The Hollow Bell

Short, sharp, and a little heartbreaking — yes please. Mara is one of those protagonists you root for immediately: practical, stubborn, and nerdy about bells (who knew grief could sound like that?). The jars-under-the-docks image is everything. I loved the weird ledger idea, too — who writes down unreturned promises? The memory-for-voice bargain actually made me gasp out loud. 😶‍🌫️ Only gripe: I wanted a bit more of the bargaining scene with the keepers. It felt like the stakes were high, but the conversation zipped by. Still, recommend if you like your urban fantasy a little damp, salty, and morally complicated.

I wanted to like this more than I did. The setting details — the brine, the crows, the market smells — are well done and evocative, but the central bargain and its consequences feel a little too familiar and underdeveloped. The idea that voices are kept in jars in underquay vaults is a striking image, yet the keepers who run that trade never quite get concrete enough to feel threatening; they mostly hover as 'dangerous keepers' rather than characters who complicate the plot. Mara's sacrifice — giving up memories to restore Eben's speech — should have had more emotional fallout on the page. We get the premise, and we get the payoff, but not enough of the messy middle: how does losing those memories change Mara's identity? Which memories does she lose? The scene where she first hears Eben's whistle again is touching, but by the end I was left wanting more texture and less reliance on familiar dark-fantasy beats (barter, cost, faded ledger). Good prose here and there, but pacing and character depth could use tightening.

This is a tightly written piece of dark fantasy with a strong sense of place. Fenport — stilts, reeds, the 'quay exhaled a smell of old copper' — is rendered through sensory notes rather than exposition, which keeps the pacing economical while still immersive. The bellcraft specifics (the cracked rim, the way grief takes shape inside a bell's belly) function as both metaphor and practical worldbuilding, and they support Mara's arc convincingly. Plot-wise the bargain-for-voice device is classic but handled with restraint: the cost being memory, rather than life or wealth, is thematically resonant and gives interesting moral complexity. Eben's laugh/whistle is a recurring anchor that justifies Mara's descent into the underquay vaults. The only structural thing I'd rethink is expanding the keepers a touch — they read as ominous but remain slightly shadowy; a sharper scene with one keeper could heighten the stakes. Still, well paced, character-driven, and beautifully atmospheric.

I loved the mood of this story — Fenport feels alive and rotten at once. The opening paragraph about bells holding sorrow 'the way a hand holds water' is a line I kept returning to; it set a tone that never quite lets you breathe. Mara's scenes in the shop with Master Corin (especially the rule to 'listen to a bell before you touch it') are spare but telling: you can feel how apprenticing is part craft and part ritual. The underquay vaults were my favorite: the jars of voices, the ledger of promises, and that claustrophobic corridor where silence seems to thicken — gorgeous imagery. I was especially moved by the small details, like Eben's birdlike laugh and the way his whistle braided through the beams. When Mara bargains for his speech and ends up paying with memory, it landed as a gutting, understandable sacrifice. The tradeoff felt earned because of the bond between the siblings. If I have one nitpick, it's that I wanted a little more about the dangerous keepers — but overall it's a dark, elegiac little tale that stuck with me long after I read it.

Reading The Hollow Bell felt like walking an alley at low tide: everything is visible and half-submerged, and the air tastes of iron and old stories. The author does an excellent job of making craft — bell-making — into a form of metaphysics. Master Corin's lessons ('hear what shape the grief made inside its belly') are poetic without being precious, and Mara's apprenticeship becomes a credible moral education. The set-piece beneath the quay, where voices are stored in jars, is the story's strongest image. The jars are small, grotesque reliquaries that suggest a whole economy of loss, and the ledger of unreturned promises hints at a larger social contract violated by Fenport's silence. Eben's whistles and raw-palmed visits ground the book emotionally; his presence is the simple human motive that compels Mara's descent. When she bargains for his speech and pays with memory, the trade feels inevitable but tragic — the story doesn't cheapen the sacrifice by playing it as melodrama. Atmosphere is the story's chief strength, followed closely by its moral clarity: what are we willing to forget to recover what we love? My only wish is that the dangerous keepers got another scene to show how they operate as a system rather than mere antagonists. Even so, this is a memorable dark-fantasy short that lingers like the echo of a well-struck bell.