. No one knows where the eighth is… or who rings it."
Sunny already knew. He walked on.
The Dark City revealed itself.
It had fallen upward.
Once, a crumbling castle clung to a cliff. Now the city hung inverted beneath the red sky, colossal chains rising from the ground, rooted in nothing. Towers pointed down like stalactites. Streets spiraled into void. Bridges of rope and bone swayed gently.
And everywhere, the dead. Thousands of corpses hung from chains, rusted armor, hair drifting like seaweed. Some preserved perfectly. Others fresh, skin sloughing off in wet sheets.
The bells rang, seven perfect notes and one cracked scream, endlessly.
Ash led the way to the longest chain, carved with a spiral staircase centuries ago. They climbed.
The higher they went, the louder the bells became. The eighth bell was close now—each scream making Ash's flame gutter, Sunny's shadow recoil.
At the top, the former castle courtyard now a ceiling far above the void. Gravity still pulled down. Boots stuck slightly to salt-slick stone.
In the center stood a figure. Human-shaped—but wrong.
Bronze skin alive, etched with thousands of faintly glowing runes. Arms too long, hands with too many joints. Face featureless except for a vertical mouth, rows of bell-shaped teeth.
Chains grew from its back like wings. Each ended in a bell—seven perfect, one cracked and bleeding rust.
(SFX: CLANG… CLANG… KREEEE—screeeaaam!)
It rang itself. The cracked bell screamed with every movement.
The Bell-Keeper turned slowly. Voice layered, resonant, ancient:
"Sunless."
Seven perfect bells rang in harmony. The eighth screamed.
Ash raised her spear. Flame flaring.
Sunny stepped forward.
"You came back," the Bell-Keeper said. "The tumor returns to the body."
Sunny stopped a meter away.
"Explain."
Chains clinked as the Bell-Keeper spread its bronze arms.
"When you sat the throne," it said, "you cut this place away. A clean incision. The Forgotten Shore was the rot at the heart of the Spell. You removed it. Sealed it. Became the vessel to hold the world together."
One step closer. The cracked bell screamed louder. Bronze skin rippled like liquid metal.
"You left pieces behind. Changing Star's blood. A fragment of your Name. A child's scream. The Shore fed on them. Four hundred years it fed. It built a new heart. A new hunger."
It pointed one too-long finger at Sunny's chest, where the white flame burned.
"It wants the rest of you," it whispered. "All of you. To finish what it started. Drag the world back into the dark it never left."
Ash's flame roared.
"The Spire—"
"The Spire is only the mouth," the Bell-Keeper said. "The Shore is the body. And it is waking."
Chains dragged as it turned, walking toward the inverted cathedral of chains and bones—the former great hall.
Sunny followed. Ash hesitated, then came too.
Corpses drifted like slow fish. Bells rang, seven notes and one endless scream.
At the throne room's center: a pit. Not downward. Upward. A perfect circle cut into red darkness.
Inside, a single bell: the eighth. Cracked, rust bleeding like blood. The clapper: a human child, mouth sewn with iron wire. Screaming with every movement.
Sunny's shadow recoiled violently, trying to flee.
Ash made a broken sound.
The Bell-Keeper stopped at the pit's edge.
"This is what waits at the top of the Spire. Not Changing Star. Not the Terror. Something older. Before the Spell. Before the Forgotten God. Before the first slave cried."
Featureless face toward Sunny:
"It has been ringing your Name for four hundred years. Taught the Shore to dream of you. Taught the dead how to wait. Taught the living how to hate."
The cracked bell screamed again.
The red sky rippled. Something looked down. Prey, already chosen.
The Bell-Keeper stepped aside.
"The only way out," it said, "is through."
Then it knelt, chains pooling like spilled blood, and rang itself. Seven perfect notes. One endless scream.
The hanging city began to fall upward. Chains tightened. Corpses drifted faster toward red darkness.
Ash grabbed Sunny's arm.
"We have to go," she said, voice shaking.
Sunny looked at the pit. At the child screaming inside the bell. At what waited above.
He reached out. Touched the nearest chain. Warm. Alive.
"Run," he whispered.
He stepped into the pit. Chains caught him gently, like a mother catching a falling child.
The cracked bell screamed one last time—triumphant.
The red sky closed above him. The Dark City fell upward, carrying bells, dead, and a single living flame toward whatever waited at the top of the Spire.
Ash stood alone, spear burning. Tears cut clean lines through salt on her cheeks. She whispered something too soft to hear. Then followed.