Avengard: The Fall of Senvia

Chapter 23 - Bell Haven

Bell Haven was an old city filled with people who had no idea what time meant. Dozens of bell towers scattered across the city, some old enough to escape any memory of their purpose, some built within the year, and some entirely ageless, their origins a mystery.

The oldest of them didn't ring anymore. A series of bells placed around the city, considered too antique to waste on a silly thing like pealing. The younger ones usually had a purpose, though it was becoming increasingly unpopular to have bells announcing the arrival of the dawn. People had magic for that, personalised devices to wake them as needed, if the sunlight didn't wake them enough on its own. Universal wake-up calls were out of fashion, and in the way of folks who wanted to sleep in, or who worked later into the night or early in the morning.

Bell Haven had forgotten time. It was a city beyond it. Every hour of every day was in fact, noon. Every hour of every day was midnight. Every moment in time in that city, another part of it lived in another moment. Another person was doing the same thing, but twelve hours later. The shops still closed, but as they did, a night crowd opened up their own stalls. When the sun rose, they would go to sleep, pulling the drapes over their windows to keep out the light.

Bell Haven was the people. It was an older man who, unprompted, would decide to insert into an unrelated conversation, a comment about the youth of the latest generation being too carefree and lazy and having the world handed to them on a silver platter, or a mention of how a joke about an alligator in a vest being an investigator was apparently offensive, and the problem with humour nowadays was that everyone got offended too easily, and how he missed the good old days when nobody's feelings ever got hurt. He'd go on and on about it, and when he eventually died, his son would repeat his words unknowingly, and his grandson after that.

Bell Haven was the boy who never learned his lesson, and night after night, would sneak into the orphanage from his hiding spot on the shingles where two roughshod buildings met. He wanted the candied apples, because candied apples were very good, and the muck he got from the kitchens was very and extremely not good. And besides, the candied apples never seemed to get touched. They were practically reserved for him. The bowl was placed near the chimney, not too close and not too far. He could linger in the orphanage for a few seconds before finally sneaking an apple, which somehow always seemed to be the last one left, and was always left uncovered and in the open.

Bell Haven was a girl, barely ten years old, excited for this new chapter in her ever-evolving life, where she had finally reached the double digit numbers. This was a saga for her, you see. A never-ending adventure where the adults were perpetually adults and gross and icky and old, and she was never going to age for even a moment. Of course, she looked forward to ageing up, because adults got to do whatever they wanted and eat absolutely anything, and stay up past dark to see the night markets. But she didn't. Age didn't happen. Time didn't happen. Not to her.

Not like the couple who would get married all too soon and decide to go out and buy a small farm for themselves. Bell Haven was a city-state, isolated in its own way, but with some hefty expanse of farmland and pastures on its outskirts, which technically fell inside the city's border, only outside of its walls. But this couple, rather than farm, would plant shrubs and pretty grasses and trees, and carved bird feeders and benches for the property, and just like that, there would be a little less food in the world.

But that was alright, because underneath that air of relaxed retirement, Bell Haven was a human city of work and labour, and food could be imported for cheap from Durn and Espara and Eckshire.

Every city had work and labour, but Bell Haven was especially known for it, labelled with terrifying words like 'unions', 'welfare', and 'democracy'. It was one of the only provinces to have instituted democracy, and had in fact done so since the city first popped up from the ground, forever and a half ago.