"I can help summon the Ents.  Unless, Aria, you can use my help?  No doubt you can see as a bird where the Orcs are scarring the forest?"

"I could look for the orcs, but if you want to direct me somewhere more urgent or just save me a few hours of searching, I would welcome the help. Do they always come to the edge of the forest closest to Isengard, or have they attacked other places? And do you want to show us to Derndingle first, or afterwards - how far is it?"

"Usually the side closer to Isengard.  I can show you to Derndingle if you want?"

"Yes, thank you. And then we'll go to the edge of the forest facing Isengard, kill any loggers we find, and probably rest for the night, and in the morning I will fly out." She looks a question at Tora.

"I don't really want to fly around all day. You're not going to decide it's suddenly time to attack, right? If Saruman comes out of his tower on the first day you're there, he probably does it all the time. I think I should stay behind and guard the forest."

Aria knows Tora hates flying! She was just making sure Tora feels alright about separating, and maybe trying to convince herself that she feels alright about it. This is a friendly forest and she trusts the treants, but - they're still in a new and unfamiliar world, and they are about to make some enemies whose capabilities are not entirely known, and - it's natural to be a bit stressed about leaving your companion behind.

"That should be fine," she agrees. "Shall we go?"

"Yes; farewell!  May the earth be soft beneath your feet - or the wind be in your wings, as may be."

Treebeard nods, shakes himself, and strides silently away to the north, mumbling names to himself.

Quickbeam is in a more hasty and angry mood as he leads them toward Derndingle.  If Aria doesn't bring up other topics, he'll be mourning the trees - many individual trees - felled by the Orcs.

He'll also tell the story of how, in his younger days, he and some other Ents went to destroy a logging settlement of Men from across the sea.  "Numenorians, they were," he says.  "The ancestors of the people who built Saruman's tower, Orthanc - and founded the realm of Gondor to the south.  They built well, with magic, we found to our cost.  We drove the surviving men out of the forest and broke their axes, but we could not break their fortress wall.  And so they came back in the end, or others did from across the Sea, and soon there were no trees within a day's walk of the River Greyflood..."

Soon they reach Derndingle.

It looks like an impenetrable wall of dark evergreen fir trees, at first - but Quickbeam turns to the left along the wall, and comes to a narrow entrance where a worn path plunges down a long steep slope into a smooth grass-clad bowl.  The hollow is crowned at the rim by the evergreen hedge, with three paths leading down into it.

Here, Quickbeam explains, the Entmoot has always met; and will meet again soon.

Once, when Aria went for her annual checkup with a cleric of Erastil, Tora tagged along. The cleric said she was Neutral Good, with a big smile like it was a compliment. She stormed out, and refused to be checked ever again.

Good and Evil are ideas of the gods which lead people astray. Sarenites don't help animals caged and beaten and killed for sport. Shelynites don't protect a beautiful tree from being cut down, they just turn to admire the next one. Even Asmodeans disdain to tyrannize animals.

It is evil to cut down someone's friends in the prime of their lives, not to eat or to dress or even to build but to burn their bodies for fuel to make tools of war to kill others in turn. And it is no less evil to look at it and see nothing wrong. That is the world the Erastilians endorse, and she wants no part of it.

Real good is knowing that -

   (the rescuer, fighting without rescue. the mortal protector with no divinity above them. the tree of the forest and the beast of the field with only their own fangs and claws, and the druids' helping hands are far too few -)

Seeing that with your own two eyes, every instinct inside you screaming to run, and deciding to stay and help anyway, because someone should.

She listens and nods and makes the appropriate noises (there are, she has learned, appropriate words for being told about someone's friends being murdered) and she is going to protect. this. forest. 

It is a story as old as the hills. Every druid knows they are fighting the Long Defeat. Every druid has to make their own peace with the world.

Aria likes to think the future can be better. Some decades, the world deteriorates so slowly that she can almost bring herself to believe it. She doesn't have a grand plan. So many plans have been tried and found wanting over the millenia, as the forests raced the humans to retake the world after the skies cleared, spread and then retreated again - as they fought Aroden, and Aroden's empire and its desendants, and a dozen equally threats on other continents - the short-lived euphoria at the breaking of prophecy and Aroden's death and the Chelish wars, a growing realization that the Worldwound and Hell's outpost were little better -

Always, in the background, the forests' edges burn, as marauders and raiders and the occasional empire takes its toll. Always, friends die and are mourned and are gone. The cycle of life continues, predator eating prey as human hew wood, new growth replacing the old and fighting for space, and every year, little by little, the forests shrink and the grasslands and farmlands advance.

The greatest powers of the world spend their time fighting each other, but none of them are on the forests' side. If she somehow grew vastly more powerful, enough to change the balance of power, enough to truly threaten them, the gods and churches and empires would spend the power needed to squash her. She is under no illusion that she exists on their sufferance while they busy themselves with other matters.

Maybe this world will turn out to be different.

"Thank you for showing us. It is a place easily found from the air, too, if I ever need to fly here in an hurry."

Tora's mood is an open book to her. "We'll find the orcs quickest by flying. I'm going to statue you." This is both much cheaper than turning Tora into a bird and back, and has the advantage (from Tora's point of view) that she won't have to stay frustrated for long.

"We'll hunt well," Tora promises. "I'll see you tomorrow or the day after, Quickbeam."

Aria deshifts human. Carry companion shrinks Tora to a tiny (*) stone statue; into the bag of holding she goes.

"I will likely come back tomorrow night to rest, and give you an update then," she says. "If not tomorrow, then the day afterwards, as Treebeard asked."

(*) Not Tiny; so tiny that Pathfinder has no words for it.

Quickbeam stares in curiosity as Aria shifts human.  Of course she's already told him she wasn't born a tiger, but it's different actually seeing it.

(Some birds go silent for a moment, and then they take up singing again.)

"Strange.  I have never seen anyone shapeshift before.  Now I am imagining an entire forest where each animal is secretly a Druid..."  His branches rustle in laughter.

"But, good hunting!  I plan to stay near here till the Moot, if you come back early with news.

A forest full of hidden druids is sometimes the only way to keep a forest alive. Aria would much rather a forest full of druids walking about openly, whatever their shape. She's going to need to be Lawful after all, and much sooner than she expected: a familiar-looking world brings with it familiar problems.

She shifts into an eagle. Not a giant eagle, able to carry a humanoid on its back or carry it off in its claws; a medium-sized one, a carrion-eater with excellent eyesight of a kind she saw on her way to the forest; its presence should not be suspicious. And off she flies, back towards the southern edge of the forest.

What can she see?

She sees a huge scar in the forest, with felled trees and stumps and chopped-away branches lying there on the ground.

Around the edges of the scar, two large groups are even now chopping down trees and hauling them away westward!  There's an established road now, with many ox-drawn carts carrying logs away.

If she gets closer, she can see that one group is Men with darker hair than the people of Rohan, and many of them with tattoos.  The other group is Orcs, but shorter than the Orcs she's familiar with.  They're even shorter than men, and all grey-skinned not green, but they have the same sort of thick frames and scars that she's familiar with.

Whoever they are, they're not getting away with this.

...she'll admit, this is worse than she expected, or rather - the scale is bigger. Instead of one fortified group that can be cut off and overwhelmed, they're spread out, which makes it easier to pick them off one by one but harder to get all of them without even one escaping to tell the tale.

Can she cut off the flow of ox-carts? Or are there so many of them that no matter where she attacks she will be seen by the next one, all the way to Isengard?

There're a lot of ox-carts, but not too many for that.  There're several places in the forest and near the forest's edge... near what was the forest's edge... where the road winds between some hills so that she could cut it off without being seen from elsewhere on the road. She can't see any scouts or anyone else watching; except for the cart drivers, everyone's busy at the logging camps themselves.

There're probably more places further west toward Saruman's tower, too, where the road winds up among the foothills of the Misty Mountains, though she can't tell yet if there's someone watching there?

As Aria swoops lower, she can see most of the carters have spears and whips or goads, and the tree-cutters have their axes and saws, but she can't see any more arms or armor.

The cutters usually work in groups of four or six or so, and there're other groups of maybe a dozen who come around to bring the felled and stripped trees back to one of several camps for additional cutting and lowering onto the cart.  She can see several small fights broken out at the orcs' camp; the men's camp seems to have better discipline.

She can see... maybe a hundred men, and two hundred orcs?

She can't kill three hundred spread-out people quickly. They'll have to cut them off and herd them towards the forest, and make them bunch together in an attempt at defense rather than run away in every direction. (Although if any are foolish enough to run into the same forest they are cutting down, she will let them... at first.)

She has to deshift human again to let Tora out. That means she can't let her out inside the forest, because she doesn't want to use her last shape on flying back out to the carts. They'll have to start outside, and work their way in.

To work, then.

Aria lands in front of the carts passing through the hills, deshifts human, and puts Tora's statue on the ground.

Now there is an angry tiger, a hundred feet in front of the first ox-cart laden with lumber.

"Kill the drivers, break the carts so the oxen stay put. I'll set them free later. The logging camps are that way. We work our way in, make them bunch up together. Don't let any escape. They don't seem to have bows."

There's no need for buffs with such soft targets. She walks along, guarding Tora against surprise attacks and surprises in general, but she doesn't really expect any danger from cart-drivers.

To work.

Killing not for food is unpleasant, but it is necessary. A well-kept forest requires weeding, and it is the druids' role in Nature to wage war in defence of others.

Caden was excited when his clan lord announced that the Many-Colored Wizard had promised them his alliance in their feud with the Strawheads.  As he and the other men marched north, he was looking forward to winning glory in battle, and finally having the older men respect him rather than looking down on him as a youth.  Then he saw the Wizard himself, and gave him his oath (with everyone else), and things were looking even more exciting -

- and then some officer from another village that they were supposed to be listening to told Caden and some others to go off and chop wood.  Caden laughed at him, but that evening his clan lord was saying with a long face that he really should listen and go off.

And then when he finally got to the forest, some other officer told him he had to go drive an oxcart back and forth.

Several weeks later, Caden is still grumbling to himself over the inglorious oxcart, and how none of the few girls in the growing town around Isengard will give him the time of day.  The oxen know the road, so he isn't watching as they round the bend -

- and he doesn't see the tiger till it's too late.

The next carter is not quite a quarter-hour behind Caden.  He's an older man, and watching better; he throws his spear at Tora and then jumps to try to hide behind the tree-trunk.