The Belogradchik Rocks are a belt of red sandstone towers thirty kilometres long in the northwest corner of Bulgaria, standing up to 200 metres over the forest, with a fortress wedged in among them. Nothing here grew upward. Blocks of sandstone cemented hard with iron held their ground while the softer rock around them washed away, and the towers are what stayed. That iron runs through the whole mass, so the red is the colour of the stone and not a stain on it. The base trails are where the height lands: two hundred metres of vertical rock with a person standing at the foot of it, which no terrace above can show you. The same paths pick out the figures the villages named over centuries — Adam and Eve, the Bear, the Dervish, the Horseman. The tallest of them is the Schoolgirl, a convent novice who in the story was chased through the rocks until the whole scene froze where it stood. Each one is plain rock from the road until you reach the angle where the resemblance clicks.
Kaleto's gates open onto a courtyard hemmed by sheer red cliffs. Roman foundations, medieval Bulgarian walls and Ottoman ramparts stack against the living rock, because every builder used the towers themselves and only closed what was open between them. Stone walkways run along the top of the walls, and stairs cut between boulders climb to platforms set on the sandstone. The gaps are tight enough that the cliffs, not the masonry, decide where you can go. The last hour of light is the one to be up there: the day-trippers have gone, the sandstone is at its deepest red, and nothing moves between the towers but wind. A hundred metres away the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences keeps an observatory, and on clear nights its research telescopes open on the planets while the stars come out thick over the towers. Up on the terraces the wall under your hand runs a few metres and then becomes cliff again. Nobody here ever built more than the joins.