The old stone tower stood guard over the valley, gilded by afternoon sunshine, silent in its duty as it had for the past thousand years. An up thrust of mankind’s perseverance and ingenuity it stuck out like a snaggletooth in the jaw of the mountain range. Brush and scrub trees clung around the base of the tower obscuring the stone blocks that had fallen from the promontory over the years. The road that led to the tower was long since gone, not even a straggly path remained to remind wheeling birds in the sky that once people had trod the valley.
Across the valley snow-tipped peaks of the next mountain range gleamed at the unwinking eye of the tower’s lone window. The faint gurgle of a rocky stream drifted up the valley walls, muted by the shushing sound of the wind passing through the trees.
A pair of squirrels scurried through the limestone crumbling at the base of the tower; playing in the late summer sun, racing up the tower’s outside walls, jumping to the crown of a neighboring tree, careless in their enjoyment. An opportunistic coyote circled the base of the tower, nosing through the crumbling doorway to the interior, scoping out a possible winter den. Wrens, robins, chickadees, and finches chattered back and forth in the trees in alarm at this possible new neighbor. The field mouse nestled in a hole in the wall shivered in fear as it tried to make itself as small as possible at the back of its hideaway. The coyote yawned and snapped its teeth as it investigated the interior perimeter. It wasn’t hungry right now; however, it was good to know that this new home already had a snack in the larder.
The tower ignored all this as it patiently waited for the return of its fighting company. It had a duty to keep a watchful eye on the valley. A thousand years was a blink of an eye to the stone tower. Quietly it shone in the fading evening summer sun; glimmered under the light of the moon and the stars, clinging to the rocky promontory through storms and snowfalls, feeling the slow passage of time over its four walls as the earth rotated around the sun. Waiting.