"They're sort of spirits? Maybe they aren't animals. They small and curious and get everywhere and then talk about it. There's some in Okhema you can meet. They probably find wilderness boring."

Ah, a translation mistake. "Then they may be kin to ours. Our nymphs do love nature but there isn't much of it left here." 'Probably boring' could be a real difference or it could be a city-dweller speculating about something not seen on this world for a thousand years.

That reminds her to check what the trees told her. "How long ago did this 'black tide' start? And how does the lighting work in this world, is there no sun?" The giant orb became brighter as they journeyed towards it but stayed about the same while they rested, so it doesn't seem to have a night-day cycle of its own. She hopes it isn't as bright as a sun up close.

"What other races still live here? And how do you all feed yourself with no animals left?"

"The black tide's first signs appeared about three thousand years ago, around the same time the Titans of Calamity - Strife, Death and Trickery - awoke. Though it was only a thousand years later that it started destroyed city-states."

"There used to be a sun, Aquila, the Titan of the Sky, would open and close their eyes to bring day and night to the world. People of Castrum Kremnos - the city of Nikador - went to war with the skyfolk, and the war has blinded Aquila, plunging the world into the eternal night."

"There's many titankin of different sorts, there's Mountain-Dwellers, the white dryads of Cerces, the winged beasts of Aquila, and so on."

"The sun was someone's eye? And then someone else blinded them?" How can a sun be an eye? Tora is confused.

This place.

This is another plane, perhaps just a demiplane. It is not a planet, it is not a world, it was never natural to begin with. It was run directly by some gods (demigods?), and broke when they left or died or changed, and bringing them back might make things better but it will not put them right because there is no making this right. 

There were probably no druids here to begin with. To be a druid is to understand Nature, to feel it and to love it, and here there is no Nature, there are only the clumsy direct interventions of clueless gods who built a mockery of real life because they could not understand or control the real thing.

They can help the people of this place, what few are left. They cannot help this place. They can only leave as quickly as they can, and hope to find their way home.

"This is not a real world," she tells Tora in their semi-private language, a mix of Sylvan and animal speech and Taldane loanwords and gestures, most of which Tribbie won't understand using her Shared formal Sylvan.

"It never was. We can't - fix this place. It's a kind of place that someone, maybe these Titan gods, made, and made poorly, and there's no rescuing it. We need to go home."

"Tribbie has a plan she thinks will work. And a prophecy!"

"Tribbie has never seen a real world. She hopes to bring back her gods, and she may succeed, but a real world doesn't need gods. It needs a sun, and a real sun isn't - a demigod who blinks every night! Even in the Dark Ages, Golarion was shrouded by clouds but the sun was fine, it shone on other worlds."

"I wanted to rescue them," Tora whispers.

"I know," Aria says gently. "I know it hurts you to see them live like this, cut off from nature."

"Tribbie is our best hope to go home. If we don't meet someone better, we'll help her with her plan. So we can go home, where we can really help people."

"Alright." Tora's faith in Aria's wisdom is comfortably greater than in her own, or in the evidence of her senses.

"If we're not really trying to help them, we should hurry," she adds.

"Yes. We should." She switches back to normal Sylvan to talk to Tribbie. 

"I think it would take us too long to understand the workings and history of this place." She won't dignify it with name 'world' any longer. "We'll help you in your quest, in return for your help getting us home." It goes without saying she'll also ask around for other options, and keep asking. "What do you need to do, how can we help, and what do we need to learn to do it? And - how long do you think it might take?" Hopefully the answer won't be 'a thousand years'.

"You should meet with Agy when we get to Okhema, if you want to help the Flame-Chase! We aren’t sure how long it will take, but we will try to get you home if it’s within our abilities."

"How can we tell if you'll be able to do it, is there something we can do to check or to help you be able to do it? And please tell us about Agy."

"Six coreflames have already been recovered, and three more - Time, Reason and Worldbearing - are in reach. But locations of Nikador and Thanatos are not currently known, and we are searching for them. Agy - Aglaea - is the demigod wielding the authority of Romance, she is leading the Flame-Chase and would know how exactly you can help."

"You're on a romantic hunt for the flames?" That sounds very exciting!

"Agy is really good at knowing people and leading them! And she's protecting Okhema and making sure everyone in the city is all right."

They're going to be constrained by food. There won't be any fresh berries to harvest in this dying land, nor anyone for Tora to hunt. Aria can permanently statue Tora and turn into something that eat leaves or even an elemental, but that's no way to live. She might be able to figure something out with Plant Growth and time she doesn't have and berry-bearing plant seeds she also doesn't have. A plan of last resort.

Hopefully there'll be someone to eat in the city, but leaving it will still be a problem.

"You didn't answer me before. With no animals and plants probably not growing much in the absence of a sun, what does everyone in the city eat?" Also, do these people even realize tigers are obligate carnivores?

"There's some farms near Okhema, and the Grove of Epiphany still produces fruit by the grace of Cerces. Dromases are sometimes raised for meat, though there's not that much space to do that."

"See, they do have fruit! You shouldn't assume the worst without asking." Tora is a little smug.

"That is very good news! I hope they'll have something I can use." The spell's definition of what fruit counts as berries doesn't always follow an obvious natural rule. "So we don't have to eat your dromases." But they'll still be limited to ten days' travel from the city and back, unless she can come up with a way to preserve large amounts of meat.

Tora isn't unaware of the problem, being the one of them who can't eat berries or leaves unless they're magical ones. "You could conjure food again? I know you don't like it, but if there's no choice..."

Yes, she could do that. She doesn't normally bother, goodberries are much more economical if she needs to feed hungry strangers, but she's done it a few times when she needed to impress self-important humans in a city.

It's the trappings of the spell that really annoy her; it very obviously wasn't invented by druids. It creates tablecloth and serving trays and, and stupid little porcelain dish covers, and she has to fight it every time to stop it from making metal cutlery. It makes an amount of food that ought to feed hundreds of humans, ten different courses and little unidentifiable cubes on sticks, but it can only nourish twenty people - doesn't matter if they're tiny birds or huge dragons, dividing the food just doesn't work. At least goodberry has the sense to package its indivisible magical nutrition in a single, small, unassuming berry! This stupid spell spends so much energy on catering to stupid humans that it's fourth circle, it could probably be second if it focused on just feeding twenty people.

Aria is a calm and sensible person, she will use the tools she has and not get angry at a spell for existing. She'll need all her willpower and splendour to stop it from roasting the meat. Calm.

"Yes, dear." Her frustration is visible to no-one but herself. (Tora counts as herself, obviously.)