I have been here a long time.

I can’t remember how long, but I love people. 

I sit on the corner of this chapel and I have watched them.

Since four thousand season changes ago when this chapel first came to be and I was laid here by my mother. This was a temple to the forest Gods. Humans frolicked nude with a joyful frivolity and then the holy torture symbol came.

The people wore clothes, offerings to the forest that we fed on ended, our numbers used to be vast, almost fifty! One of the largest gargoyle colonies to ever exist, now most live in that awful city and eat dumpster scraps. I live out here and eat snakes. At any rate we are sickly and skinny, both those in the city and me, the stupid old Gargoyle on the church.

We are so weak now we can’t reproduce and too weak to fly higher than the tree line, but even if we could drakes and sky jellies would pick us off. So we are just waiting as the world passes us by without ever having given us a chance to participate for the last two thousand years.

I just wish I could kill the deacon, an awful human, the only one I’ve ever hated. A grey man, hair, robes, dull metal glasses. Grey, it defies the beautiful, colorful nude humans of the past.

It seems that after two strange bolts of lightning he became enraged by visions that told him the world was coming to an end, or at least he screamed constantly about that as he transgressed against me.

We Gargoyles love to become works of frightening art over the course of our lives, we add a feature from every creature that scares us and so when we finally die our body becomes a statue that wards off evil by frightening it and we leave ourselves on the buildings the humans have created which serve as our perches.

In this way the curse of our stone bodies becomes a reward to the humans whose frolicking keeps us happy while we are locked in stone flesh and our minds alive.

My mother died a hundred seasons ago, but that bastard deacon smashed her with a sledge hammer saying she was trying to chase him out in his dreams from the church

I wept for the entire day waiting for him to kill me, but it seems he put his back out. I enjoy watching him wraith in pain and I’d go through the window to kill him, but it seems he has some degree of magic ability and guards himself with multiple thuribles and censers.

So as I sit here waiting for my death I think about my face and the boy. My face is blank as almost nothing has ever scared me, the deacon does which is why a cross has formed on my neck I scratched it because I hated it. Otherwise I have lived a stupidly quiet life of just people watching and living through them.

Which is also why I remember the boy, most people shuffle sadly towards this church now. He on the other hand bounded through the forest  and up the knoll and climbed the church wall though the thorny vines on the church wall pieced his tiny hands he kept climbing. I screamed for him, cried out to him, wanted to reach out to him, yet in the day I am only stone.

Somehow, against all odds, the tiny form of the boy crawled up here and collapsed hidden between my wings. The first touch I have ever felt on my stone form, tears manage to escape my stone eyes as blood. In this instance I am happy beyond imagination.

A being relies upon me for safety, not just the simple birds, a human likr those whom I have always loved, my purpose is this moment. A man emerges from the under brush, every time he screams the word “Toby” I feel the small body on my back constrict. That creature is not a human to make my precious dependent feel this way.

I hate him.

Hate, my mother spoke to me of it, years later I would have it for the deacon. I felt something drip from the boy, blood. The man hunting him carried a bladed club…with blood on it.

No more hate,RAGE. My very soul burns, I can feel it, based on the fact the fat grub of a human below me shits and pisses himself, dropping his club and running away I guess he can feel it too.

Two tiny hands wrap around my wings and speak terror stricken words that haunt me to this day.

“I’m sorry I let the Foxes go, please don’t kill me Daddy.”

The blood won’t stop flowing from my eyes.

The boy leaves before the sun sets, I can do nothing to save him from returning to face the wrath of his own parent.

The pain is maddening.