AUREFOLD — BOOK ONE

THE BELL OF SILENCE

In the high silent valleys, a goatherd hears a voice. House Whitehart exists to test those who claim to hear.

MANUSCRIPT COMPLETE · COMING

Cover of AUREFOLD, Book One: The Bell of Silence — a lone traveller on a mountain path above a misted valley, a bell-tower cut into the cliff.

Cover — The Bell of Silence

Where it begins

It begins with a testing. In the Light Heights — the high, silent valleys of the northwest — a goatherd named Sela hears a voice, or does not. Her house will come to call her the Called. The testing falls to Brother Tomas, the Tester, a man carrying the one thing a tester should not own: his first doubt.

Above them both stands Mother Alaine, fifty years at the griffes, head of the listening house.

Find the Bell of Silence on the map →

The shape of the book

The Bell of Silence is a completed developmental draft: a prologue and thirty-four chapters, told in three movements, with two interludes in the voice of Mother Alaine — a woman whose survival is an archive no chronicle has rivaled. It opens outside the valley, then narrows to a single testing; from there the larger realm presses in — the Ten Great Houses, the coming jubilee, and the pressures already moving beyond the mountains.

In the second movement, a herald of House Blackcrest comes to stay in the valley, gathering the realm’s testimony for the coming 400-year jubilee — a chronicler writing down memories that, until now, only one woman has kept.

The book asks one question, and does not answer it: what do you do with a voice you cannot verify? It closes where the charts do — at the edge of the map, with someone still walking.

In the end she turns east. What turned her is the one thing the book will not confirm.

Contents

A prologue — The Question in the Margin — then thirty-four chapters. The two interludes are Mother Alaine’s.

  1. The Trial of the Goatherd
  2. Interlude The Woman Against the Stone
  3. The Morning After
  4. The Road Down
  5. The Ledger
  6. First Snow
  7. The East Shoulder
  8. Nothing Happened
  9. The Man Who Writes It Down
  10. Nobody Ever Asked
  11. What the Grave No Longer Shows
  12. The Corrected Entry
  13. Not That Way
  14. Wet Ground
  15. Four Accounts of a Rope
  16. Four Marks a Head
  17. The Only Voice Permitted
  18. Interlude What the Notes Said
  19. The Low Wells
  20. Four Kinds of Count
  21. Water Finds the Missing
  22. A Name for Work
  23. A Place on the Plan
  24. Permanent Pegs
  25. The Elbow
  26. What He Left Running
  27. Nine Days
  28. The Gate
  29. The Keeper
  30. I Don’t Want To
  31. The Divided Record
  32. That’s How You Know
  33. The Blank Page
  34. East

Read the opening for yourself on the Read page.