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----In the middle of the afternoon, two stone figures sat in their closed room on the third story. Distrust laid beside Petra, his claws digging deep into the hardwood floor. He felt a deep sense of grief and fear in her now, such emotion he had never felt in her before, and this scared him. He was glad Ciara was gone that week, because somehow he knew it would be worse if she was there. His eyes felt glazed over, and so strange... this also made him afraid. Petra was sitting on the floor crying, salty tears coursing down her smooth grey cheeks, and a small rat stood motionless in front of her.
----The rat was not dead, nor was it alive. It was made of stone. It had been turned into stone.
----Petra was too preoccupied to notice the change in her own eyes. If it didn't feel so natural, maybe the stinging in her eyes would have brought some alarm to her. But as was the case, all she could do was sit and cry, and pity the poor rat that was staring up at her -- staring up at her, but not really being able to stare -- and somehow she knew what she had done, though maybe not the extent of realizing what it had done to her, or knowing exactly how she had done it.

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----It had all started earlier that morning. Pippin came in the room to check on the two, as he always did when Ciara was gone. Distrust would usually ignore him, and Petra would stare almost angrily at him, and wouldn't budge if he tried to move her or take her downstairs.
----After his visit Petra took to crawling around the room, leaving trails of clean floor across the dusty surface, the only sign to anyone else that she had moved at all. She tried to get up and walk as she saw the others doing, but failed miserably and fell down on her butt each time. After finally giving up, she crawled over to the corner and sat there for most of the morning. A few hours had passed when a rat came up into the room, squeezing through a hole in the floor boards. Petra stared at it intently, almost curiously. It was so small. Its tail was so pink and long. Its eyes were so black. Its eyes... Broken thoughts filtered through her head in pictures, and seemed to settle on this one subject, and even she herself didn't quite know why. And as the rat crawled closer toward her, she just kept staring at its eyes. Finally it looked up at her, but immediately it stopped in its tracks. It just stood there staring back at her, but not on purpose. It was as if its eyes were drawn to hers, against its will somehow. How Petra realized or even comprehended this was strange, but somehow the whole situation was.
----And that was when Petra realized that its eyes weren't so black anymore. And its tail... it wasn't pink anymore, either. The rat was made of stone. And when she realized what she had done, she started to cry.