From Corpse to Crown: Reborn as a Mortician in Another World-Chapter 26: Echoes in Stone

Lucian struggled to sleep that night. After they returned to the borrowed quarters, he lit the hearth and stoked the fire. Rosa was curled up beneath a quilt on the cot, and the driver snored from his spot near the window.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Alaric's painting. The brittle scroll. A broken jawbone, hidden in a box beneath someone's bed. An ancient book full of names he didn't recognize.

And within all of it, a low hum. It was a laborer's voice—tuneless and lost in ash—and the memory of it echoed louder than silence. When he parted his lips, Lucian heard the most frightening wheeze, as if it hurt to breathe.

By morning, Lucian was combing down his hair with a question on his lips.

+

On the second day before Rosa's continued decay, the sun didn't rise. If it did, Staesis refused to let it shine through. The thick clouds above the city were the same sickly gray they always were.

Still and quiet.

It made Lucian's skin crawl.

I always thought it was great if time stood still. Now I know it's just unbelievably creepy.

He and Rosa crossed the plaza with purpose this time. He could feel something coiled around his thoughts—something quiet and watching. The Grimoire had pulsed three times in the night, as if trying to remember something it wasn't allowed to.

Rosa looked stronger today, though her eyes stayed downcast. She didn't speak much unless spoken to, but he noticed her glance nervously at the laborers every few paces.

They didn't just move like clockwork now.

They watched him like it too.

+

The bell tower sat at the far eastern edge of the city—half-shrouded in ivy and smoke-stained from decades of industrial fog. It loomed above the rooftops, a monolith no one seemed to acknowledge.

It was missing a bell.

Lucian pressed a hand to the massive oak door at its base.

It didn't feel locked.

It felt sealed.

He knocked twice, then paused.

Inside, someone shifted.

The door opened without protest, revealing a man in soot-streaked robes with iron-grey hair and a face like carved wood. His right hand was missing the last two fingers.

Lucian blinked.

"The bell tower," he said. "It's still occupied?"

The man grunted. "Was never vacated. Just... repurposed. Come in."

Inside, the air was thick with old ash and wax. Rows of melted candles lined the walls, some half-used, some blackened down to the wick. A shrine stood against the far wall, housing a cracked bronze clapper—the only surviving piece of the bell that once tolled.

Lucian stepped in cautiously, Rosa trailing close behind.

"I'm Lucian Bowcott. Mortician. This is—"

"I know who you are," the man said, not unkindly. "I've heard the cane."

Lucian glanced down. The cane hadn't made a sound on the stone steps—but the man seemed to feel its rhythm anyway.

"And you?"

"Most people don't call me anything anymore. But you can use 'Caretaker.' Old title. No one's bothered to give me a new one."

Lucian nodded, gaze drifting to the row of wall-etched names beside the shrine. Each was carved by hand, lines shaky, some filled in with soot.

He read the topmost name aloud.

"Cara Brown."

The caretaker flinched—only slightly.

Lucian turned. "You knew her."

"Everyone in Staesis did. Especially after what she gave up."

Lucian's voice was quiet.

"Her daughter."

The caretaker didn't answer.

Instead, he limped to a side cabinet and opened it, revealing a book bound in leather and cracked bone. He placed it on a table, careful not to disturb the soot.

Lucian opened it slowly.

Each page listed a year. A name. A short notation beside it.

Year 11 – Cara Brown (Offered: Alice Brown)

Status: Fragment Transferred. Vocal Resistance. Partial Loss.

He looked up.

"What does this mean?"

The caretaker stared at the cracked clapper.

"It means she screamed. Loud enough to echo through the binding. Loud enough to be remembered."

Lucian swallowed.

"And Alice?"

"Still working. Like the rest."

He closed the book carefully.

"So what happens when one of them starts remembering?"

That, finally, got the man to meet his gaze.

The caretaker walked to a shelf and pulled out a small wooden box, setting it between them.

"Three days ago," he said, "a laborer in the ash-processing quarter began humming. Just a tune—simple, tuneless, like something from before."

He opened the box.

Inside was a shattered jawbone, charred and inscribed with ritual ink.

"The Whisperbound arrived an hour later. Took him without ceremony. Left this."

Lucian stared at the bone, a chill crawling up his spine.

"What happened to him?"

"No one knows," the caretaker said. "He was the first in a long time to look up at the sky and ask,

'Where did the sun go?'"

Lucian looked at Rosa.

She nodded, her voice thin but steady.

"We're waking something. Or reminding it that it never slept."

The caretaker's voice turned bitter.

"We don't toll the bell anymore. Not since the Treaty. Not since the silence was signed into law."

Lucian walked to the cracked clapper and ran a finger across the runes carved into its base.

They weren't words.

They were names.

"And if it tolls again?"

The caretaker didn't answer.

But he opened the tower window.

The view stretched across Staesis—workers moving in perfect lines. Chained not by shackles, but by expectation.

"If it tolls again," the man said finally, "then something will remember what it was built to forget."

They left the tower just before dusk. The sky was still gray, but darker now. The fog hung heavier than before. The wind smelled like the inside of a sealed tomb.

Lucian paused on the steps and glanced back.

The tower seemed taller now.

Like it had straightened.

"He was humming," Lucian said quietly.

"What?" Rosa asked.

"The laborer. He was humming. That means... something inside was still alive."

Rosa's lips pressed together. "Maybe something was trying to be."

That night, as he prepared to rest, the Grimoire twitched violently in his satchel. Lucian opened it and saw a single phrase scrawled across the page:

Echo registered. Memory resonance spreading. Loop instability: increasing.

He stared at the words until they faded.

Then closed the book with shaking hands.