The bells argued with the clouds until both gave up. Night took the city in small, polite bites. Thomas waited for the portion of evening that isn't yet dangerous to learn its manners.
Thibault had gone to a neighbor's card game (children allowed if they could convincingly pretend to cheat). Patricia watched from the window the way a saint watches water. Christian examined a new lamp cage as if it had been caught lying and needed repentance.
"Back by ten," Patricia told the street in general. It agreed, because she was persuasive.
Thomas measured the stairwell before he used it. Steps 3 and 7 had opinions. Step 9 remembered it had been a tree. He honored those facts and reached the landing that gave onto the roof hatch.
The hatch had rusted in the pattern of gossip. He pressed a be kind into the hinge rather than a be quiet. Kind worked better. The hinge remembered generosity. The hatch opened with the soft sigh of someone admitting they like you.
Rooftops in Lutetia loved drama. Slate made an argument of texture; chimneys negotiated with wind. The gargouille watched the wrong way with the practiced arrogance of those who know where the right way is.
He stepped onto the slope and understood why the old chalk lady crossed herself. Height tells the truth; the river approves.
The gargouille crouched where two eaves conspired. Wings tucked, mouth frozen in a laugh or warning, claws sunk like commas into the stone sentence. Water stains down its chest marked the path rain liked to take when it wanted to pretend it had been told to.
The roof did what roofs do—pretended to be steady while collecting stories. He kept three points of contact, which felt like an extravagant number. He let his weight read the slate before his foot did.
Halfway, a tile sang—the thin cry slate makes when it is ready to return to sand. He froze. The cry echoed with the obscene clarity heights give to foolish noises.
From across the roof a second noise answered: stone shifting a millimeter. The gargouille did not move. But the roof's grammar changed.
You climbed because you intended to, the roof said. Good. Pay attention, then.
He backed his weight and chose an alternate syllable of slate. The tile swallowed his foot with careful grace. He reached the gargouille's shadow and set his palm to stone, not because he believed in friendship but because he believed in temperature. Stone chilled him with the kind of cold that isn't air; it was river-cold, old and exact.
[SEQ] Relic Umbra — Eligible (Gargouille Mantle)
[SEQ] Requirement: Touch + Height + Night + Focus.
[SEQ] Risk: Slip (minor). Reward: Stone Mantle (Merge).
[SEQ] Proceed? Y/N
Y, he thought, and did not smile.
He pressed—not to move stone, which does not love being moved, but to agree with it. He agreed that roofs have duties. He agreed that fall is a verb that wants respect. He agreed that if something must be heavy, it should do the job with dignity.
The gargouille's shadow thickened, like ink remembering its bottle. Cold chased up his wrist to the elbow. For a heartbeat he lost the world's edges and felt only weight as an ethic.
The roof chose this moment, being a teacher, to lift a fraction in the wrong place. Slate went from sentence to question. His back foot slid—
He did not panic. Panic is a vote for gravity.
(…to be continued)