The Lantern of Lost Bells
Join the conversation! Readers are sharing their thoughts:
About the Story
In a fogbound port, instrument restorer Maya Kessler finds a brass lantern holding a child's voice and a clue to her missing brother. To rescue him she must penetrate a subterranean Archive, bargain with memory, and confront those who silence the city — at a cost.
Chapters
Related Stories
The Unremembered Room
On her grandmother's property, Evelyn Hart discovers a hidden chamber that answers with echoes of the dead but takes back pieces of the town's memory. Facing a moral calculus, she will either reclaim one life or protect the many. The attic asks for a price, and the town gathers to hear it named.
The Hush at Lyric House
When acoustics engineer Juno Park returns to stormy Greybridge to help restore a derelict theater, she finds a silence that steals voices. With a lighthouse keeper’s tuning fork, a sharp-eyed barista, her brother, and a stray dog, she must retune a haunted house and return a stolen song.
The Lantern at Greyvein
A young woman returns to a fog-bound coastal town where a hunger for memory steals names and anchors. To save her people she bargains with small things, learns ancient craft from an old mender, and tends a lighthouse whose light holds stories together.
The Harvest of Echoes
Fog coats a small riverside town where a reservoir keeps more than water. Nora Finch, who hears trapped voices, uncovers a municipal ledger that recorded a century of traded lives. To return the missing she must offer memory itself—risking the one thing that kept her sister alive in her mind.
The Bellmaker of Brinefen
In fog-cloaked Brinefen, bellmaker Nera Voss crafts rings that hold names. When a Gallery begins sequestering identities, Nera must follow threads of loss through markets and vaults, confront the Curator of Names, and wrest memory back into the living world.
Fixing the Places Between Us
Evie Park, a solitary plumber, leads a ragged group of neighbors to perform a dangerous manual reseat of an ancient balancing valve under the city's streets. The chapter follows the tense choreography of pumps, clamps, torches, and timing; the climax depends on Evie's skill and physical precision. Humor and everyday details—market buns, Sogs polishing wrenches, peppermint-scented hand cream—pepper the night as a neighborhood stitches itself back together through shared labor.
Other Stories by Ulrich Fenner
Ratings
Cute premise, stylish sentences, but I spent half the story rolling my eyes. Grapevant's 'salt and regret' vibe is delightfully noir, and sure, I enjoyed the Restoration shop details, but the plot hits so many expected notes it's almost a checklist: missing brother, haunted object (brass lantern!), descent into some underground Archive, bargain with Memory Personified, moral cost. Yawn. The reversed watch is a neat image but also kind of a lazy clue — of course time is the key, right? Also, the antagonists who 'silence the city' are more wallpaper than real threat. I wanted someone to explain why they'd do such dramatic stuff beyond 'to keep the peace.' The ending tries for resonant, but it felt like paying a cover charge for atmosphere and getting a skim of real stakes. If you love mood over mechanics, you're good; if you want tighter plotting and fewer tropes, temper expectations. 😏
I wanted to like this more than I did. There's no denying the author can write — the descriptions of Grapevant smell and sound are evocative — but the story stumbles over familiar beats. The concept of a lantern holding a child's voice is interesting, but the execution leans too heavily on tropes: the missing brother as emotional anchor, the subterranean Archive as a shadowy MacGuffin, and the bargain-with-memory as the necessary moral puzzle. I found myself predicting the reveals: the backward watch equals time-play equals clue to Jonah — it felt obvious rather than revelatory. Pacing is uneven. The first third luxuriates in atmosphere, which is lovely, but the middle rushes through the Archive and the confrontation scenes without fully exploring consequences. A few plot elements aren't fully earned (who exactly runs the silence in the city? their motives feel undercooked), and the 'cost' of confronting them is presented as a fait accompli rather than dramatized. In short: beautiful writing, promising ideas, but a plotting and pacing shortfall that left the emotional payoff muted.
Short and luminous. The writing turned small mechanical details — winding, springs, varnish — into metaphors for memory and loss in a way that never felt heavy-handed. I was pulled in by the reversed watch and the lantern that keeps a child's voice; those two images carried the emotional weight. The subterranean Archive is a neat idea and the scenes where Maya bargains with memory are strangely intimate. A compact, atmospheric read I'd recommend to anyone who likes ghost stories that feel human.
This story is a tight, well-crafted piece of supernatural urban fantasy. Structurally, it balances mood and momentum: the opening lingers on atmosphere (salt and regret, neon bruises) but then keeps moving with clear, purposeful beats — the crate on the stoop, the brass lantern with a child's voice, the watch wound backward in denim. Those images are specific and memorable. Characterization is economical but effective. Maya's vocation as an instrument restorer isn't window dressing; it informs her methods and choices. The Archive sequence works as both plot engine and thematic center — bargains over memory are handled with unsettling subtlety rather than melodrama. I especially liked how sound and silence are treated almost as characters themselves (the bell that chooses who can sleep is a brilliant motif). If I have a quibble it's that a few secondary figures could be sketched more distinctly, but given the story's length that's a minor note. Overall, rich atmosphere, smart worldbuilding, and an emotionally credible throughline about family and cost. Recommended.
I fell into Grapevant like someone slipping into a dream someone else started — and I didn't want to come up for air. The prose here is gorgeous: the bit about neon bruises that flicker like tired eyes is the kind of sentence I read twice just to breathe it in. Maya Kessler is a quietly fierce protagonist; her shop, Restoration, and the tactile details (boiled linseed, solder, the cool oil of old springs) make her world feel lived-in and sacred. I loved the reversed watch under the counter — that image of time literally unmaking a minute is heartbreaking and sets the stakes in such a clever, tactile way. The lantern holding a child's voice is eerie and heartbreaking. The trip into the subterranean Archive felt like a descent into both memory and consequence; the bargain-with-memory scenes hit me hard, especially when Maya listens for what wants to keep living and what wants release. The ending — the cost of confronting those who silence the city — lingers. It isn't neat, and that's what made it feel real. A haunting urban fantasy that treats grief and redemption with real tenderness.