summerborn
Born in the Month of Songs
♔ Champion ♔
- Local time
- Today 12:18 AM
- Messages
- 128
- Age
- 24
- Pronouns
- He/Him, They/Them
The Rowan tree has a long, sacred history. Since ancient times, people have planted Rowan beside their homes. In Celtic mythology, it is known as the Tree of Life, symbolizing courage, wisdom and protection. It is sometimes known as the mountain ash, and sometimes as the 'Lady of the Mountain' due to its ability to thrive in inhospitable mountainous environments. Rowan was sacred to the Druids, who saw them as portal trees between death and rebirth, often burning rowan branches on funeral pyres. Rowan trees planted in cemeteries were said to protect the dead from evil spirits. It was also one of the nine sacred trees to be burned in the Beltane fires to symbolize new beginnings.
The sapling sprouted in fickle spring, on a steep hill in the jagged cleft between two rocks. The first frosts scorched its tender leaves, withering the frail new growth, but the stalk remained; slowly, stubbornly regrowing what had been lost. Spring rains provided nourishment, roots eking a tenuous holdout in the ground, and the summer sun coaxed new leaves into being, the sapling climbing slowly higher. In the winter, snow fell in heavy sheets, burying the sapling beneath, until Zephyr blew in again, carrying spring upon his back and waking the sapling from its slumber.
And so another year passed. And then another, and another, until the sapling stood the height of a child. In the dry autumn of the fifth year, the white flowers that bloomed every year were replaced by a spray of bitter red berries, which the songbirds gleefully consumed before they flitted away, winter following on their tailfeathers. Time marched on, and the tree bloomed and blossomed every year, growing taller and wider with every spring. By the twelfth year, the fruit it bore was so plentiful that the small red berries that it bore every autumn littered the rocky ground at its roots.
On the late spring of the thirteenth year, following a particularly bitter winter, the tree awoke from its slumber to find that the landscape around her had changed as she slept.
No more was the grove of swiftly-growing beech trees by the stream in the basin below. They had been reduced to stumps, stacks of lumber piled on the ground by the swell of the hillside; beside which a small, winding road had been cleared from the underbrush, felled trees on either side. And on the mountainous hill above, piles of lumber and stacks of stone sat; a crew of small two-legged creatures carrying sticks and tools sweating and toiling beneath the sun, vanishing into a tunnel they had dug into the very stone of the hillside. The tree had never seen such creatures before. Adam's children were almost entirely hairless, save for a small thatch upon their heads; with loud voices and none of the graces of the woodland animals she knew.
Spring passed into summer, and still, the men toiled away day and night, expanding upon the echoing chambers they had carved from the stone. And the rowan tree, on her lonely hillside below, drank in the spring rains, and soaked in the summer sun, and felt the nighttime breezes rustle through her leaves as it had always been, but change had arrived, blown in with the western wind, and she knew it.
The tree watched as one man was hauled from the stone chambers by his compatriots, bleeding heavily from a wound on his head. He did not wake up again, and they buried him in a small plot of earth a small ways from the digsite a couple of days later. He was joined by two others over the course of the season; one, a grey-haired man who had simply keeled over, stone dead, on a particularly hot summer day of work; the other a young man who had been bitten by a snake, seemed to recover over the course of one day, and succumbed the next to convulsions.
The work ground to a halt in late autumn, berries hanging heavy from the tree's branches. The men packed their tools onto a small donkey-drawn cart and carried the lumber into the caves below to be stored away from the winter damp. They were all gone before the first snow, the hills silent once more, save for the wind and birdsong, and the tree, naively, thought that would be the end of it. The snow fell heavy that winter, sticking to the crags and rocks as it always did; ice freezing over the stream and the small pond at the crux of the basin below.
The sound of wagon wheels and the shouting of loud voices woke her once more in the spring. The men had returned, even more of them this time with three carts of tools and building materials, and one covered wagon drawn by a horse, out of which a man clad in fine clothes stepped out. He did not assist the rest of the men in the work, and in fact, was not seen outside in the daylight hours very much at all, but the rowan watched at night when he emerged from his wagon with a lantern, parchment, and quill. The strange disquieting words he murmured to himself carried upon the breeze as he disappeared down into the stone chambers below the structure that was beginning to emerge; the shapes of stone walls and carefully-placed support beams.
It was once again early autumn, Boreas's harsh influence bringing a chill to the air that left her leaves stiff with frost in the mornings, when a carriage arrived one night. Two horses drew it; one white as winter's snow, the other black as midnight, metal bits between their teeth. Three more men piled out of the carriage, greeted eagerly by the man in the fine clothing who had arrived in the spring; his clothing now significantly less fine from having been forced to wash it himself in the stream, just like the rest of the workers.
One of the men, wearing a fine black cloak stitched with silver thread and decorated with silver tassels, the hood drawn over his face, greeted him coolly, gesturing at his other two compatriots, one of whom produced a hemp sack from the interior of the carriage. Its contents rattled and clacked audibly as it was moved about. The other man withdrew a small wooden box from beneath a seat. This, he treated far more gingerly than the sack the other man held; holding it with a sort of almost-reverence.
"The components, as requested. You are sure this will work?"
"It should- please, the martyr... may I?"
A sharp nod from the leader, and the box was carefully transferred from one man to the other. He unlatched the lid with quivering fingers, eyes trained upon the white gleam of bone inside of the box; a small, delicate bone nestled in the packed wood shavings inside. Slowly, he touched it with the tip of one finger; slowly, as if he could hardly believe what he was seeing.
"Just a finger. That was all that my contact could salvage," said the first man. Beneath the hood, very little of his features were visible, but it was plain enough from the way that he kept his distance from the small box, arms folded over his chest, that he had no particular desire to handle the object himself. "Will it be enough?"
"Yes," breathed the first man, reverently. Shaking his head, he closed the box again, taking a moment to recompose himself before he glanced at the sack. "And the sinner?"
"Retrieved from a graveyard. Hanged as a maleficar almost a century ago. I dug up the records myself," the hooded man said impatiently. "Short of a body fresh from the gallows, you won't be getting anything better."
The man nodded fervently. "Good. Very good." He drew a shuddering breath. "Everything is ready, then. I made sure the workmen cleared out tonight. The sigils have been drawn, the components are in place- save for these. The only other thing it needs... is us."
The hooded man nodded curtly, casting a hungry glance towards the construction site. "I see no reason to wait, then. Take us down."
Leaving the horses to be taken care of by the hunched driver manning the helm of the carriage, the four made their way to the building site, disappearing down into the stone tunnels below without so much as a glance up at the stars, twinkling coldly above. And the rowan tree, on her hill, felt her leaves rustling in the cold night air. She listened to the scraps of whispers that were carried up into the air, and drank in the iron tang of blood that soaked the earth that night through her roots, far in the ground below her hill. Change had arrived again, this time carried on wooden wheels drawn by two horses, and it was strange, and disquieting.
Of the four that had gone down into the stone chambers below, that night, only two emerged: the hooded man and one other of the men who had accompanied him in the carriage. Their faces were pale and wan, drawn with exhaustion, but there was a gleeful gleam in the pale eyes of the hooded man, even as he climbed back into his carriage and disappeared again down the road, not to be seen again for some time.
The work continued upon the structure for five more springs and winters. Tall stone walls grew up, a second floor was added above the huge central chamber, with its stone alter at the front; and a spiraling tower, at the zenith of which was hung a huge brass bell that crushed and killed one of the workers beneath it when it the rope snapped halfway through being hoisted up. Laborers came and went much more quickly, those five years; rumors of devils and ghosts haunting the grounds running rampant after one man claimed to have heard breathing behind him in the stone cellars below.
On the eve of the sixth spring, with the work on the structure, which was meant to be a church, due to be completed within the next two years, a horse-drawn carriage arrived at the base of the hill again. It was the same pale-eyed man from that night five years ago, though he looked remarkably the same, aside from the pastor's vestments that he wore. He was accompanied once again by two others: a man and a woman. The woman was a stonesmith of some renown; the man her husband and assistant. Shortly after she arrived, so did a wagon drawn by a team of shire horses carrying several slabs of marble, and the work began.
Several statues were carved that season. The first, a gentle-faced man with his hand outstretched meant to be placed in the gardens behind the church. The other three: winged and terrible gargoyles; were carved after the dreams began. Terrible dreams that caused the stonemason to thrash and scream at night, waking ashen faced and panting. Whether the three gargoyles were guardians to ward off the evil dreams or simply representations of the things that haunted her dreams would remain unanswered, for the stonemason passed of mysterious circumstances shortly after finishing the third and final statue; a terrible look of fear on her still face when she was found in the morning. They buried her in the crypt, the first to be entombed in the stone down there. Her husband left in the night, leaving all of the stone carving tools behind.
The leaves began to change color. And so another season passed. The young rowan, by now, was used to strange and fearful occurrences. To play witness to the births and deaths of all the world's creatures, small and large, all of Adam's children and all others, was her role. Yet, the birth of the final miraculous occurrence to happen there for some time at the church up the hill, which would come to be known as the Ossuary of Sacred Bones by the sons and daughters of Adam, was something that not even the trees had ever seen before.
The fearsome statues of the three gargoyles had been relegated to the belfry tower the previous autumn, hunched in the carved alcoves high above the rest of the church. It was up there one night, a storm moving in from the North, that the pastoral figure, accompanied by two other men in priestly garb and carrying lanterns, made his way to the top of the belfry.
Drawing a knife, the Father cut his hand and used the blood to paint several runes upon one of the statues' horned foreheads. The other two priests, following behind him, did the same, painting four circles: One large one around the plinth of the gargoyle, and three smaller ones upon the ledge of the belfry tower, all linked together with a single line of painted blood. In the center of the pentagram: a bowl of pure silver. Its contents: a switch cut from the rowan had been placed between the teeth of a darkened skull, cracked and brittle with age. Each of the three added several drops of their own blood to the bowl. Upon the completion, all took their places kneeling within the smaller circles; the Father flanked by the other two in the central circle.
He chanted in a low voice, almost obscured by the roll of thunder across the sky: "Demon, with this wand, I call you to this mortal plane. Demon, with this skull, I bind you within this marble shell. Demon, with holy silver, I compel you to serve. Come, Demon, come, Sinner, I invoke you with your true name. Come, Desdemona."
Lightning lit the sky upon the completion of this invocation as a massive crack of thunder momentarily deafened any cries of fear that the priests may have made, but the circle remained unbroken though the men looked around at each other with wild eyes- all except for the Father, who only had eyes for the painted statue before them. Upon the next lightning strike, accompanied by an ear-ringing boom of thunder, the statue's 'skin' where the runes had been painted seemed to crack and splinter before their eyes, the stone shell falling away from the brow to reveal a pair of solid golden eyes. Like an eggshell falling away, the rest of the stone sloughed off all at once, shattering musically against the marble plinth as the demon spread its wings and glared down upon the three with narrow eyes.
The huge leathery wings were tipped with batlike talons at every joint, mirroring the bestial talons of its hands and feet Roughly humanoid in form, its pale back bore more than a passing resemblance to the knotted trunk of an oak, the stalks of its wings rooted in muscle mass that no normal human would ever have– or have need for. It crouched still on muscular multi-jointed legs, hunched over its dusty pedestal; long, tangled black hair falling over its shoulders, and a long, snakelike tail whipped around one leg. Its half-open jaw revealed large sharp canines, incisors all slightly pointed; while a pair of curving horns crowned its brow, curving up towards the sky.
"Desdemona," the Father hissed, a quaver to even his voice, and though there was no wind, not even a breeze, for the night had become unnaturally still, the mighty wings shuddered. "Kneel," he commanded, and slowly, unwillingly, the creature dropped to one knee. A smile spread across the priest's face, and he slowly pushed himself back to his feet, hesitating for just a moment before stepping over the lines of the summoning circle. But the gargoyle did not move at all, just continued to stare hatefully at the mortal man. "Welcome back to the land of the living."
He paused, looking rapturously over the features of the horned beast. "I had heard of the practice of burying a live hound beneath the foundations of a building, so that its spirit might watch over the grounds, but I confess, I have never been very fond of dogs. You, on the other hand..." He smiled, elatedly. "I was not sure it would work. But here you are, surpassing even my wildest expectations."
The gargoyle's lips peeled back from its teeth. "Release me," it growled.
The man shook his head. "You know the rules as well as I. I have invoked you by your true name. By rights, you are owed to me a boon."
Another low sonorous growl, carried upon the wind. "Then name your demands."
A smile. "My request is simple," he said. Another fork of lightning split the sky above, illuminating the moonlight pale of the gargoyle's hide. "I wish for you to guard these grounds; to sleep by day and watch by night, for as long as the foundations endure."
The being's tail lashed angrily behind it, cracking against the sides of the alcove; eyes bright and angry, but although its taloned hands curled into fists, it made no aggressive movements- though it clearly seemed to wish to. The horned head inclined, and in a voice like stones grating against one another, it spoke. "It will be so."
And so, the church atop the hill came to gain its sleeping guardian. Many strange things started to happen there as the years passed, even after the death of the founding Father, whose likeness was carved into a marble statue inside of the sanctuary. There were rumors aplenty of a beast that roamed the grounds by night; a fearsome bear, or perhaps a wolf- no, a serpent! Or a combination of all three... But only the rowan, with her deep roots, listening to the wind with her rustling leaves, knew the truth of the strange creature that would sometimes leave its stone perch to visit the stream by her roots. The trees around the stream had grown taller and taller with the building of the church upon the tall hill, many of the younger trees practically dwarfing the rowan, which had reached just over six feet the past year.
The creature would sit with its clawed feet in the water of the stream, just staring at its warped reflection upon the surface of the water, the tip of its long tail sometimes twitching behind it. And though the rowan could not speak, the rustling of the wind through her leaves was company enough for many nights, it seemed. Time passed, the seasons changed, and the creature slowly stopped its visitations, until, after one long winter, it ceased to come at all, remaining asleep atop the belfry tower in its stone shell.
The sapling sprouted in fickle spring, on a steep hill in the jagged cleft between two rocks. The first frosts scorched its tender leaves, withering the frail new growth, but the stalk remained; slowly, stubbornly regrowing what had been lost. Spring rains provided nourishment, roots eking a tenuous holdout in the ground, and the summer sun coaxed new leaves into being, the sapling climbing slowly higher. In the winter, snow fell in heavy sheets, burying the sapling beneath, until Zephyr blew in again, carrying spring upon his back and waking the sapling from its slumber.
And so another year passed. And then another, and another, until the sapling stood the height of a child. In the dry autumn of the fifth year, the white flowers that bloomed every year were replaced by a spray of bitter red berries, which the songbirds gleefully consumed before they flitted away, winter following on their tailfeathers. Time marched on, and the tree bloomed and blossomed every year, growing taller and wider with every spring. By the twelfth year, the fruit it bore was so plentiful that the small red berries that it bore every autumn littered the rocky ground at its roots.
On the late spring of the thirteenth year, following a particularly bitter winter, the tree awoke from its slumber to find that the landscape around her had changed as she slept.
No more was the grove of swiftly-growing beech trees by the stream in the basin below. They had been reduced to stumps, stacks of lumber piled on the ground by the swell of the hillside; beside which a small, winding road had been cleared from the underbrush, felled trees on either side. And on the mountainous hill above, piles of lumber and stacks of stone sat; a crew of small two-legged creatures carrying sticks and tools sweating and toiling beneath the sun, vanishing into a tunnel they had dug into the very stone of the hillside. The tree had never seen such creatures before. Adam's children were almost entirely hairless, save for a small thatch upon their heads; with loud voices and none of the graces of the woodland animals she knew.
Spring passed into summer, and still, the men toiled away day and night, expanding upon the echoing chambers they had carved from the stone. And the rowan tree, on her lonely hillside below, drank in the spring rains, and soaked in the summer sun, and felt the nighttime breezes rustle through her leaves as it had always been, but change had arrived, blown in with the western wind, and she knew it.
The tree watched as one man was hauled from the stone chambers by his compatriots, bleeding heavily from a wound on his head. He did not wake up again, and they buried him in a small plot of earth a small ways from the digsite a couple of days later. He was joined by two others over the course of the season; one, a grey-haired man who had simply keeled over, stone dead, on a particularly hot summer day of work; the other a young man who had been bitten by a snake, seemed to recover over the course of one day, and succumbed the next to convulsions.
The work ground to a halt in late autumn, berries hanging heavy from the tree's branches. The men packed their tools onto a small donkey-drawn cart and carried the lumber into the caves below to be stored away from the winter damp. They were all gone before the first snow, the hills silent once more, save for the wind and birdsong, and the tree, naively, thought that would be the end of it. The snow fell heavy that winter, sticking to the crags and rocks as it always did; ice freezing over the stream and the small pond at the crux of the basin below.
The sound of wagon wheels and the shouting of loud voices woke her once more in the spring. The men had returned, even more of them this time with three carts of tools and building materials, and one covered wagon drawn by a horse, out of which a man clad in fine clothes stepped out. He did not assist the rest of the men in the work, and in fact, was not seen outside in the daylight hours very much at all, but the rowan watched at night when he emerged from his wagon with a lantern, parchment, and quill. The strange disquieting words he murmured to himself carried upon the breeze as he disappeared down into the stone chambers below the structure that was beginning to emerge; the shapes of stone walls and carefully-placed support beams.
It was once again early autumn, Boreas's harsh influence bringing a chill to the air that left her leaves stiff with frost in the mornings, when a carriage arrived one night. Two horses drew it; one white as winter's snow, the other black as midnight, metal bits between their teeth. Three more men piled out of the carriage, greeted eagerly by the man in the fine clothing who had arrived in the spring; his clothing now significantly less fine from having been forced to wash it himself in the stream, just like the rest of the workers.
One of the men, wearing a fine black cloak stitched with silver thread and decorated with silver tassels, the hood drawn over his face, greeted him coolly, gesturing at his other two compatriots, one of whom produced a hemp sack from the interior of the carriage. Its contents rattled and clacked audibly as it was moved about. The other man withdrew a small wooden box from beneath a seat. This, he treated far more gingerly than the sack the other man held; holding it with a sort of almost-reverence.
"The components, as requested. You are sure this will work?"
"It should- please, the martyr... may I?"
A sharp nod from the leader, and the box was carefully transferred from one man to the other. He unlatched the lid with quivering fingers, eyes trained upon the white gleam of bone inside of the box; a small, delicate bone nestled in the packed wood shavings inside. Slowly, he touched it with the tip of one finger; slowly, as if he could hardly believe what he was seeing.
"Just a finger. That was all that my contact could salvage," said the first man. Beneath the hood, very little of his features were visible, but it was plain enough from the way that he kept his distance from the small box, arms folded over his chest, that he had no particular desire to handle the object himself. "Will it be enough?"
"Yes," breathed the first man, reverently. Shaking his head, he closed the box again, taking a moment to recompose himself before he glanced at the sack. "And the sinner?"
"Retrieved from a graveyard. Hanged as a maleficar almost a century ago. I dug up the records myself," the hooded man said impatiently. "Short of a body fresh from the gallows, you won't be getting anything better."
The man nodded fervently. "Good. Very good." He drew a shuddering breath. "Everything is ready, then. I made sure the workmen cleared out tonight. The sigils have been drawn, the components are in place- save for these. The only other thing it needs... is us."
The hooded man nodded curtly, casting a hungry glance towards the construction site. "I see no reason to wait, then. Take us down."
Leaving the horses to be taken care of by the hunched driver manning the helm of the carriage, the four made their way to the building site, disappearing down into the stone tunnels below without so much as a glance up at the stars, twinkling coldly above. And the rowan tree, on her hill, felt her leaves rustling in the cold night air. She listened to the scraps of whispers that were carried up into the air, and drank in the iron tang of blood that soaked the earth that night through her roots, far in the ground below her hill. Change had arrived again, this time carried on wooden wheels drawn by two horses, and it was strange, and disquieting.
Of the four that had gone down into the stone chambers below, that night, only two emerged: the hooded man and one other of the men who had accompanied him in the carriage. Their faces were pale and wan, drawn with exhaustion, but there was a gleeful gleam in the pale eyes of the hooded man, even as he climbed back into his carriage and disappeared again down the road, not to be seen again for some time.
The work continued upon the structure for five more springs and winters. Tall stone walls grew up, a second floor was added above the huge central chamber, with its stone alter at the front; and a spiraling tower, at the zenith of which was hung a huge brass bell that crushed and killed one of the workers beneath it when it the rope snapped halfway through being hoisted up. Laborers came and went much more quickly, those five years; rumors of devils and ghosts haunting the grounds running rampant after one man claimed to have heard breathing behind him in the stone cellars below.
On the eve of the sixth spring, with the work on the structure, which was meant to be a church, due to be completed within the next two years, a horse-drawn carriage arrived at the base of the hill again. It was the same pale-eyed man from that night five years ago, though he looked remarkably the same, aside from the pastor's vestments that he wore. He was accompanied once again by two others: a man and a woman. The woman was a stonesmith of some renown; the man her husband and assistant. Shortly after she arrived, so did a wagon drawn by a team of shire horses carrying several slabs of marble, and the work began.
Several statues were carved that season. The first, a gentle-faced man with his hand outstretched meant to be placed in the gardens behind the church. The other three: winged and terrible gargoyles; were carved after the dreams began. Terrible dreams that caused the stonemason to thrash and scream at night, waking ashen faced and panting. Whether the three gargoyles were guardians to ward off the evil dreams or simply representations of the things that haunted her dreams would remain unanswered, for the stonemason passed of mysterious circumstances shortly after finishing the third and final statue; a terrible look of fear on her still face when she was found in the morning. They buried her in the crypt, the first to be entombed in the stone down there. Her husband left in the night, leaving all of the stone carving tools behind.
The leaves began to change color. And so another season passed. The young rowan, by now, was used to strange and fearful occurrences. To play witness to the births and deaths of all the world's creatures, small and large, all of Adam's children and all others, was her role. Yet, the birth of the final miraculous occurrence to happen there for some time at the church up the hill, which would come to be known as the Ossuary of Sacred Bones by the sons and daughters of Adam, was something that not even the trees had ever seen before.
The fearsome statues of the three gargoyles had been relegated to the belfry tower the previous autumn, hunched in the carved alcoves high above the rest of the church. It was up there one night, a storm moving in from the North, that the pastoral figure, accompanied by two other men in priestly garb and carrying lanterns, made his way to the top of the belfry.
Drawing a knife, the Father cut his hand and used the blood to paint several runes upon one of the statues' horned foreheads. The other two priests, following behind him, did the same, painting four circles: One large one around the plinth of the gargoyle, and three smaller ones upon the ledge of the belfry tower, all linked together with a single line of painted blood. In the center of the pentagram: a bowl of pure silver. Its contents: a switch cut from the rowan had been placed between the teeth of a darkened skull, cracked and brittle with age. Each of the three added several drops of their own blood to the bowl. Upon the completion, all took their places kneeling within the smaller circles; the Father flanked by the other two in the central circle.
He chanted in a low voice, almost obscured by the roll of thunder across the sky: "Demon, with this wand, I call you to this mortal plane. Demon, with this skull, I bind you within this marble shell. Demon, with holy silver, I compel you to serve. Come, Demon, come, Sinner, I invoke you with your true name. Come, Desdemona."
Lightning lit the sky upon the completion of this invocation as a massive crack of thunder momentarily deafened any cries of fear that the priests may have made, but the circle remained unbroken though the men looked around at each other with wild eyes- all except for the Father, who only had eyes for the painted statue before them. Upon the next lightning strike, accompanied by an ear-ringing boom of thunder, the statue's 'skin' where the runes had been painted seemed to crack and splinter before their eyes, the stone shell falling away from the brow to reveal a pair of solid golden eyes. Like an eggshell falling away, the rest of the stone sloughed off all at once, shattering musically against the marble plinth as the demon spread its wings and glared down upon the three with narrow eyes.
The huge leathery wings were tipped with batlike talons at every joint, mirroring the bestial talons of its hands and feet Roughly humanoid in form, its pale back bore more than a passing resemblance to the knotted trunk of an oak, the stalks of its wings rooted in muscle mass that no normal human would ever have– or have need for. It crouched still on muscular multi-jointed legs, hunched over its dusty pedestal; long, tangled black hair falling over its shoulders, and a long, snakelike tail whipped around one leg. Its half-open jaw revealed large sharp canines, incisors all slightly pointed; while a pair of curving horns crowned its brow, curving up towards the sky.
"Desdemona," the Father hissed, a quaver to even his voice, and though there was no wind, not even a breeze, for the night had become unnaturally still, the mighty wings shuddered. "Kneel," he commanded, and slowly, unwillingly, the creature dropped to one knee. A smile spread across the priest's face, and he slowly pushed himself back to his feet, hesitating for just a moment before stepping over the lines of the summoning circle. But the gargoyle did not move at all, just continued to stare hatefully at the mortal man. "Welcome back to the land of the living."
He paused, looking rapturously over the features of the horned beast. "I had heard of the practice of burying a live hound beneath the foundations of a building, so that its spirit might watch over the grounds, but I confess, I have never been very fond of dogs. You, on the other hand..." He smiled, elatedly. "I was not sure it would work. But here you are, surpassing even my wildest expectations."
The gargoyle's lips peeled back from its teeth. "Release me," it growled.
The man shook his head. "You know the rules as well as I. I have invoked you by your true name. By rights, you are owed to me a boon."
Another low sonorous growl, carried upon the wind. "Then name your demands."
A smile. "My request is simple," he said. Another fork of lightning split the sky above, illuminating the moonlight pale of the gargoyle's hide. "I wish for you to guard these grounds; to sleep by day and watch by night, for as long as the foundations endure."
The being's tail lashed angrily behind it, cracking against the sides of the alcove; eyes bright and angry, but although its taloned hands curled into fists, it made no aggressive movements- though it clearly seemed to wish to. The horned head inclined, and in a voice like stones grating against one another, it spoke. "It will be so."
And so, the church atop the hill came to gain its sleeping guardian. Many strange things started to happen there as the years passed, even after the death of the founding Father, whose likeness was carved into a marble statue inside of the sanctuary. There were rumors aplenty of a beast that roamed the grounds by night; a fearsome bear, or perhaps a wolf- no, a serpent! Or a combination of all three... But only the rowan, with her deep roots, listening to the wind with her rustling leaves, knew the truth of the strange creature that would sometimes leave its stone perch to visit the stream by her roots. The trees around the stream had grown taller and taller with the building of the church upon the tall hill, many of the younger trees practically dwarfing the rowan, which had reached just over six feet the past year.
The creature would sit with its clawed feet in the water of the stream, just staring at its warped reflection upon the surface of the water, the tip of its long tail sometimes twitching behind it. And though the rowan could not speak, the rustling of the wind through her leaves was company enough for many nights, it seemed. Time passed, the seasons changed, and the creature slowly stopped its visitations, until, after one long winter, it ceased to come at all, remaining asleep atop the belfry tower in its stone shell.