David Charming knelt in the torn dirt at the edge of his clearing and pressed a flattened seedling between his fingers. Three years of fence posts and garden rows, and now this. He wanted children running here someday. He wanted a place worth handing down. But every clearing he scouted came up trampled by morning. He followed the prints to the tree line and found the stones. A ring of them, tall and cracked, with deep claw gouges raked across the faces. The beast had marked this ground long before David ever swung an axe. He stood there a long minute. Then he walked back to the barn and started hauling timber. By the third sunset he had raised a tower at the clearing's edge — a wooden platform braced into stone, a heavy bell hung at its peak. He rang it once. The sound rolled into the trees and kept rolling. That night the prints stopped at the tower's shadow and turned away. By dawn his seedlings still stood. But on the platform, fresh claw marks scored the wood, deeper than before.