(no subject)

The statue has teeth but it's stone, the one in front of her is frozen in an impossible slavering lunge but she knows there could be more right behind her and she knows this one can move even though it can't, it couldn't but it has, and she only has two eyes and she can't break stone, and she shrieks--

--and her eyes close, just for an instant--

(and in her ears a great rushing like wind and water)

The choked remnant of her cry is a pitifully small squawk in the damp unfamiliar night.

She's huddled in the shadowed corner of a stone wall, hands clutching her head in hopeless defense.

Behind her, sloping walls rise into crenellations and turrets. It's a castle: small, sturdy, and apparently abandoned.