"But if I had a magic item that let me fly or turn into a bird I'd be able to see all those things too..."

"You could at least see them, yes! If you can't turn into a real bird it's still very much worth going flying if you have a way. Or maybe if you can get up a really tall mountain, you can see very far away and a lot at once. When I look at the world from far above it looks so beautiful, it - makes it easy to remember that it's really really good that it's there, even with all the Evil and suffering in it."

Nod nod nod.

"One day I'll learn to be a giant owl and then I could give you a ride so you could see for yourself, but I'm not nearly there yet," Feather says wistfully.

"Whoa. I won't hold you to that, I assume by then you'll have lots going on that doesn't make space for dropping by Ostenso to catch a play and give me an owl ride, but it's fun to imagine. ... Hey what would be good for more people to know about druids? I've started to dabble in writing plays as well as performing them and have their use as a way to inform on my mind."

Feather doesn't even know where Ostenso is! It's a bit sad to think that anyone nice she meets here, like Laia, she will probably never see again.

"You know, a week ago, I could have told you all about what makes druids different from other people and what's interesting and useful for everyone else to know them," she says reflectively. "But now I think that in some ways the differences between druids and the other people in Ravounel Forest are less than the differences between all of us and the people outside the forests. So maybe when you think about druids, the things that stand out to you the most are just things about - people from the Forest. And if that's true... maybe it's more important for you to know about all of us, and not druids in particular?"

"Of course I will tell you about druids if you want, it's important and also - one thing about druids, is that we think it's very important to understand other people. Not just observe and predict them, not just treat someone as an ally or an enemy or an obstacle, but to really understand them. So I'm glad you want to know! And that you think your audience will want to know."

"The important thing that we in the forest all think - believe, know - is that most living things are people. What does that mean, to call them people? It means they can be happy or sad, they can be hurt or helped. It means that if it's Evil to torture anyone who can feel pain, whether they're a human or a bird or a dryad or a mouse. It's Good to help others and that means everyone, and it's most Good if you're not helping them at someone else's expense."

"Druids care about all living things. We try to make the world better for everyone in it. Not just the Good druids, all of us, it's what being a druid is for. And it's different from the way Good wants everyone to prosper. In a perfect world, like in Nirvana, maybe they're the same thing. But all mortals live at the expense of someone else. We can't just say - no-one can eat anyone else, better starve to death. No-one can cut down trees to build houses or burn them for firewood, better freeze to death. That's impossible, the world doesn't work that way. Even in an empty world with nothing but plants in it, they will compete for sunlight and strangle each other if they can."

"All we can do, even the Good among us, is - not kill for fun if you're not going to eat them or use the wood. Not hurt unnecessarily when you kill them. Not kill so much that the prey population can't recover and there's not enough food for anyone next year or next generation. It's fine and normal to be selfish, to want to live and live well even if it's unavoidably at the expense of someone else."

"Now, as a druid, I want many people of all kinds to flourish. Forests - ones managed by druids - are like that. There are very many people of all different kinds, living in a very complicated balance, at least ideally. And when something disturbs that balance, we try to restore it. If, say, there's a new kind of squirrel, and it's really really good at finding all the acorns and remembering where it put them, we might end up with no new oaks, and that would be bad. So we'd stop there being too many of those squirrels, or if they recently came from outside we might try to kill them all off. Because if the oaks die, then the squirrels die for lack of acorns, and so do the many other kinds of creatures who depend on there being oaks and live in and on and around them."

"Some Chelish people think the druids hate them and want everything to be forest and not human farms. That's not true." Well, some druids definitely want that, but not all of them and it's not the message she wants to convey. "We don't want humans to cut down more and more forest, because that means killing everyone who lives there now. And there are more, and more kinds, of people who live in a bit of forest than on a human farm of the same size. But even if there weren't, they're living in the forest now, and we don't want them to be killed and their world destroyed so that different kinds of creatures can live on that land instead. They're - beautiful, and precious, and we don't want them to disappear just so humans can live there instead. Because humans are also beautiful and precious, but they're not more so than everyone else."

"That's so interesting, except - that's not at all what I mean when I say something is a person. When I say something is a person I mean it can make moral choices. I'd eat a bird, but I wouldn't torture it. A cat would - I've seen them do it - but that doesn't make the cat evil, because the cat isn't thinking about it that way and never can, it's just being a cat. A human can decide whether to torture a bird or not for reasons the cat can't even imagine. I had a friend who kept mice and she said they'd eat their babies sometimes, even when they had food to eat, and that's not evil for a mouse because a mouse is doing it for animal reasons, but a human who did that would be monstrous."

"It's true that a cat, a regular cat anyway, isn't Evil for playing with its food. Pharasma doesn't judge animals who aren't smart enough for it, like you say. But it's Evil for us to torture a mouse, because we do know better, even though the mouse doesn't. I guess I need two different words here, I know how I'd say it in Sylvan but it's not translating cleanly. There's - people who can make moral choices. And there are people, or however you call them, who can have moral choices made about them. You can't hurt a rock, there's nothing it'd be Evil to do to a rock."

"Huh, what are the Sylvan words?"

"Moral actor, moral patient. They're not literally single words but they're - the expressions my ethics teacher used, he's a very old and wise treant who knows a lot of things. And words. I don't actually know if people in other forests use the same words, just that - they have the concept. If you say 'creatures you can be Good or Evil to' it gets the idea across, it's just unwieldy."

"It's an interesting thought, since like I said I wouldn't torture a bird, but actually I also wouldn't, uh, pretend to torture, a rock? I just don't find destroying things very fun. But there is a thing that's different between the bird and the rock and that's good to have a name for."

"Yeah!" Feather is feeling very validated right now. She just needed to find the actually Good people to talk to. Laia is a perfectly normal and Good person who obviously understands that you shouldn't mistreat birds even though they're not humans!

(She wonders how much easier it must be, to try to make peace between the forests and the humans outside them in a country where most people are Good and not Evil.)

"I'm really glad I met you," she tells Laia. "Not just because you're a nice person and told me useful things. I was feeling like - every other human I've met here is either Evil or - sometimes not Evil, but I just can't understand them. And they can't understand me, even the ones who I think are really glad trying. You're Good and you're also - just a normal person. So I'm happy and very - relieved, to know there are people like you in Cheliax. I wish there were more."

"If you want to try to find me again some time to tell me what's confusing I can try to help! I don't think most people are - incomprehensibly evil, just a little evil sometimes for reasons that still make sense to me."