Rebirth15 min read
I Fell Through a Bell and Met a General
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I hit the ground so hard the dry leaves stung my cheek like a slap. "Ugh—" I pushed myself up, wiping grit from my mouth, and the world smelled wrong: old sap, wet earth, and something like burned wood.
"Beautiful, so beautiful—skin like milk, scent to raise the dead," coaxed a voice that should not exist. A tall thing moved between trunks, its face half-hidden by curling vines. Red eyes glowed from the knot of bark where a human face should be. It laughed in a way that made my bones feel thin.
"Tree spirit," I said to the air, smoothing my skirt so I could think. My training in the city had never prepared me to fall through a cerulean bell into a forest that smelled like old prayers. "Stay calm. Stay logical."
"Ha!" The tree-thing flung out a vine like an arm. It snagged my ankle and I went airborne. "You will be perfect—my perfume, my feast—"
"Grant!" I shouted. "Bind-rope!" I couldn't feel my wrist where my black bracelet used to hum, where my tools usually returned to me. The forest answered only with wind.
A glossy black bird dropped from a branch and perched on a twig near my head. "The ward's twisted. Grant here. White—white's gone. Your tools are with him now. You survive on your wits this time, Bianca," the bird said, ruffling like a gentleman.
"Grant?" I blinked. The talking raven had lived in my bag back home as a trick, then it had been a real companion. "You left me?" I barked, climbing to my feet.
"Left you? I flew to the edge of the ward to scout—someone slipped past the formation. A human." Grant's eye caught a twig, then a shadow. "Hurry, you idiot, before—"
An arrow hissed past my cheek. I bent and the stick of iron grazed my skin. "What the—" I grabbed for my hairpin, stabbed at the vine, and the vine recoiled with a screech.
The tree's face split into a grin of bark. "You'll be perfume, pet," it hissed. "Humans are soft."
I rolled, bared teeth, and bit my fingertip. Blood welled. I drew a sigil in the air, letting the old words roll off my tongue like a prayer and a command.
"I bind by blood and sky—light of thunder, rage of heavens—rise and strike! Seal!" I thrust my hand up. The storm obeyed me. Clouds boiled and a sting of lightning lanced into the thickest vine.
The tree howled and lunged, but the same moment one arrow grazed my cheek and the tree's spirit slipped into the trunks like smoke. "No!" I cried, because an intruder could distract a ward, and wards hate mistakes. The tree found a hole in the weave and dove through the root-world into deeper wood. My sword felt heavy in my hand, grown from my hairpin the way it always did when I called it home. I hurled it. It changed—long, cold, singing.
The tree's spirit lurched out of a trunk and smashed into a natural circle of stones. "A boundary!" it hissed. It groped, frantic, then saw me. It tried to flee.
"Think you can run?" I summoned thunder again. My laugh when the sky answered felt small and ridiculous next to the lightning, but the lightning let go and struck the fleeing spirit. It shrieked and tried to splice through roots, but the long sword bit clean. The poor thing's spirit cracked and flared.
I had been smiling for maybe two seconds—pride tastes like metal—when the black bird dove onto my shoulder. "Someone else entered the ring," Grant said. "Humans. Leave."
A sharp whisper of wind—too smooth, like silk across glass—cut my ear. I twisted. An arrow sliced a breath between me and the last tree. I turned to the edge of the formation and saw them: a company riding through the trees, banners bright in a country where banners were threats.
"Who goes there? This is the Imperial Hunt!" called a girl in red whose entourage buzzed like gnats. She had eyes like knives: a princess with entitlement.
"Princess Annalise?" someone breathed near the back of the line. A tall man cloaked in black and silver moved forward like a shadow forcing daylight to keep its distance. He wore a mask of hammered silver over half his face. His height ate my anger. He didn't look like a noble; he looked like someone the world should fear.
"General Eliseo," the rider near him called, pausing as the princess narrowed her eyes at me. "What business does this... woman have in the hunt grounds?"
"She's a demon," one of the princess's attendants said, pointing at Grant. "Look at that bird."
"She isn't a demon," I said. "I—" I tried to explain the lost ward, the tree, the missing friend. But explanation fell apart when General Eliseo reached out and grabbed the back of my collar, lifting me off my feet like a child.
"Let go!" I spat. The bird flapped and left me. "My tools—Grant, get the cerulean bell back to him, find White—Chase—"
Grant cawed and darted into the trees, leaving me dangling. I realized I looked ridiculous: hair out, skirt muddy, eyes wide. The princess brightened at my humiliation, and Eliseo's grip was firm. "He is gentle—" someone said, and the girl recoiled.
"There's no time. He'll be your prisoner," Eliseo said low. He carried me like a bulk of winter and the world flipped in a way that made my stomach unhappy. "We go to the Manor. We'll speak."
"You can't—" I twisted, then thought better. Not a good idea to kick the biggest blade in the Kingdom while you are in his hands.
That night, they put me in a dark cell meant for monsters. "You're bold for a demon," the gaoler snarled. He knocked on the boards outside my cell. "They say you'll be judged and burned."
"Judged for what?" I muttered. They had taken my sword and bracelets. The ward could not reach for things without them. I closed my eyes and breathed. There is always a way. I am an exorcist from a century where trains move like iron tides. I have more tricks than I look.
Moonlight through the high window skittered across the floor. I pressed my palms flat and whispered: "Borrow the moon; make me lean like mist." My body dimmed. The heat of fear turned to the cool of air and I was almost empty.
When I ran, I nearly laughed. The lock was old. I slid past two guards and felt the sweet rush of freedom in my lungs. Then I ran into a wolf the size of a small house.
"Ah!" The wolf's jaws closed around my cloak and I used the scarf to slide from its mouth. The wolf erupted into a human the way beasts do in stories. He was tall and bare, shockingly beautiful, and then he fumbled for clothes as if we'd all agreed such modesty was optional here. Eliseo walked into that scene like a blade returning to a sheath. He took a lantern and a cloak and handed one to the wolf-man, who transformed his shapeshift into a human of quick grace.
"Ah," the wolf-man said, smiling. "You must be the one everyone is fussing about."
"Don't be an idiot," I muttered. He handed me clothing and then a voice—soft, like a stream—said, "You likely need rest." It belonged to a man in white, clean and not frightening; he offered a bowl of broth and called himself Benjamin. "My name is Benjamin Abe."
"Bianca," I told him. "Bianca Wagner."
"We met the general," Benjamin adjusted his sleeves. "He is—" He paused, giving Eliseo a look that was less explanation than a question.
Eliseo only said, "She was found at a boundary. She was meant to be contained, but someone broke the ward."
"Who?" I demanded.
"We don't know," Eliseo said. "But you will not leave."
And so the strange days began. I became a guest of the General, or rather a detained guest. He made me wear someone else's dress while a household debated if I was servant or worse. "You cannot leave," Eliseo said once as he sat in a room that smelled of oil and old paper.
"Why are you so weird?" I asked him. "You kidnapped me, General Eliseo, that's a lot of weird."
His mouth twitched like a guard trying not to smile. "You broke a ward meant to keep a thousand wrong things sealed. If you leave, others will die by that mistake. Stay. You will be safe in my house. You'll call yourself a servant."
"A servant? You mean 'slave' might be a more accurate translation." I glared.
He folded his hands like that meant nothing. "You will be paid, and you will not be a magnet for the wrong kind of trouble if outside rumors call you 'General Eliseo's woman.'"
"Is that a threat or a bribe?" I asked. "Either way it's awkward."
"Neither," he said. "A practical solution."
I stayed because I had no passport and no apps in this world. I had only one item that might get me home: the cerulean bell, the old bronze talisman that had bound a spirit the way a door binds rooms. I needed my friend Chase—everybody here called him white—Chase Owens, to find its rattle and bring it to me. He had been with me when we fell. He'd disappeared. Grant had said he had gone someplace wrong.
Days bled into tasks. I went with the town's "monster hunters" to check charred roofs. The town was falling apart. Bodies had been found with ribs eaten clean but the people had not died right away. The disease that eats from within seemed like a new species: corpse-worms that devoured organs and crawled from the skull to leave a hole.
"You're small," a deputy named Patrick Deng whispered at my shoulder as I worked by lamplight. "You look like someone who does things with soft hands. You know more than you claim."
"I bite things," I said.
"I believe you. Help us examine," Patrick suggested. When I bled on the corpse and drew lines, a pale, wriggling worm tore out like something that should not come from a skull. I flinched—but then I caught it in the glow of my bracelet, and it folded, trapped inside the metal.
The townspeople called me clever after that. The berry of favor tastes like copper.
A soft-faced man, Song Qi—no, Patrick Deng had come to be known as "Song" here—begged me for help with a missing daughter. "Left Minister's daughter," he said. "Taken from a temple garden. We could not find the thief."
"Trees cover the best hiding places for something that loves wood," I told him. We followed a scent like old sandalwood. I found the tree-spirit's lair in the mountain temple's roots. I set up a lure using my own blood and the tree's ancient anger untangled into grief and I saw, for the first time of many, the story beneath the monster's face: the tree's wife had been cut and made into incense, offered to the palace. Its vengeance was crude and merciless. I could finish it, or I could listen.
The tree's voice trembled like wind on brittle leaves. "Let me look on her again."
"Only truth. If you trick me, I'll take you," I said. I let it place a bit of its last pain in my hands, and it dissolved like smoke on blue water.
It was not a good memory to hold. Later I found a black stone on the ground near the tree—a pebble of sealing so thick it hummed under my skin. I picked it up and Grant crowed on a branch as if I'd found a coin.
"You found something," Eliseo said later, stepping from shadow. He'd come to the clearing without me hearing him. "Do not hide things from me. Trust is the only currency that lasts here."
"Trust can be forged," I said. "It can also get you killed." I kept the stone at my throat like an omen.
The first big fracture came at a plated banquet at the Left Minister's house where we were to be presented. I wore a light dress Eliseo said would not make the gossip worse. Princess Annalise sat like a red wren at the high table, her attendants glittering around her. As guests chatted I saw her look at me like somebody who'd picked a bone with themselves and found me in the shape of an answer. "That witch," she whispered to a maid. She shot an arrow to frighten me—a tiny thing to strike a mark. The arrow grazed my shoulder. I blinked, and Eliseo hauled me off my feet again.
"Princess," Eliseo said, wide and dangerous as a window open to a storm. "This ends now. Withdraw."
"I was promised," she objected. "He promised me—" Her mouth twisted, and she spat like a woman who had been used to getting what she wanted by threat and gold. "He promised reward to the woman who took his hand."
Eliseo's face did not move. The room froze like breath on glass, and people wet their lips. A pedestal of silence grew. "You will withdraw," he said. His voice had the width of a blade. He turned an arm like a judge might. He revealed his left hand and peeled off a glove. A grey tuft like fur showed along his knuckles. The girl's face slivered into naked fear.
"General—" someone tried.
"Enough," Eliseo said. "My marriage will be not of your design. Withdraw now. Or be expelled from the palace precincts."
"Expel me?" the princess tried to hold on to the center of her star. "I will speak to the Emperor—"
"You will not," Eliseo said. "And you will not awaken the court with lies." He stepped forward. I saw something like triumph and blood at the same time.
Then, in the reception hall, he said what no one expected in a voice even and sharp: "Our betrothal is rescinded." He turned away, as if to leave, and Princess Annalise flamed with rage. Her face went from haughtiness to raw panic as if someone had yanked the rug from under her feet mid-step.
"How dare you!" she screamed. Her attendants gasped. A murmur rippled like a stone.
I stood, small and insolent, and I felt Eliseo's arm brush my waist like a promise. "He cannot," the princess wailed. "He is a monster!"
She lunged at him with a servant—poor, foolish, grasping for any power like a drowning person grabs a branch.
Eliseo did not lift a sword. He dropped his hand to his belt, and his look hardened into something that terror and sorrow share. "Princess, you have lied to me," he said in a voice that could not be softened. "You told me you loved me. You told me you desired me. You used me—"
She tried to deny, lips white. Guests had drawn their fans like shields. Some laughed like cruel children, others opened their mouths into O's of shock. "No!" she said. "I—"
"Listen." Eliseo walked to the head of the dining hall and—"I called this banquet to settle it publicly." He held up the Emperor's small silver seal he had had from the throne. "You told lies to secure favor, to leverage a title," he said. "You will stand and speak the truth before these people."
"You're insane!" Annalise flung her hands and tried to leap free, but they had already surrounded her. "I would never—"
"Speak." Eliseo's voice was low steel. "Tell them why you fired the arrow at Bianca."
Faces turned. The princess looked like a carved doll whose strings had been cut. She tried to wriggle away—then someone had the bright thought to video a public spectacle: servants with little glass lenses and curious hands crowded near and the sound of the crowd making shards of murmurs smashed into her like hail.
"She is a witch," Annalise began. "I was promised an honor—"
"You were promised the title because you let the Emperor believe you were worthy," Eliseo finished. "You made bargains you had no right to trade."
"That is a lie!" she screamed. Her breathing got fast. Her supporters shifted, feathers at the edge of panic. "You can't—" She ran her fingers through her hair and panted.
"Enough," Eliseo said. He pointed at one of the guards. "Bring the scroll."
Two officers came forward bearing a ledger of the princess's expenses and gifts to courtiers. Names were read aloud: bribes, payments, favors traded. A hush fell over the room. People started to whisper names, and their voices became a knife: whatever dignity the princess had evaporated under the cold eyes of a thousand tongues.
She tried to get ahead of the story. "You can't show those— those are private!" She tried to laugh and sob at once. The hall, wide and bright, became a stadium. The servants with lenses took photos and someone streamed it—the content that would go like a fever.
He read entries, lit by candlelight: payments to servants to accuse rivals, purchase of poison, forged letters forged to destroy reputations. The princess's face crumpled from color to sallow white. "You're lying!" she screeched. "I did those things to secure family—"
"Do you deny the seal?" Eliseo asked, and then he produced a stamped letter—a handwriting sample that matched her hand. It matched her accounts. She began to shake, not with anger but with a human fear she had never felt as the powerless saw the sudden reversal.
Crowds hissed. Women wrapped their fans around their mouths. Some whispered in glee; others in horror that a royal might be so small. "I didn't—" she tried, and the words kept failing as more ledger pages were displayed.
"People, she has lied to us," Eliseo said, and his voice no longer had any warmth. "She used the Crown's favors to stalk and humiliate strangers. She endangered this city with arrows and then tried to gift shame to a stranger."
"I—" She started to bargain, to plead.
"Stop," Eliseo said softly, like something that could no longer be softened. "Your duties were to honor the court. You used your rank to trample others. The court will handle the rest."
Guards moved in. They took her jewels and her banners. They hauled away her favorite ornaments. The crowd surged like a tide. Someone recorded it all—faces, tears, the princess screaming and then crumbling as the weight of her own falsehoods sank in.
She did everything wrong. First disbelief, then anger, then an attempt to gaslight—"You don't understand!" She tried to deny the ledger. She tried to apologize and call it a prank. Then she had nothing but silence. The crowd started to turn on her: laughter became a chorus, the sound of someone losing everything. Somewhere in the back, a servant asked, "Will she be exiled?" Another cried "Shame her!" The royal guards answered the court's decisions and escorted her away under the eyes of everyone she had ever humiliated. People took pictures, some clapped. Others spat. The princess' face first turned hot then ice-cold, then wet.
Her posture slipped. She did what very few do when their world collapses: she begged. "Please," she said, voice small and cracked. "Please do not ruin my family."
"No," Eliseo said, unyielding. "You must accept the consequences for the harm you caused."
The punishment lasted until the court clerk declared a formal censure. She was stripped of privileges and made to kneel in the square before the market's stallholders. The crowd watched. Some whispered sympathy, but most kept to the satisfaction of seeing the arrogant humbled. The princess's denial turned into burning shame that wrung her voice raw.
She left the hall as a ruined woman, and people recorded every step. Her supporters evaporated when the state turned to stone. It was over: her plot unmasked, her manipulations unfolding like a badly sewn garment.
I watched him watch me as he orchestrated the fall.
"You did that for me," I whispered later.
He looked at me like someone who had found an answer. "Yes."
He protected me in a way I had not expected. I found myself not wanting to leave even with the bell in my pocket and the mission stitched to my throat. Because when the world stripped someone down, Eliseo's eyes had stayed on me and the way his hand rested at the small of my back was like bread after a storm.
The next weeks turned into hunting the source of the undead-bug plague. We camped in cold houses, ate watery soup, and listened to villagers say the dead rose and walked like shadows. I pushed at the edges of the problem with blood-lines and old songs. Grant popped around like the world's most trustworthy pest: the bird was both comic and brutal when he wanted to be. Chase—my missing friend—left a whisper of where he might be. He was in the north, the emptiest place on maps: the Borderlands where the snow eats men. I felt the bell hum in my pocket like a heart beating.
Eliseo said nothing when I told him about the border. He only tightened his jaw and nodded. "Then we go," he said.
He asked me to stay in the back of the line as if I were fragile. "You are not fragile," I told him, and he looked like someone hearing a truth that takes the breath. "But I am yours to guard if you will be mine."
"Not yet," he said, but his hand found mine in the night and did not let go.
Time braided itself: fights in alleys where corpse-worms burst under well-placed strikes, nights in which townsfolk slept under my sigils, the quiet patience of reading the bell's ring and following the sound that led north like an echo.
I found Chase in a ruin near the border. He had a scar across one cheek and a wild look and he smiled when he saw me like a man who found a harbor in a storm.
"Bianca," he said. "You look like trouble."
"You always did," I laughed. "You left me."
"I had to check the bell," Chase said. "Someone bigger than us took notice."
He led us to a place where the earth had been made wrong: a shrine with a great old bell half buried. The bell hummed with a hunger like teeth. "That's the bell," I said. "That's the one."
"It has an imprint," Eliseo said, placing a palm to the metal. It reacted like a living thing. He frowned. "This is not a sealing bell—this is a trap."
We argued and fought with spirits that wanted the bell's ringing to free something older than empires.
We almost didn't make it back to the coast alive.
When we did, the cerulean bell was heavy in my pack and heavier in my heart. I had a choice: swing the bell and break the seal and hope I could rebind the thing inside, or leave it and stay in a land that was more dangerous by the day but had a man who would take a stand in the open.
I did what I always did. I used my training and my wit and my bad jokes. I set the trap, told Eliseo to stand behind me, and drove my hand into the method of the bell's tongue. The creature tried to speak in the old terrible voice that made ice melt, but I kept calling the words, letting the bell ring and the sigils roll like waves.
The world shook and something like thunder took the place of my heartbeat.
Eliseo reached for me mid-strike and I let him, letting his strength hold me while my blood sealed the thing back inside. It was messy and beautiful, and when the silence came, I could hear my own breath like a small bell.
"You did not leave," he whispered. "You did not go."
"I could not," I said, and both of us smiled like fools.
We learned things about each other that the world would not forgive: that I was not simply a visitor; that the more I stayed, the more my magic altered the rulers' lives; that the generals had hearts and the princesses could be crueler than any monster.
There were consequences—always consequences. But there were also small mercies. Grant stayed. Chase came home. And even Princess Annalise, after being stripped and punished publicly for her lies, became a quieter figure, watched by everyone who remembered what public humiliation could do.
One night, years from that first fall, I held the cerulean bell like an old coin, placed it under a quilt, and hummed a lullaby to the only world where I had ever been the kind of person who could stab a demon and not blink.
"Do you think we'll ever go home?" I asked Eliseo as we sat in the garden where the tree had once lived.
He looked at me and touched the scar on my cheek with a wary tenderness. "I think the world we call home is less a place and more a person," he said. "Stay."
I laughed softly. "You are selfish."
"A little," he said, and kissed me on the forehead where the bell thudded like old luck.
The bell was still under the quilt. It hummed faintly, a sound like a far-off train whistle. It was proof I had been away once, and proof I could go again. But for now, the world we had chosen—no matter how wrong the rules that had put us together—was enough.
We kept the bell, and we kept each other. And when people asked later what I had been doing the day my own world fell through a bell, I told them the truth and left out the part about the train: "I was the one who sealed it."
The End
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