[The alarm went off, it was 6 AM. Jason was ready to get to work around the farm. He had 39 starting actions]

[Tess’s Almanac: 75th day of Summer! 16 days until the Summer Festival. Looks like today’s going to be a bit cooler! Expect temperatures to start cooling steadily all the way up until the start of Fall!]

Jason woke up, rolled out of bed, and walked up to the window. He stared out at his mostly-dead field, along with the small patch of green in the corner, and sighed deeply. After his meeting with Tess, he had tried a dozen more methods for getting the Juun bug repellant out onto the field, but none of them had worked. On the bright side, he was fairly confident that even if he stirred up a whole swarm of the insects, none of them would come near him, as he had utterly soaked himself time and time again in the thick sludge. On the less bright side, the stench also kept away all the townsfolk when he went into Summer Shandy for supplies, so… There was that.

He soon dressed and made his way down to the kitchen. He dropped into a chair and the cookbook made him a plate of something green, and he chuckled. It was greener than just about anything else on his farm, and he ate it with a full acknowledgement of the irony. When he finished, he slowly made his way outside, hitched up Lady, and leaned against her stable as she ate.

The green grass of his yard was starting to vanish as well, leaving very little for Lady to graze upon while she was hitched up. He scowled at a group of the bugs flying overhead, then shrugged. What more could he do? Nothing. Nothing at all, save to rant and rail. It felt odd, in truth. He felt more inactive than he had been since moving into the property, but everything he tried felt like spitting into the wind. Sure, it was possible that there was something that would eventually be able to help. but he didn’t have the faintest idea what it might be.

On top of that, the letter from his mother was continuing to eat at him. She wanted to discuss his “business endeavors.” What did that even mean? Was she interested in the farm? She hadn’t even seen it, but maybe she was just assuming that since he had been down in Summer Shandy for two years, it must be at least a little profitable? He didn’t have a clue. Nowhere was there a mention of congratulations. Nowhere was there a question about what Tess was like, or what kind of wedding they were planning, or how he was doing. It was simple, to the point, and that was that. Not that she had ever been the most expressive person in the world, but certainly she was a little more excited than that… Right?

The thought continued to eat at him, until finally he couldn’t take it. He grabbed Lady’s saddle out of her stable, strode over and cinched it up, then climbed onto Lady’s back. With that, they both rode off into the wilderness. He needed to get his mind off current events, and didn’t see any better way to do that than to visit the stone monolith.

While it had certainly been in the back of his mind, thoughts of the monolith had remained floating around his brain ever since he had first found it. He doubted that he would really be able to come up with many answers, but it was worth going back to take another look. As he rode across the gently-rolling hill, he sighed deeply. The ride was refreshing, and he found his mind turning to the landscapes that hadn’t seen a human other than Jason himself in untold years. How long had the land laid dormant? How long had it been since a fellow man had walked across those prairies? Jason knew little of the history of the land, but he could imagine plenty. Perhaps there had once been a great civilization there, a masterful race of people that had fallen into ruin over thousands of years until nothing remained but memory. Perhaps it had been a vast expanse of unexplored wilderness, until the first few people came and built up a handful of towns here and there, only for their constructions to become lost amidst the sands of time, and new towns like Summer Shandy sprang up to replace them. Would anyone remember his own farm in a hundred years? What about Summer Shandy itself? Would it, too, become so overgrown that later generations would walk past it and wonder if anything had ever existed on that barren prairie hill?

He had the answers to none of these questions, and supposed that they mattered little in the end. He rode onward, until he came over the last hill and into full view of the expansive field. There, much to his delight, he found that everything was still utterly dead. None of the monstertraps had regrown (which was quite a problem with the odd plants. It took almost nothing to get them to start growing, and once they did, they spread like no one’s business. Of course, a good swath of the prairie around the field was also dead, and the leaves on a number of the trees closest to the field had curled up. He winced a bit, but supposed that there was nothing to be done about it. Soon enough, he had ridden Lady up to a tree with loads of fresh, green grass growing underneath of it, dismounted, and strode off into the woods.

It took him the better part of half an hour before he found the monolith once again, due largely to the twisting and claustrophobic nature of the forest. When he finally came up to it once again, he sat down on the ground and just stared up at it.

It was strange, in a way, just how magnificent it truly was. How many years had it stood there without anyone looking up at it? How many people had once looked up at it, never imagining that such a great stone could fall into such obscurity?

Jason sighed, then took out a notebook and pencil, and began to sketch the thing, focusing specifically on the faint, almost invisible runes. He copied them down as best he could, then pocketed the notepad yet again. He would show them around town, see if anyone happened to recognize the scribbles. Maybe they would, and maybe they wouldn’t, it was hard to know for sure. He could always take them up to Illumitir if he ever got that way again, he was sure that there would be some sort of a history professor up there who would be able to translate the document. For that matter, there was a good chance that showing the runes around Illumitir would bring down an expedition of historians hoping to learn about the monolith and everything that it might hold.

Even as the thought crossed his mind, Jason rejected it out-of-hand. He had seen what an influx of outsiders could do in Summer Shandy, and he had no desire to see a repeat of what had happened the year before. Sure, the people behind the influx had been the parents of a maniac who had tried to destroy the town the year before that, but… Details. Even before that fact had been known, growth had not looked good on the small town.

Jason continued to stare up at the thing for quite a long time, then slowly rose and walked up to it. This time, he walked all the way around it, running his fingers across as much of the surface as he could touch. There were no seams that he could find, ruling out the possibility of the monolith being a building of some sort. There were cracks, but they were the natural sort of crack, not the type that indicated a hidden doorway. The backside of the monolith was sheer, without an indication of any type of writing at all. It was disappointing, but Jason supposed that it couldn’t be helped. After a few minutes, a thought leapt into his head.

What if there was more in the surrounding trees?

His heart leapt with excitement. In retrospect, it was a rather silly feeling. After all, what would more monoliths really do for him? Give him more mysteries to deal with? Nevertheless, in that moment, he began to eagerly rush through the area immediately around the monolith, looking for anything that may have indicated that there was more construction, more anything, that he could find to examine. Nothing yielded to his search, and he paused for a moment. He needed to be more methodical, and not get hopelessly lost in the thick forest. Lacking a compass, he picked a direction that, from the position of the sun, sure seemed to be west, and started walking in that direction. It was the direction away from his farm, and if he was right, would lead him deeper into the forest.

He walked for almost fifteen minutes before he came upon the river, which seemed to be sloping to the north, where it would presumably be the same river that ran through Nightford, which was the same city where Jason had taken Tess to view a carnival. At that point, he looked down at the slope to the mud, didn’t see any other way to get across the river, and slowly turned to walk back to the monolith.

When he got back, he frowned, then turned and started walking south, from the backside of the monolith. He only went a few hundred feet before he struck the river again, and was forced to turn back. This time, though, he followed the course of the river for a hundred feet or so, then turned back to the north. This path took him to the side of the monolith, once again without finding anything that might have been related to the great structure.

Growing frustrated, Jason started just walking in circles around the monolith, going ever-further from the structure. Suddenly, though, he came upon a particularly large oak tree, with huge, snarly roots that rose up out of the ground like tentacles. He climbed up onto some of the roots just for fun, smiling a bit at their sheer size. It was just like something from a fantasy book, a snarled tree that would prove to have a portal to fairy-land or something similar.

After climbing about on the roots for a few minutes, he climbed down and walked around to the far side of the tree. There, a depression in the ground fell away beneath the tree, allowing the roots and the trunk itself to form a cave of sorts. Importantly, though, the floor of the small cave was covered in stones that all appeared to be the same grey slate that the monolith had been made from. A grin split Jason’s face, and he started down the steep slope into the cave.

It wasn’t a large cave, only about twenty feet deep (the width of the trunk, more or less), equally as wide, with the wooden ceiling just a bit higher than his own head. He sighed deeply as he walked into the musty environment and slowly looked around. Water dripped down from the roots, while a carpet of soft leaves lay scattered across the soft dirt. Slowly, Jason bent down and ran his fingers across one of the grey slate stones. It wasn’t large, and in fact looked rather like a cobblestone. He tugged at it, and when it didn’t move, he tugged at it a bit more.

The stubborn stone still refused to budge an inch, and Jason slowly climbed up to his feet and gave it a kick. A sharp crack echoed through the air, and Jason had the sudden and distinct impression that he should not have done that. With a rumble, the floor gave way, and Jason felt himself falling into a cavernous pit.

Thankfully, the cavernous pit was only about ten feet deep, and the landslide of dirt that came after it provided a slope for Jason to climb out. He sighed in relief, then sat down on the slope to wait for his nerves to calm down. As he did so, he gazed around him, taking in the structure that he had fallen into. All told, the environment did not allow him to calm down.

He was in a tunnel, that much was obvious. To his left and right, the tunnel stretched out seemingly without end, and in both directions, darkened doorways led into unseen areas. The whole structure was made out of cobblestone, though much of it appeared cracked and unstable. There were a few small alcoves with ancient candles, now yellowed and far beyond use. Most importantly, though, were the bones that littered the floor. There were a lot of them, and they all had a large number of teeth marks. Several skulls lay among the bones, skulls that looked a great deal as if they belonged to predators of some sort.

Jason lost no time scrambling up out of the tunnel. When he reached the top, he glanced down inside, imagining that he saw all sorts of horrid shadows moving about below him. He shuddered, then turned and walked back away.

Whatever the monolith was, and whatever Jason imagined himself to be, he was no warrior. If there was an old dungeon in the woods, it deserved to stay well enough left alone. He would bring Tess back and some point, and she could look it over. Until then, he had seen enough to stay away.

For that matter… Even though he didn’t really know yet how he would take care of any of his problems, he already felt refreshed by the excursion. It was time to return to his life… And hope, beyond hope, that he could figure something out.