Torredebosc

A squat stone tower at the forest’s edge, two hours south of Pontaubert along the Old Road — and the closest thing the villages have to a town square, for a makeshift market gathers in its lee each week.

No colonial hand raised it. It stood here when the first settlers came, and torre de bosc means only what it says: the tower of the wood, set to watch the tree-line for whatever its makers feared coming out. Who built it — the First World, some forerunner folk, the vanished dwarves of Vivier Peak — no one living knows; and whether it still watches, no one asks.