Where the Bells Still Ring

There was once a village perched high on the cliffs of the northern coast, where the wind never stopped singing, and the sea seemed to listen. It was called Iridale, a place so tucked away from the world that maps never bothered to mark it. The people there lived with the tides, with the gulls, and with the bell towers-three of them carved from white stone that glowed lavender at dusk.

Each morning, the bells rang-not to signal time, but to greet it. Each tone was tuned to a different emotion: one for joy, one for sorrow, one for memory. It was said that the cliffs carried the chimes far across the water, to lost sailors, to lovers separated by storms, to gods who had long stopped answering prayers.

Iridale thrived not because it was rich, but because it remembered. Every year, on the first day of spring, the villagers would walk in procession to the cliffs with handfuls of petals-lavender, golden, and blush-and cast them into the sea. Names were spoken aloud. Names of the dead, names of the missing, names of those who had left but had never truly gone. The bells would ring for each name, their voices rising into the vast sky until the last petal was taken by the waves.

But Iridale is gone now.

It began with the earthquakes, low and slow, like a beast shifting in its sleep beneath the earth. Then came the rains, hard and endless, pounding the cliffs until the very stones wept. One night, the sea rose with such fury it swallowed the lower village in a single breath. Those who had survived fled inland. The bell towers held fast-for a while.

The last bell rang at dusk on a windless evening. No one was left to hera it, but they say the cliffs glowed again, one final time. The tower fell before night arrived, but that last chime lingered, echoing over the sea for what seemed like hours.

Now, where Iridale once stood, there is only mist and the occassional fragment of white stone washed ashore. Some say if you walk the cliffs on the first day of spring, you'll hear the bells ringing across the waves. Others say the sea still remembers, and that's why it's quiet there-too quiet.

But I remember Iridale. I remember the sound of petals on water. I remember a girl who stood beside me at the edge of the world, her hair tangled with salt and wind. She whispered names into the wind and never told me which one was mine. I never asked.

The girl's name was Lira.

She was the daughter of the bell-keepers, a quiet man with sea-colored eyes who rarely spoke unless he was singing to the bells. Lira had a voice like wind chimes-soft and clear, always a little sad. She walked barefoot through the village, even in the winter, and the children whispered that her blood wasn't warm like theirs. They said she was part of the sea, that she would disappear one day like foam.

We were only fifteen when she took my hand and led me past the last house, to the edge where the cliffs broke clean into the sky. There, where the heather grew in crooked bursts and the gulls wheeled like scattered prayers, she told me Iridale was dying.

"Places die," she said, her voice nearly lost to the wind. "But they never go quietly."

I didn't understand then. I thought she meant people would leave. I thought she meant the sea would claim a few roofs. I didn't know she meant the bones of the land itself would crack, that the earth would forget how to hold what we had built.

She looked at me then-not with sorrow, but with a kind of fierce love that made my heart hurt.

"When it happens," she whispered, "don't remember the breaking. Remember the sound of the bells. Promise me."

I did.

But I lied.

Because I remember everything-the shudder of the ground, the way the cliffs groaned like wounded animals, the scream of wood and stone torn from itself. I remember Lira running into the bell tower the night before it fell, climbing with the desperation of someone trying to save more than stone.

No one ever saw her again. Not her father. Not me.

The sea took her, and I think she let it.

I left Iridale the next morning, barefoot like her, walking inland with the others through mud and smoke. I never returned. But each year, on the first day of spring, I find the nearest shore. I carry petals-lavender, golden, and blush-and I speak names.

Her name first.

Always.

I do not know if the bells still ring in the deep. I do not know if Lira becamse part of the sea, or if she became something more than girl, more than wind. But sometimes, when the tide just right, I hear a chime through the mist-a note that catches in the chest, that tastes like memory and salt.

This year, the petals catch the wind before they touch the water. They whirl upward, caught in an unseen current, and I almost believe it’s her-Lira, laughing in the gust, dancing just beyond sight.

I kneel on the wet rocks. My knees ache now; I’m not the boy I was. My hair has gone silver, like the foam that crowns each wave. But my voice is steady when I speak her name.

And this time, when I say it, the sea responds.

Not in words-but in sound. A low hum, the tone of the middle bell-the one for memory. It rolls across the water like a sigh, like something old waking from sleep. The wind hushes. Even the gulls fall silent.

I look up, and for a moment, just a breath, I see the towers again-pale as a ghost against the horizon. And at the highest point, a figure, backlit by a lavender sky, stands with her hand raised.

Then the mist takes it all away.

But that’s enough.

I rise slowly and leave the shore.

And somewhere behind me, in a place that no longer exists, the bells of Iridale keep ringing.