Beaumont walked the canyon edge with a skeleton carrying his tools. The cliffs here would do. High walls, deep shadows, and rock that would hold weight for centuries. He needed space for what he planned — a sculpture tall enough to prove that death had made him better than any living artist could ever be. He stopped where the canyon opened into a wide mouth flanked by jagged stone. A cave sat at the base, its entrance already ringed with pale spirits that drifted through the rock like smoke. His army stood in formation before it — not soldiers anymore, but guardians for what he would build. He gestured to the skeletons. They moved into the cave and began clearing debris, their bones clicking against stone. This would be his gallery. The living world had stolen forty years of his work. Now he had forever, and this monument would prove they had wasted a genius. But the cave was too small for what he saw in his mind. He needed height, drama, proof that living sculptors worked with hands that trembled and eyes that failed. His soldiers brought bones from the canyon floor — femurs, ribs, skulls still dirt-crusted. He arranged them at the cave mouth, stacking them into towers that framed the entrance like columns. More bones followed. His hands moved without pause, building upward, outward, creating a structure of death that rose higher than any headstone. By dawn, a monument of interlocked skeletons stood before the cave, their empty eyes watching the path. The territory was claimed. The work had begun. He stepped back to examine the bone towers. They needed a guardian, something that would tell any visitor this place belonged to art, not war. From the graveyard beyond the canyon, he summoned his largest creation — a skeletal giant that had once been three men fused into one frame. It carried a massive axe across its shoulder, bones wrapped in armor scraps. He positioned it at the center of the monument, between the towers. The giant stood motionless, its skull tilted toward the path. Anyone approaching would see it first. They would know a master worked here, someone freed from the limitations of flesh and time.