The museum was a fairly strange affair, a new building in town that he couldn’t recall having been built… despite it popping up along a major street. It seemed to showcase arboreal art, bonsai, topiary, various other trees and plants artfully twisted or shaped into various forms; but the exhibit which interested him the most was the hall of stone trees. Frysco had never seen anything quite like them that day when he set paw into the chilly hall, darkened clearly to preserve the art, and filled with rows of masterfully carved plants.

The statues were of all makes, jade, alabaster, onyx, marble, carved with such intricate and delicate detail that they didn’t seem possible. Leaves on thin twigs, pine needles, cones, branches, all twisting out from unnervingly shaped trunks that evoked a slight shape of living creatures. He’d noticed a similar style in the plants outside, the topiary and bonsai, all appearing with vague arms, mysterious hints of faces, it was almost off putting to the gryphon, but somehow fascinating.

He leaned in to look more closely, pondering and puzzling over just how the artists must have made these things, and finding himself more or less clueless on any answers. There just seemed to be no earthly way to carve a pine needle from hard stone, nor a leaf or a twig, it just couldn’t be done. And yet there in front of him, lined up in the hall were many examples that stood in defiance of both logic and physics, taunting his brain to come up with an explanation for them, reading the labels on copper plates as he went by.

Padding quietly through his ruminations in the deep hall, he stopped, seeing an empty space between two of the sculptures, about the width of any of the others, as if a sculpture had been removed and was missing. He glanced around, noting this was the only free space, and he was alone within himself in the hall. The gryphon took this as an opportunity to get a closer look at the side of a maple tree in alabaster which had caught his eye.

The very moment both paws had set weight in the space, a startling rumble came from the ground below, a stony crack pierced the silence and Frysco wobbled as the floor beneath him lifted up a couple of inches, creating a sort of thick plinth beneath him, of warmly hued marble. With a yelp of surprise he moved to jump off from the sudden plinth, but immediately found himself tripped and toppled over, the pads of his paws stuck to the stone, almost as if they had been glued down.

With a moment of confusion and twisted ankles, he manages to shimmy himself back up onto his stuck paws and lean down to investigate what had happened. As soon as he did though, he almost wished he hadn’t… the stone was seeping upward, fusing his toes and pads into the plinth, and starting to creep up and around them like a living force! The stone travelled alarmingly quick, filling in the space between his toes and pulling his ankles together, filling and forming around them and carving a texture almost like…

BARK! Sudden realization leapt to Frysco’s mind as to just how these statues were created, but now it was a bit too late for him to do much about it as he felt his knees stiffen, quickly followed by his spine. The fur of his chest began to smooth down as spots of the impending stone appeared elsewhere upon him, at the elbows and the tips of his talons, sticking them together, and slowing the movement in his joints. The sound of crumbly creaking stone with each and every movement met his ears as he felt its cold embrace around him, molding him into a new form bit by bit as the minutes progressed.

It wasn’t long before those delicate stone leaves began to ‘sprout’ from his appendages, wings locked out behind him and thinning into perfectly rigid branches, fingers fusing together and stretching out as his arms involuntarily lifted, covered in their sheath of carved bark.

The definition of his legs was vanishing rapidly, becoming a vaguely gryphon-esque trunk of a stony tree, and his chest wasn’t far behind. Soon his arms had split off, crackling as they cemented into place, lost beneath the stony façade, his clothing ripped by the transformative process and slipping away. The cold shell of stone took over his skin, encasing around his chest and holding in his breath with impossible weight and tightness before seeping inward, stopping the air within him and preventing any late cries for help. With great unnerving realization, he found he could no longer feel his heart beating as the cold sept further inward.

A rushing sound approached his ears as the crackling stone rose up and subsumed his neck, locking it into place and creeping over his face, losing the avian details to bark like stone. He lost the feeling in his jaw and face, squeezed by the stone and preventing even the slightest movement, covering his ears as the last of him was converted to stone. The gryphon quickly found his sense of hearing deadened, as if listening through a thick wall, and his vision, tinted with the warm color of marble and locked permanently forward. He was trapped now, in the body of a stony tree, leaves frozen in time, never moving…

He couldn’t see it, but a small copper name plate arose through some unfathomable magic, bearing the name of Frysco, and showing what he’d become.