A Tear of Stone

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In the heart of a forgotten temple, where sunlight filters through columns like faded memories, Medusa does not pray for salvation. She has long known that no god will answer. She prays instead for a moment of simple, human recollection.

Her hands come together, the gesture a ghost of her former life. She closes her eyes and begs her mind not for freedom, but for the memory of warmth—the feeling of a hand on her cheek without the cold slip of a scale, the sensation of wind in her hair without the constant, restless weight of hissing thoughts.

For a single, breathtaking second, the prayer is answered. A memory, pure and unblemished, surfaces: the laughter of a girl under an Attic sun.

But the moment is poison. The memory’s light is so bright it burns, and the return to her cold, marble reality is a physical blow. The serpents in her hair stir, agitated by the echo of a life they can never know. The pain of that contrast—between the girl she was and the curse she has become—is too great to bear. It coalesces into a single, perfect tear.

As it traces a path down her cheek, it is no longer a relic of her lost humanity. It is an artifact of her curse. The power the gods gave her, the horror that lives in her gaze, flashes in her eyes—a green, petrifying light that reminds her that even her sorrow is a weapon.

With a shudder of profound resignation, she closes her eyes. She shuts out the world not to protect it, but to protect herself from the ghost of her own past. The snakes calm their hissing, and she returns to the stillness of her curse, a living statue in a garden of stone, waiting for the day she is brave enough to pray again.