"What are you going to do? You said you were looking for some priests that needed rescuing?" Maybe they can do something about that without going into the spooky temple that Aria clearly doesn't like.

"They're hiding in the temple, Snowy's making sure they safe. We'll wait for a caravan and bring them to Okhema soon."

If there are still caravans passing through here, it can't be that dangerous. (And if Tribbie needs a caravan to bring some people to safety, she can't be that powerful.)

"Then I think we'll look around. Maybe we'll meet your caravan on the road, or in Okhema."

"Safe travels then! We will find you in Okhema to help you look for a way home, when you get there."

"Thank you! Good hunting!"

And when they've gone away some distance...

"You don't trust her?" That's in their private dialect of Sylvan, a mix of sounds and body language built up over decades because Bestspeak castings are limited and Speak with Animals isn't a proper language to begin with. It's not meant to be secret, or especially hard to decode, but it's not the formal interforest Sylvan that Aria shared.

"I don't distrust her," she hums. "I don't know her, I don't know this world. I don't want to give trust if I don't have to. We should spend some time learning things for ourselves, talking to more people."

"If the land is being corrupted, we need to help the local druids."

"And we can't find them by asking non-druids," Aria tacitly agrees.

Can they find a quiet spot safely away from any magical structures or statues without being interrupted this time?

They can probably find one. There's a lot more seemingly random structures or even just nature showing up as magical than would typically be expected, but not all of it. 

Once they leave the temple grounds, there's almost no statues standing dormantly, though they can sometimes hear sounds similar to stone golems or elementals in the distance. 

It's clear enough that this area isn't natural, corruption or no corruption, but they might as well start here. Aria finds a secluded spot where she can meditate for fifteen minutes.

Lay of the Land. What are the notable features within five miles? Buildings and roads besides they ones they've seen, rivers and lakes, caverns leading deep beneath the earth...

She could see most of this from the air if she spent time scouting but wild shapes are limited too, and the only flying shape she has that's useful at night is an owl that might attract predators. Besides, she doesn't like leaving Tora.

They're more than five miles away from any notable landmarks. The road between Janusopolis and Okhema is the only major one in range, though there are a few smaller roads going in different directions, and no road here feels maintained. 

No major caverns, rivers, or lakes in the vicinity. 

Oh well. In that case they can keep going, not in the exact direction of Okhema (because they don't want to follow the actual road) but not too far off-course either.

What is the local biome like? Aria is more attuned to deviations in what she knows than to figuring out completely new locations, but she did travel abroad a few times in her life and can tell quite a lot about a place from a few hours' observations. Is it thriving, recovering or deteriorating? Are the local species at all familiar to her, are there some she recognizes outright and if not do they at least fall into familiar patterns? Are there many species in a complex web, or do a few invasive/supercompetitive/hardy ones dominate? What are the local top predators and their preferred prey, how common and how overt are poisonous species, is there plentiful water and is it safe to drink, are there suitable animals for them to hunt? Are there signs of intelligent creatures living here that she could talk to, tracks or scents or implications from other things she observes? Does anything look shaped or guided in the ways intelligent inhabitants or druids might produce, are there metaphorical low-hanging fruit that any nature-minded people living here would have taken care of?

She won't learn all this from a few hours' wandering, of course, but she hopes to make some kind of head start, something clue worth pursuing.

They don't know what time of night it is, so if they find nothing in a few hours they'll look for a spot to rest until morning. (Is there a moon here?)

The terrain is mountainois, though slighly less so beyond the Abyss. There's some vegetation, bearing resemblance though not identical to that which is familiar to her, but animal life is absent in the wild. It's definetely deteriorating, though slowly. The plants seem to point themselves towards Kephale, not reach high for the sun. They don't look guided or tended, and some are barely hanging on, though it seems to be the stable state of this place, not a recent catastrophe. 

There's no visible moon. 

After a while, they can feel the ground shaking slightly, and can hear/smell/observe a group of people going along the road from Okhema, riding a few giant dinosaur-like beasts. 

?!!

There is no non-plant life. No sign, tracks, scent or litter. Not only animals but birds, vermin, they haven't seen a single insect since they began watching out for them. No mobile or intelligent plant creatures, either.

Aria wouldn't have believed it possible, to kill (and remove) all sign of non-plant life from a land without killing the plants. No wonder they're deteriorating; it's a surprise any are still alive at all, beyond the oldest trees!

This isn't corruption. The Worldwound is corrupted, the Mana Wastes are corrupted. This is death, final and unrecoverable unless life survived elsewhere and comes back. This is a land the druids have abandoned, and if they still fight for their lives it is somewhere else.

She spends her Commune with Birds, since she has it prepared. Is anyone there, she asks, are you alright? 

There is no reply, not that she expected one.

Speak with Plants, then, looking for the oldest trees she can find that look familiar, ones that need pollination or their fruit eaten before it falls, ones that might suffer most from parasites and pests. When did the animals and insects disappear? How many years ago? When did life change?

"When the sky closed its eyes"

"When darkness never left"

"When life-carrier fell silent"

It's hard for plants here to tell the exact time, but the trees that still keep their cycles agree that it's been around a thousand years.

Eternal night, for an age of this plane.

All the plants that needed pollination, seed dispersal, magic, companionship... All gone, a thousand years since. This place is long since dead, it just doesn't know it yet.

"Golarion survived the Dark Ages," Tora whispers.

"In the Dark Ages the animals were the last to die. They ate the plants, it's the plants that needed the sun. Whatever happened here isn't just eternal darkness."

"I hope this is something local like Nidal, and doesn't cover the whole plane." The locals may depend on the gods to save them but most gods won't bother to bring back anyone who won't worship them.

This is too miserable for Tora to dwell on. She can focus on people who are being miserable in front of her, or on her Aria being miserable about people who aren't, but the utter absence of people is - she'll try to think around it for now.

"What do we do? Look for the druids or follow Tribbie? She has dinosaurs, so not all animals are gone."

"In the Dark Ages most druids went to the Darklands, they weren't badly affected. If any are underground here, it might take a very long time to find them. Let's go to the city first," she decides, "it will be much faster."

They'll walk along the road to Okhema, then, close enough that if the caravan comes back they can intercept it. And they'll their eyes and noses peeled for any sign of wildlife on the way, or other changes.

The walk to Okhema takes a while. They'll probably start feeling tired around half-way, at a typical pace. 

As they get closer to the Dawn Device, and there's more light, vegetation starts to look healthier, but animal life is still absent. The plants are perhaps even too healthy considering the absence of the rest of the ecosystem. 

Anything that survives in the absence of non-plant life will thrive with more light, but that's not really living.

...Does this plane have no sun, and instead it has - that? No, the trees said something was lost an age ago, and after that 'the darkness never left'.

It still might not be a sun like Golarion's; other planes can be very strange. An unmoving light-source in the middle with no day-night cycle wouldn't be very surprising for a little out-of-the-way place, crafted by a few weak and inexperienced gods.

"We should remember not to assume this place is or was like Golarion," she tells Tora. Honestly, she probably needs the reminder more than Tora does, Tora's thinking is simple and direct and that can make her very open-minded.

She has Lesser Restorations for when they tire, walking all day is not really a cat thing, but eventually they want to sleep. They keep watch in turn, of course, and keep an eye on the road.

They can sleep uneventfully for a while, until they once again feel the slight ground shake and sense the caravan approaching.

Then they will walk onto the road to intercept it. (It has not been long enough on Aria's personal clock to replace all her spells yet, but she only used a few so far.)

What are these dinosaurs like? Aria is at least a little bit familiar with the Mwangi ones. And is Tribbie there?