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DOLION

A tiny voice speaks to me, the sweet sounds rippling through my stone state.

Even my bones ache, but I’ve been in this form for …

how long now, months? A year? Eyes too filled with grit peer hazily into a garden where Gisella plays with a child who resembles both herself and her husband, Sebastian, though the vampire won’t come out to play in the sunlight that warms my stone facade.

But she isn’t here, and so I let my eyes drift shut, blocking out the light, and the warmth and all the kind sweet things this world offers. Without my Minette, there is no purpose to this place. And so I shut myself away.

Soft sounds swirl around me. My stone crumbles as I strain to open my eyes, knowing over a decade or more has passed since I last emerged into this world that I hope has long forgotten me.

But these are not happy sounds. These are sounds that I remember from the night when I lost her.

The night I held Minette in my arms, her blood coating my hands.

Even then, as I carried her from that burning hell of ash and smoke and ruin of Sebastian’s house, and buried her bones beneath the earth, my skin took on its stone hue.

And as my heart broke, I knew it would be a long time before I could return.

Now, apparently, I am ready. Perhaps my mind forgot to tell my heart.

The muted noises that reach me as I wake, however, are far from sweet.

Tears track a face I vaguely remember. Perhaps I haven’t slept for as long as I thought, and I am still in that hellish night when we fought the demoness who held my best friend’s soul in her gnarled, ancient hands for so long, tortured his wife and family and destroyed my own chance at love?

But no, that can’t be right. Since then I’ve seen Gisella grow.

She, somehow, managed to mother a child with her husband—a daylight miracle for the nightwalker who has been so sure his soul withered many centuries ago, yet she alone gave him light.

No, this is not that same torturous night when my own heart turned to stone. Too much has changed since then. Gisella and Sebastian’s family grew, and now the love of my best friend cries.

“What is wrong, my friend’s wife?” I rasp. My throat, so used to its stone state, cracks painfully. A little of my essence crumbles away. Not that it matters. Nothing about me matters after losing my Minette.

The sobbing ceases. “I am no wife,” whispers a voice almost as raw as mine.

I frown. “I am sorry, Gisella. It has been an eon since I last spoke. I am….long removed from your world.”

Too long, perhaps. I should have woken earlier.

I am no wife.

My gut, reforming into its fleshy state from my gargoyle form, clenches down on a diet of rock for the past however long I have rested as urgency grips me. “Tell me, please. Sebastian. Is he alright?”

Silence, after the incessant sounds that roused me, blanket the courtyard where I rest like the wake I fear I have long missed.

Stone teeth bite down on my tongue, and I taste blood. Proof that I exist, even when I should not. I try again.

“Gisella, please. End my misery.”

The plea I should have made the night Minette’s soul departed this world along with the demoness.

Perhaps, if I have lost Sebastian, I will ask her to push my stone form into the fountain where I have graced the entrance to his labyrinth for so long and let me shatter into a thousand stone shards, truly ending my existence as I cannot do for myself.

My eyes pry wider, my vision blurring before me as I peer at the slip of a woman crouched at my pedestal in a reverent, prayerful position.

No, I am unworthy of this worship while I consider the only thing a gargoyle is incapable of doing alone for himself.

Dying.

“Gisella,” I whisper, hearing Minette’s French accent lilt through my mind, and my gut twists afresh at the memory. “Tell me?”

Finally, the woman before me draws the faintest, shakiest breath.

“I am not Gisella. She is gone.”

My stone form returns, flesh departing as my last friend has. No more can I suffer in this life .

A gargoyle can only exist while his heart beats on. And with the loss of another I have loved, my heart fails its next challenge and stills in a chest that weighs more than all the granite accumulated in this world.

Again, I fade even as the woman before me sobs my name.

I will not return.

A gargoyle might not choose to die by their own hand, but they can remain in stasis for near an eternity.

Perhaps, if I forget the pain of love, I can also forget how to live.