Hello, everyone.
Welcome to “From Scars to Stories,” the series where I pull back the curtain on my fiction to show you the real-life resilience that fuels it.
Today, I want to talk about a story that is a little different from my Morro Bay legends. It’s a fantasy piece called “The Shield and the Sword,” told from the perspective of a gargoyle who has guarded a cathedral for seven hundred years.
The Hook: The Stone Guardian
In the story, the gargoyle describes himself as a vessel of “texture and vibration.” He is made of granite, built to be a silent, stoic protector. But beneath that stone skin, he is hiding a secret.
He says: “There is a force within me, a core of molten rage… It is a constant, grinding pressure, a silent scream trapped in my rock throat.”
For centuries, he believes his job is to contain this internal monster. He thinks the rage is a flaw, a danger that must be locked away so he can be a “shield.”
But when a dark sorcerer threatens to destroy his cathedral, the gargoyle realizes that being a shield isn’t enough. To save what he loves, he has to stop fighting the monster inside. He has to let it out.
He realizes: “The monster within me… was the key that unlocked the cage. The molten rage I had suppressed for so long poured through my stony veins. But it was not mindless… it was now a weapon.”
The Mirror: The Pressure to Be Stone
I didn’t write this story because I know what it feels like to be made of granite. I wrote it because I know exactly what it feels like to be the one who has to hold it all together.
When you are surviving, whether it’s the chaos of the foster system, the terror of homelessness, or the weight of being a single mother trying to rebuild a life from scratch, you learn very quickly to become “stone.”
You learn to suppress the anger. You push down the fear. You lock away the “molten rage” because you are terrified that if you let it out, it will burn everything down. You convince yourself that to be a good mother, a good business owner, or a good survivor, you have to be a statue: silent, unmoving, and unbreakable.
I spent years feeling like that gargoyle. I thought the “storm” inside me, the trauma, the anger at the unfairness of it all, was my enemy. I thought it was the thing that made me broken.
The Bridge: The Sword and the Shield
But here is the truth I found, both in writing the story and in living my life: Your monster is not your enemy.
That internal fire? That grit? That refusal to stay down? That is not the thing that breaks you. That is the thing that saves you.
In the climax of the story, the gargoyle defeats the evil not by being a passive shield, but by embracing his nature. He says, “I embraced the monster within, and it became mine to command.”
Resilience isn’t just about enduring pain with a smile. Sometimes, resilience is about tapping into that deep, primal force inside you, the part of you that says NO, and using it to fight for your life, your family, or your sanity.
I write about monsters because I believe we all have them. We all have parts of ourselves we are afraid of. But “The Shield and the Sword” is my reminder that those parts don’t have to be cages. They can be engines.
We can be the shield and the sword. We can be the guardian and the monster. And sometimes, that is exactly what the world requires us to be.
—Pam
Read or Listen to the Story
You can listen to the full audio version of “The Shield and the Sword” on my podcast, Momentary Tales, or read the text or listen to the audio right here on the blog: https://beyondtheblog.org/the-shield-and-the-sword/
This post is part of my series “From Scars to Stories.” The best way to know when the next story emerges from the mist is to subscribe to my newsletter!
As a thank-you for joining, you’ll get a free download of my exclusive subscriber-only short story, “Where the Fog Settles First,”—a spooky tale you can’t read anywhere else.
Pamela Beach is a multi-genre author, poet, and lyricist who writes from her home on California’s foggy Central Coast. She is the creator of the “Morro Bay fog-mythos” and author of The Unstoppable You. You can read more of her work and explore her complete “fog-mythos” collection at her blog, Beyond the with Pamela Beach
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