The Bell and the Silence

As the Black Death ravages a medieval village, seven strangers chronicle their descent into grief, faith, and madness—each journal a final cry in a world falling silent.

When the Black Death sweeps through a once-prosperous medieval village, the living grow fewer with each passing day. The toll of the church bell—once a call to worship—becomes the village’s final language, ringing for the dead, the dying, and the faith that struggles to survive. In the silence that follows, seven remain—scattered, broken, and clinging to what shreds of meaning they can find.

Told entirely through the raw, intimate journal entries and conversations of those left behind, The Bell and the Silence is a harrowing portrait of a world unraveling. Sister Agnes, a cloistered nun, records the disintegration of her convent and her faith, praying into a silence that only deepens. Tomas, the weary gravedigger, catalogs the dead with mechanical precision, until the mounting bodies force him to confront what it means to carry a soul. Ellyn, a widowed midwife mysteriously untouched by the plague, buries family and strangers alike, her immunity offering no protection from grief. Bran, a feral twelve-year-old orphan, scribbles riddles and visions in the margins of reality—visions that might be prophecy, or the unraveling of a fragile mind. Brother Matthieu, once a rising star in the Church, now questions everything he once preached, torn between scripture and the suffering he cannot soothe. Sir Corwin, a battle-scarred knight who once sought glory, now drags his rusted armor through empty streets, seeking redemption in a world that no longer honors it. And Ysabet, a learned healer and former heretic, tracks the disease like a scholar, even as panic and superstition begin to outweigh reason and compassion.

Each journal, each conversation is a candle guttering in the dark—flickering, defiant, achingly human. As their paths cross in fleeting, unexpected ways, these seven voices offer a mosaic of desperation and endurance, belief and blasphemy, love and loss.

The Bell and the Silence is both a haunting elegy and a profound meditation on what survives when the world does not: the stories we leave behind, and the questions we carry to the end.

Coming 2025