Fiction Fragment 3

Here's the third part of a story I'm finding in my head. I recommend reading the first and second parts before this one. It's a good idea even if you've read them before, just because your memory's not that good. What? No, it's really not. What did you have for dinner last Tuesday? Yeah, like I said.

***

The night was silent; not even the sound of insects crawled through our musty tent walls. Our last thought as awareness waned was to wonder what sounds a brick monolith might make, creeping through a wood, pushing past branches and over newly ragged stumps, plowing through earth to a nearby meadow-- would it make a sound at all?

---

It was good that they slept, and slept soundly. Had they not, they might have felt a sustained tremor from the ground beneath them, and heard a muted din, the distant clacking and clanking of stone and metal. It might have terrified them.

---

No sound woke us. Hunger courteously obliged to do that favor, and our first thought on that new day was not of any brick structure, but of the persistent gnawing discomfort in our gut. Still though, upon setting foot outside and straightening out a stiff back, we saw dark red through the nearby trees and the strange conclusion to the previous day returned to our memory.

Nothing had changed during the night, and in the sunlight we saw our vague foreboding of the pillar as pure foolishness next to the new and more tangible fear of starvation. Resisting the temptation to go north to examine our brick enigma and perhaps find a vantage point from which to view its top, we went south in search of nourishment.

It soon became apparent that wild game was out of the question. The silence of the wood was complete-- no life stirred its brush. So we looked for berries, fruit or a potato farm, wandering farther and farther from our camp as we did. The more distance we put between ourselves and the tent, the more hopeless our search appeared. The vegetation became more sparse and the trees thinner. Just as we were beginning to decide that there was more hope of nutrition in the denser forest behind us, the space between the trees opened up and we found ourselves in a small grassy meadow.