Page 1 of 20
When Cloudhaven’s Great Bell falls silent, ten-year-old Noa sets out by skiff to find its missing voice. Guided by a storm petrel, a Listening Shell, and a glimmering wind-thread, he faces fog riddles and a barge of bottled sounds. In a gentle adventure, he brings the bell home—and teaches a weary collector how to sleep.
Cloudhaven clung to the cliff like a nest of lanterns, its roofs tiled with red slate and its windows the color of warm honey. At dusk the sea lulled itself against the rock and breathed out salt and mist, and the gulls wheeled home in soft, tired loops. Down in the bell foundry, where the air was always a little warmer than the wind outside, Noa wiped bronze dust from his cheeks and held a half-polished chime up to the doorway. It caught the last of the light and held it as if it were a sip of tea.
“Don’t squint,” Elin, his mother, said gently. She leaned her shoulder against the doorframe, a smudge of ash on her jaw and a strip of leather protecting her hand. “It turns the world into a guess.”
Noa grinned and set the chime down. Behind him the molds cooled on their beds of sand. When the molten metal had been poured, you could hear it sing a thin, secret note until it settled. He loved that the most: the way a new bell seemed to try out its name.
Outside, the cliff path curled around the headland toward the Great Bell tower. The tower’s white stones were worn smooth by years of salt, and ivy had taught itself the shape of its corners. Every evening, when the tide turned and the wind leaned the right way, the Great Bell would speak across the harbor and the houses, across the cobbles and the rope coils, and the town would set itself down for the night. Babies soothed. Dogs sighed. Someone always hummed along under their breath, and someone else put a kettle on.
“Bring the polish cloth,” Elin said, tying her hair. “We’ll make sure our big neighbor is presentable.”
They took the path together, their boots scuffing the chalky grit, the soft thump of the sea underneath everything. Copper the cat threaded between their ankles like a small, proud ship. The evening was the color of tide pools, blue with a little green, and the first stars had already gone fishing for their reflections in the water. From the market square came the drifting scent of cinnamon and fish stew cooling.
Noa loved this very moment when the day sighed into night, when the words people said to one another lowered, when doors sighed closed and lamps were trimmed. He loved that Cloudhaven had a sound at its heart, and that his hands knew how to help make it.