“It’s the only the thing that never gets old.”

The conversations one overhears around the cathedral are enlightening. An eavesdropper soon learns that there are answers to seemingly impossible questions, including this one: “Why is that gargoyle smiling?”

A MOTHER CONSOLES HER DAUGHTER

“Lizards must perish, as sure as they’re born;
Children who love them are fated to mourn.
Yet lizards live on when their season is flown:
Scales fall away; the remainder is stone,
And wings, like green legends, burst forth and unfold.
The beasts they become covet altars of gold;
They roost on cathedrals, unnoticed and gray,
Watching the centuries die in a day.
Well may you wonder, ‘But what happens next?’
This question leaves even the wisest perplexed.
The wyrd of these wyrms is a subtle decree,
But here’s what a wyvern once whispered to me:
When Time bids these buttresses buckle and break,
Scattering rubble and ruin in their wake,
Things wearing wings will awake and take flight.
On towering temples a few will alight;
Some will watch kobolds construct them a shrine;
Some will stalk longships, their prows to entwine;
Some will grind gryphons to dust in their claws;
One may remember a child, and pause.
So listen, for wings carry comforting truth:
Honor the monsters that creep through your youth,
And never make light of a reptile’s pride;
A lizard, though small, is a dragon inside.”