Paula Bodin: "Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculpture to discover it" Michele Angelo.

Chapter one. Where in the girl, the gypsy and a gargoyle ran into each other.

When Laurel disappeared, her father and the villagers and the priest of the cathedral of Saint Stephan's searched and lit candles in prayer and pleaded with the heavens for news of her. But they never thought to look up.

It began on a brisk spring morning. Laurel grabbed for Sloth's cold cheek and caressed the polishes stone. From her porch, a tap of twenty foot ladder, Laurel look across the rooftops of the cathedral at the graceful lines and the gargoyles that kept many gutters.

Behind the gargoyles, where the sun couldn't reach, there were still patches of icy snow. Sloth, named for one of seven deathly sins, sat in a niche of the main entrance. Below father inaudible the ladder in fuss. "How does it look?" Laurel had scampered out the ladder to check the gargoyle, despite the fact her father usually insisted that she should stay off ladder with her skirt. "It's not safe" he said "you get tangled up" but she had helped him carry the ladder, and then before she could start up, she grasped rungs and started climbing. He had sighed, but said nothing. "He is too indulgent" Dame Francis, her old nurse had always said. And when Laurel asked what that meant, Dame Francis sniffed and said "he lets you do whatever you want and that's not anyway to rise a proper lady". Laurel liked the word indulgent, she liked what it meant.

Beside her Sloth grimes in sleep, and she mimicked his contorted face. She'd always liked this gargoyle, with his grotesque expression. Maybe she liked him because he was wrapped around a smaller gargoyle and sit seemed to her that their sleep was peaceful even tender, the older protecting the younger.

Her hand went to the large gargoyle's broken wind. The wind inaudible taking up bits of old leaves and blowing them around her face trying to loosen her hair from her hood. She called her father "You're right, is badly broken". Master Raymond, the architect of the cathedral and her father cursed softly. He hated spending construction money on repairs and there could be a lot of repairs after the severe winter. "Come down" he ordered. But she didn't want to go down just yet, she was enjoying the view.

Below her, the city of Montague laid quiet, sheltered by the cathedral shadows, like chicks protected by a mother hen. A ten foot wall surrounded the city and inside stone houses with thatch roofs scrammed together in a jumble of streets. "Laurel come now" father shook the ladder gently. With a sigh, she balanced by holding on to the gargoyle's leg with one hand and the ladder with the other. She stepped down to the next rung, but the rung gave away with a crack and she flailed almost falling, her wait though pulled the gargoyle forward and it tumbled, scraping out of its niche and plummeting toward her father. Laurel swayed and screamed and somehow her foot found the next rung and both hands found the ladder.

Stone crashed under the cobblestones below. Someone cried out, then silence.