But a memory haunted him, the bleakness of mountain peaks and deep valleys that represented the overmind that belonged to all the gargoyle race. It had once been vivacious, a place of life and ever-growing knowledge, but too many had died. Terribly few of the peaks grew now, blunted by time and aging memory. Foothills, the memories of children, were few and far between: all signs of a dying people. Reluctance to enter that dour realm again drove Alban high through the city towers, as if remembering under the stars might help bring life back to what had once been a great repository of memory and legend.

All the history of the Old Races. Not just the remaining five, but innumerable other peoples whose light had faded as humans swept the planet. Exploration and settling was their nature, as much as solitude and contemplation was a gargoyle’s. Humans had not meant, in the first many thousand years, to encroach upon habitat used by different peoples than themselves.

It had been far more recently that mankind began to hunt the legends: dragons and sea serpents, closely related but diametrically different. Wild men in the mountains, always few thanks to the harsh climate in which they existed, were hunted to the brink of extinction and beyond, until only tales of Bigfoot remained. Harpies, winged and bitter even before their female-heavy tribes were decimated, and the siryns whose songs were so haunting that sailors spoke of them even still. Vampires, hungry for the very blood that gave humanity life, were feared even more than dragons. Men who destroyed vampires were heroes among mortals.

All of their stories and more lay in the gargoyles’ memories, in the minds of the one race bound so tightly to stone that daylight took life from them and left nothing but the protective state that could shield memory against even the ravages of time. That was the purpose of Alban’s race, beyond all else: to preserve history.

His people had once gone amongst the others, listening to stories and opening themselves to their memories so histories might be fully recorded. They might be hidden from the world but they would never be forgotten, even as the unadaptable died and were lost to time.

Only the remaining handful had learned the precarious balance between pretending humanity and remaining true to their own natures. Of those, whole tribes of djinn remained in the deserts, riding sandstorms and acting out their hate against humanity in brutal raids that left reporters bewildered and humanitarians horrified. They were the most united, possibly the most populous, of the Old Races, but their ambitions were reined in by desert boundaries, more by choice than necessity. Humans were too many, and the Old Races, even together, far too few.

Gargoyles, after the djinn, still held the most numbers, but even those were countable: fewer than fifteen hundred when Alban had last known. The others diminished far more rapidly, with dragons counting in the tens or dozens, and the selkies thought to be all but gone. The memories carried more sorrow than joy now, their price heavy in emotion and heavier still in cost of daylight hours unshared with the rest of the world.

Alban settled on a building top, reluctance weighing his wings until he could fly no longer. Duty and desire tangled together, becoming more difficult to discern: the last price paid for bearing the memory of the Old Races. A plea for information carried in the gestalt was not to be refused.

He closed his eyes and let memory ride him.

CHAPTER 10

Salt tainted the air. Salt and the scent of fish, bound to the incessant roll of water against the shore. Such unfamiliar sounds and tastes verged on unpleasant to a creature born of inland mountains. The craggy peaks Alban was familiar with lay to the east, blue with distance created in his own mind. The landscape of memory could juxtapose unrelated features and moments in time without difficulty, but to navigate them required structure. It had been a relief to leave behind remembrances of the gargoyles themselves, the worn mountain range too much a shadow of what it had once been.

No barrier had risen up to bar his way this time. No challenge from Biali, the gargoyle set to watch over the exile. No dispute over whether Alban had a right to histories. Perhaps it was because he sought memory for another race, rather than for himself. Perhaps it was a sign of forgiveness, though Alban doubted it. Stone did not forgive easily.

He wheeled in the sky, watching a black echo of his own form flash over the village below. Young children ran back and forth at the water’s edge, dragging sealskins with them and popping up water-sleek heads when the surf surged. A handful of indulgent older children, not grown enough yet to fish the waters and provide for the village, watched over them without worry; drownings happened, but rarely, amongst a people born to both ocean and earth.

This was their existence for centuries immemorial, a life of hard work and idyllic play. Time passed in a blur, children growing up, hunters lost to the seas mourned; the selkies numbers increasing slowly, but more consistently than other Old Races had. Increasing enough that some of the more daring left their native shores to explore the world beyond.

Memory skittered, pulling Alban far away from the village below, until in the distance of his mind it seemed he hovered above a world pinpointed with water-blue light. Along coastlines where the children of selkie explorers had settled, bright spots gleamed then faded away, legend in the making. Within the bodies of continents another series of sparks lit up, earthier brown, and faded more rapidly.

Then bloodred tinged the whole of the world and Alban’s focus was drawn down to a single representative village again. The waters turned brown with pollution, waste from human settlements. Human towns and villages encroached on selkie territory, driving them farther into the sea, farther from fishing areas, farther from sustainable life, until the soul of what they’d once been was diminished to little more than stories carried on the waves. Sorrow colored the telling of memory, one death after another, until a single old man stood alone on a windswept beach. Alban alighted beside him, settling into the comfortable crouch that was a gargoyle’s hallmark, and waited.

"Thank you for coming. I know it’s been a long journey, and now I have so little time before dawn." He gestured toward the east, where the sky already brightened with the first promise of sunrise.

"You’ve aged." The voice was not Alban’s, the scrape of granite on granite, but something smoother: stone so hot it flowed, warmth emanating from every deep word. Confusion laced that comforting warmth now. "We do not age, my friend. The Old Races do not age."

"My mother was human, Eldred." The old man turned from watching the horizon and encroaching dawn to smile unhappily at the expression of shocked revulsion Alban felt shape his face. "I have stayed behind to tell you this. We are dying." He looked eastward again, shaking his head. "All of us are, we Old Races, but perhaps we selkies fastest of all. Is it so terrible?" He put his hands out, studying lines of age and thickened veins. "Is it so terrible to do what is necessary to ensure survival?"

"Humans." Disapproval roiled in Eldred’s liquid voice. "Humans weaken what we are."

"And yet you never suspected." Glendyr lifted a still-strong chin, gentle defiance in the action. "Centuries of friendship and you’ve never imagined me to be anything less than one of our peoples. I prefer to let history judge us, rather than the passion of new knowledge. We’re dying," he repeated. "With sunrise I go into the sea to join my family. We will not return. The selkies will live or die apart from the other Old Races, so that we might honor our living and our dead without censure from all. But history should know. Remember us, Eldred. Remember my people."