It opened its stone lips and let loose a primal scream, shrieking and desperate. There was a power in that screech. A power that wasn't natural. Pash saw the air ripple, as though it was distorted by a heatwave.
The noise hung in the air for a time, echoing off the cliff faces, likely heard by both the living and the dead for thousands of miles around.
There must be some sort of bond between all creatures made of stone, for the leering gargoyles took notice of their brethren's distress. Their heads twisted around as one, slow and haunting, paying no mind to the position of their bodies, some even putting owls to shame.
"Gargoyles…" Ermos cursed beside him.
The gargoyles spread their stone wings and freed their bodies from cement bonds. They took to the sky in flight, an army of overgrown bats, four shrunken limbs hanging uselessly in front of them.
Pash gulped. If even his master had a dislike for gargoyles, they were sure to be troublesome. "Are they strong?" He asked.
Ermos shrugged. "They're about as strong as everything else, but almost a hundred times more annoying. Imagine a hyena nipping at the heels of a lion. Now imagine giving that hyena wings. There you have a gargoyle."
When Pash heard the gargoyles shriek, he could understand his master comparing them to a hyena. They had this awful gloating laugh to them, terrible and taunting, enough to provoke even the most stoic of fighters into making a reckless mistake.
There were nearly a hundred of those winged hyenas that took to the sky. They flew with a strange swiftness, unbecoming of their heavy stone bodies and they sped forth to aid their bridge.
They looked small and insignificant when they flew to pester the gigantic green hand that the Queen had conjured, but that did not stop them from ducking in to slash at it with the pointed claws on the end of their wings, cackling like witches.
Then, the five girls made their move. They ran towards the edge of the cliff with their glaives in one hand, working up a speed. They leapt into the air, as graceful as leopards, bridging the several foot gap between themselves and the bridge with an enviable ease.
They bent their knees as they landed on the end of its swaying surface, sliding a second hand onto the poles of their glaives, poised for a fight.
The mouth was a distance away from them, closer to the centre of the bridge. It looked up to the Queen's conjured hand, and then back to the girls, trying to make a decision on who it would attack, but the Queen made its choice for it. She swung down with her hammer fist, casting a meteor's shadow.
Instinct assisted it in escaping. It would not have fared well meeting such a powerful attack head-on. The mouth simply disappeared back inside the grey depths of the stone brick bridge, allowing the hand to smash into pavement instead, casting up a cloud of rubble, creating a crater and a spider web of cracks. A devastating blow, but one that the mouth had easily avoided.
The gargoyles went to keep the girls company. The winged creatures soon realized that their attacks were having no effect on the hand of the trees, and so they switched their focus gratefully to softer targets.
They were very much pack animals in the way that they operated. One beast swooped in, wielding its wings like blades, perfectly poised to cut one of the girls clean in two. She leaned back, allowing it to fly over her head uselessly, before she spun around and retaliated with a slash of her glaive.
The creature howled in pain when the blow landed. Pash almost cheered for the girl's success. But being made of stone, they were nothing if not hardy. It flew back into the sky, and there were ten others ready to take its place.
"Should we not help them, master?" Pash asked, worried by the predicament of the girls. Each of them were facing off against more than twenty gargoyles each, having to fight on all fronts at once. They were doing well enough for now. In fact, they performed masterfully, spinning around with a frightful speed, keeping them well back out of the way, and even wounding them in the process. But soon they would be sure to tire. No one could run at a sprint forever.
"She said it was their fight," his master reminded him simply. He betrayed no emotion on his face. In fact, he looked rather bored.
Pash looked back to the fight, trusting that his master would not be so lax if they were truly on the losing foot. He was the far more experienced fighter. He was surely seeing something that Pash was unable to.
The bridge's mouth popped up again like a mole, nearer to where the girls were fighting, threatening to get involved. The Queen's reaction was immediate. She opened up her hand and reached for it, intending to pluck it from the very stone that it sought to hide in.
It allowed the hand to come within a few feet of it before it once more scarpered into invisibility. This time, the Queen chased after it. She dug deep into the bricks with the massive fingers of her apparition, and she chased after the mouth's shadow, likely worried by the threat it posed to her servants.
The mouth was far too quick for her, however. It put a distance between them, always looking back, waiting for its opportunity.
When it was quite sure that it was safe, it rounded on her like a dog would and opened wide its abyssal mouth, bringing down its ridiculous teeth on the end of one of her fingers.
A massive bite it took out of it, right past the thumbnail, and then it disappeared to safety once more.
The wound seemed to affect more than just the hand of the trees, it affected the Queen herself. A look of acute pain flashed across her face and she withdrew the weapon that she had conjured, vying for safety.