Mercy, A Gargoyle Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

can't take this anymore.   I open my mouth, with my dead heart pounding on the back of my tongue, and I scream.
    The anguish is nothing besides a sound that nothing hears.   It sifts through the trees like a shadow and is lost in seconds.   But something in my bone cage, some detached part of me, moves.   The guts shift.   I think of The Boy's calloused fingers, the sun, the clean air, and the dirty thing he required me to do.
    I scream again.
    And again.
    And again.
    The echo doesn't bring angels, but it brings me strength.   The pile of my body inflates and expands, but the bones don't fall away this time.   They grow wider and the innards push at the ivory clubs, but they don't fall over.   Another scream builds inside the heap of me and I let it out this time, in a clear streak.   And I go with it - as only a puff of smoky gray dust, shooting into the air overhead.  
    I dangle there, a ghost made of dust particles.   The tent of my bones suddenly gapes open beneath me.   Through the hole, my dried organs rise, one at a time, into the air.   They rise and cling to my fog, one after another, making a grotesque shape of me.  
    And then the bones come.   They rise and stick to the innards, sharp and jutting in unfamiliar places.   My ribs become low fingers, encircling my stomach.   I swallow my displeasure down so hard that my empty heart slips into a beat, lodged behind the cage around my abdomen.   My chest is shriveled and bonelessly pinched, my limbs are each less than a quarter of the size around that they once were.   The bones that are left assemble across my back, fanning out like stiff empty fingers, reaching far past my body.  
    The plate of my face, which slipped to the ground, is the last to assemble.   It affixes itself lower than where my face once was, pulling my eyes down into the tiny almond holes of the mask.   It is a face that floats upon the destruction of a face.   I look out of the low peep holes at what I am now- a feeble body stretched to it's limits, jutting with naked bones and filled with desiccated innards.   I weep, but instead of seeping through my eyes, it flows down inside me like a river running into my stomach.   But at the outlet, dry ashes pour over my heart, instead of water.  
    I drift down, until the huge, arched talons of my inadequate feet touch ground.   I unfold wings and huddle beneath the stretched, skeletal sheathes.  
    A deep shadow swoops over me and I peer out to meet the sudden eyes of the gargoyle.   For the first time, I look into Moag’s eyes and see something more troubling in the depths than my future.   I see the ancient grief of the world, the accumulation of it, swimming at the bottoms.   What are layered over the grief are pity and sympathy, understanding and something so vulnerable and kind that I stop crying.  
    "Pretty,"   the gargoyle says.   Even without a smile, I see his truth dive up from the pool of his eyes.   His admiration glistens in my sight only for a moment before diving back down into him.   It is long enough to heal the stab of horror over what I am now and to feel, for the first time in any of my lives, acceptance.

 
    ***

 
    " You need skinning," Moag says.   "Get up."
    I rattle like a calcified wind chime.   I can't even work up any fear.   I am the thing I would've feared most, if I'd known it actually existed.
    "Hold strong," the gargoyle says and I step close to him, bringing up my clawed arms to encircle his thick neck.   I hadn't looked closely at him before.   My eyes sweep over his wide face, his crushed nose, his grotesquely hooded gaze.   I look away and tighten my arms around his neck.   His grunt is the burst of a furnace on my neck as he spreads his wings and drives them down, pushing us into the sky.
    We level out above the trees and I cling to his gray skin, my guts, and sinews almost black in contrast with my bones, a startling white.   It is a struggle to hold on, each downward