Snippets of HISTORY

Mostly these are bits of information that the show didn't mention, but logically must have taken place, at least according to the fanfic I'm writing. And I don't really feel like wasting the time and energy to find a good way to shoehorn these particular facts into my stories, without making it obvious that they're being shoehorned in. One can do only so many explanatory flashbacks in a story before the reader loses track of what's supposed to be going on.


The Inland Clan

The Wyvern Clan was not the only clan in Scotland back in the ninth and tenth centuries. In fact, at some point before Wyvern Castle was completed, the clan was so large that it had to split, before they outgrew their ability to support themselves by hunting and fishing in their claimed territory. Half the clan migrated inland, taking over half of the clan's watchbeasts with them since they were more comfortable away from the water. They just might have settled near Loch Ness, to become the clan Sevarius thought existed in the episode "Monsters", or they might have gone elsewhere; this author ain't ready to say yet. But the offshoot clan survived in Scotland, hiding quite well from an increasingly intolerant human population, until at least the nineteenth century. (They might even still be surviving today; again, this author ain't saying yet.) The London clan knew of them, which is why Griff, upon meeting Goliath back during WWII, guessed he was of "Scottish stock."

The Lincoln Clan (and their Connection to Other Clans)

The London clan has feathered wings and the heads (and a few other bodily characteristics) of animals, due to a spell cast on them back in the Dark Ages by Merlin; a transforming spell, to protect the clan from a slaughter like what had happened to Wyvern. Everyone figured that if they looked like angels instead of devils, the local humans would look on them more favorably. But since they'd only heard of angels from overhearing humans, and had never actually seen a picture of one, well… Read "Revelations of the Labyrinth Pt.4: Guests and Pasts" for the full story.

Sometime in the late 8th century AD, roughly a hundred years after the transforming spell, the London Clan was large enough that it needed to split just as the Wyvern clan had done, with roughly a third of them traveling north to find new territory. The new splinter clan thrived for centuries in an area close to what's now the city of Lincoln. And they were eventually joined by a few gargoyles from the Scottish clans, who had wandered looking for mates.

The Scottish gargoyles interbred with the English gargoyles, and as a result some of their hatchlings had feathered wings but mixed-up color schemes that just aren't found on the animals they were patterned after (red cats, blue eagles, etc.) and some of them had leather-wings instead. And once the local priests really noticed the gargoyles who didn't look like angels, the jig was up, and the persecution began again. It was this clan that drew the attention of the first Canmore, after he was banished from Scotland in the eleventh century. Canmore gained the support of the local nobility and incited the English people to slaughter that clan, before turning his attention to Scotland once more.

Not all the Lincoln clan was killed, though; some of them escaped the slaughter, and wandered in hope of finding other clans that would take them in. Some of them went south to London, to join the original clan still thriving there; others went elsewhere. Two of them, a bovine-looking female gargoyle and a snake-bodied male gargoyle, encountered Merlin (still alive and kicking after all those centuries, and doing some wandering of his own). Merlin had the gift of prophecy, though it was unreliable at best, and had a vision that told him these gargoyles' destinies lay far from their native shore.

He magically transported the female to Kyushu, an island in Japan, where resided the Yatsushiro Clan. (More will be said about this clan in a later story.) The female mated and bred with one of the males in the clan, and one of her descendants eventually went up to Ishimura, carrying a few of the feather-wing genes with him. This explains why Yama's wings look so different than the standard gargoyle wings. After several generations of breeding diluting the gene stock, the feathers are gone, but a few vestigial scales remain at the base of the wings where they attach to the spine, and he lacks wing-talons just as all feather-winged gargoyles do.

The feather-winged and snake-bodied male gargoyle was magically transported to Guatemala, and he arrived just in time to prevent the gargoyle clan living there from being destroyed in conflict with the humans who lived there; the gargoyles recognized and accepted him as a gargoyle, but the humans nearly worshipped him on the spot, seeing him as an avatar of Quetzalcoatl, the winged serpent and one of their major deities.

His arrival saved the clan and promoted much friendlier relations between the humans and gargoyles, so much so that a Mayan magic-user forged the Sun Amulet and the four pendants in order to enable Zafiro's ancestor, his mate among the gargoyles and two "attendants" to stay awake during the day. (The humans thought it was so "Quetzalcoatl" could hear and answer their prayers and worship 24 hours a day; the gargoyles thought it was so they could protect themselves 24 hours a day. Either way, everybody thought it was a great idea.)

When the Mayans died out and were replaced by the Aztecs, the next generations of "Quetzalcoatl" again enabled the gargoyles to maintain healthy relations with the humans. But when the Spanish explorers came and started subjugating the native human populations, slaughtering thousands in warfare and slavery and hundreds of thousands more by introducing smallpox and other diseases, the gargoyles went into hiding. The last Aztec mage cast a great spell before dying of smallpox, that caused the rainforest surrounding their Mayan pyramid home to grow nearly tenfold overnight, choking out all the roads so no path led to it and rendering the pyramid nearly invisible to view except from directly overhead.

The gargoyles knew well that the foliage was hiding them from the Spanish conquistadors, and so protecting their home evolved to include 'protecting the Green,' preventing deforestation by unsuspecting humans. They hid their home well until 1993, when a party of looters found the Mayan temple they dwelled in and slaughtered most of the gargoyles in their stone sleep, while the four pendant wearers were, ironically/tragically, out patrolling the rest of the Green.

The Schwarzwald Clan

A clan of gargoyles once lived in the depths of the Black Forest or Schwarzwald, a wooded mountain range in what is now called Baden-Württemberg, a southwest region of Germany. They were a fairly large clan, and were known to a couple of the human villages that lived on the perimeter of the forest, but forged no alliance pact with any village in the way that Wyvern Clan did; the villagers feared them because of their 'demonic' appearance, and they didn't bother trying to correct that impression. Back before the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, the Schwarzwald stretched for miles across mountainous terrain and was considered nearly impenetrable anyway. The humans left the gargoyles alone, the gargoyles left the humans alone, and that was that.

Demona left Scotland after betraying Macbeth and witnessing the slaughter of her Outcast Clan, and wandered the continent for many years before stumbling upon the Schwarzwald Clan early in the 14th century (1327, 1328; she doesn't remember the exact year.) The Schwarzwald Clan didn't know about her being under a magic spell of immortality, and might not have cared much if they knew, either. With their horrendously long breeding cycle and resulting very low birth rate, any clan would welcome a breeding-age female who might contribute an egg to the rookery at the next Breeding Moon, so long as she promises to behave herself (and Demona did.) They welcomed her and took her in, and for the next couple of decades, she found happiness again.

Then came the Black Death of 1347-1348. The Plague swept through Europe like a thunderstorm, striking everywhere and wiping out nearly a third of the population; old and young, saints and sinners alike, nobody could escape it. It is the nature of Humanity to try to find some way to explain everything, especially every tragedy, even if the only explanation they can scrape up is "The Lord works in Mysterious Ways." Since, after frantic praying and praising and outright begging God to stop the Black Death wasn't noticeably working, people decided that the Plague was God's way of punishing them. Why was He punishing them? Because they hadn't driven out the evil in their midst…

That last paragraph wasn't fiction; that was History, folks. There's plenty of historical documentation about villagers stoning prostitutes to death, slitting the throats of Jews, and burning suspected 'witches' at the stake; doing what they thought would avert God's wrath from them. Naturally, it didn't work. So who else could they blame?

In my fic'verse, they blamed the gargoyles. Those demonic-looking creatures that lived deep within the Schwarzwald; surely they were real demons, and God would not stop the Plague until they were all sent back to Hell! In the spring of 1348, two villages combined forces and marched into the Schwarzwald, armed with whatever weapons they could find, and they smashed the entire clan in their stone sleep. Even the heavily pregnant gargoyle females, since the clan had enjoyed a breeding season the previous autumn; none were spared.

Demona was among them at the time, and was pregnant as well; the immortality spell revived her at sunset, but she miscarried the egg. This is another reason why she's so obsessive about Angela. In the past, once a gargoyle female laid her egg she turned it over to the rookery, to be raised by the clan. So even if an egg was smashed or a hatchling was killed, no one female bore the brunt of the tragedy. But in miscarrying the egg she'd been preparing to lay, Demona most definitely lost a child. That tends to unhinge any mother, and it's quite common for a grieving mother to be extremely protective of any remaining children. Even after all this time, Demona still privately grieves, and fears of losing again.

After that clan was slaughtered Demona went north, and two years later, while a second wave of the Black Death swept through Europe, she encountered Macbeth in Denmark. Over the last four years Macbeth had also seen death on all sides; he'd seen village after village become nearly wiped out by the Plague, with himself as one of the few survivors and in one small hamlet's case, the only survivor. Sick and tired of seeing Death on everyone's face but his own, he tried to kill Demona and thereby himself, and nearly succeeded; she was still so depressed that she hardly put up a fight at all.

But their fight was interrupted, by villagers who thought that Demona was a demon that Macbeth had summoned, and attacked both of them at once. A spear through Demona's heart brought both her and Macbeth down, and the villagers threw both their seemingly dead bodies onto a pyre for burning. The immortality spell woke them up just as the flames caught. The villagers scattered as the flaming gargoyle sprang into the sky and the flaming man ran bellowing into the streets, and that was the last Demona and Macbeth saw of each other for several hundred years.

NEXT: Speaking in Tongues