Part 3 of Steve Stanton's amazing "Superlight" story.  You know you've been waiting on this!
 

"Have you seen the gates of the shadow of death?
Have you comprehended the vast expanses of earth?
Tell me, if you know all this.
What is the way to the abode of light?"

        The Lord speaks: Job 38:17-19

     A gargoyle lurked behind every tree. Lithe and noiseless they bounded from trunk to trunk, their scales green and slimy in the gentle mist of rain. They hunted him like a weakened deer, a slow and crippled stag that stumbled through the underbrush with the strong ones, his protectors. But even the strong ones could not hold the gargoyles at bay.

     In time his mind was infiltrated, his thoughts contaminated. Eventually Zakariah was given up a sacrifice to pagan gargoyle gods, and carried aloft by screaming dragons up above the trees to the great black anvils where the dragons danced and threw forks of lightning at their foes. His body rocked and trembled with the sounds of warfare.

     His body heaved and emptied itself, and gargoyles rushed to bring him water and red medicine, bickering and bantering with shrill whoops of malice. They touched him with scaly fingers and iced his temples. A ceasefire held for many days and whispered voices promised life and death, alternately, and each seemed attractive in its turn. Finally Zakariah found refuge in the music, a pleasant hum of music, white music, changeless, still.

     In gargoyle heaven they ministered with sheets of white music and cotton towels, their white wings beating time like a pendulum behind his eyes. They forced gargoyle ichors down his gullet and flashed sparks from their eyes into his brain. A silver snake crawled up from the floor and stabbed his arm with pain, drank dry his rich red blood and left him parched and withered like an Egyptian mummy entombed in still white music.

     He slept fitfully and woke again to white gargoyles with kind faces and red medicine. They led him from eyrie cave to eyrie cave and washed his body and shaved his face and dried him and dressed him. They laid him down in ashes and dust and asked senseless questions about life before death, about day before dawn. He slept again and woke to a world darker and more ominous. He asked for red medicine and was denied. His viscera contracted at the thought. Two white gargoyles shaved his skull. He prepared to die. Perhaps it would be easier this time.