Author's note: An old experiment in description written several years ago that I recently dug up...
Glass shattered. Colorful beautiful pieces fell from the oval-shaped window into the cathedral with a sharp and frightening crackle. People praying desperately in the church near the altar standing in the dim candlelight looked up briefly and brought their hands up in hopeful protection.
Their clothes were dark and concealing.
Past the jagged edges of the church's former window, gargoyles peered in and gaped wide-mouthed at the people. The luminous full moon passively allowed a cloud to cover her when the wind blew harshly. At the cathedral's side, a river surged with tiny but furious white and brown waves. While the gargoyles perched atop the cathedral grinning at the river's turbulence, the people stared up in horror at their odd dragon shapes. The gargoyles moved through the shadows and glass crackled loudly as horrified people in the church moved toward the light that the little white prayer candles offered.
The full-faced moon pushed away the gray cloud and smiled down upon the terrified land. The gargoyles stopped rushing toward the people when the moon gazed down. They only stared with hungry catlike eyes.
The people, with bleeding arms and faces, cried, but not to the silvery moon. So another cloud, a black raining cloud, passed over the moon and the great, gray gargoyles smiled like conniving devils while they sat upon the holy cathedral.
Water started to pour from the gargoyles' mouths and some of the water splashed into the stairs on one side of the cathedral that led to a massive crypt below. Slick, green moss climbed the steps out of the escape and water pooled slightly at the bottom of the steps in front a rotting, wooden door. The pool was black and soot swirled madly in it. The gargoyles' eyes glanced upward as pure water poured through their dirty bodies and fell to ground heavily.
Water fell into the church like the glass window had. Water from the sky, from the gargoyles' mouths, was pushed in by a hungry wind. The wind growled and whined, but the people thought it was the gargoyles howling and shrieking like frightening wolves from a black and thick forest. The gargoyles, masters of the shadowy and deceptive night, only glared with intense eyes.
From the cathedral the gargoyles watched boats tied to metal poles along the cobblestone bank on the nearby river rock back and forth wildly. The cathedral's dragons grinned as one boat, loaded with covered piles of expensive rugs, fell on its side and rugs sank quickly.
The people in the cathedral huddled near tiny stacks of white candles. Occasionally a tiny white candle and someone tried to light another with the flame of an older one. The hold men did not charge any of the frightened people to keep the light alive.
Once a tiny boy, wearing a brown scarf over his mouth, looked out the broken, oval window and saw a star shining through the black clouds that had worked so hard to cover the moon. The stars spun quickly and the little boy, with his gloved hands, pointed and gasped, but the clouds had covered the stars again by the time the bleeding people had looked.
The gargoyles perched upon the roof continued to spew water and behind them rows of copper people looked down on the river and other building in concern, but could not see the broken window of the church. The copper people remained the same size as they came to the step before the pointing cathedral tip, but the gargoyles grew smaller and smaller as if fear of the sharp pointed top made the hierarchy force its tiniest citizen to the strongest point of their opposition on the holy home.