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Written for a storyline between Runhild and Entling. Please PM if you wish to participate.

“I...hmmm...cannot stay.” she said simply.

Her sisters creaked in protest, the youngest of them waving her long willow branches in a tantrum the other sisters ignored.

“You...will hmmm not return.” said the oldest of them, her birch elms reaching for her wayward sister.

“That is not...certain.”

She could not remember how many sunrises ago that had been. When she’d left the mild warmth and dappled light of the Sun in their grove and traveled in the direction where it set. It was quiet, traveling through those lands where the ground was brown and barren for as far as the eye could see. There was no nourishment there for her roots and so, hungry and tired, she’d pressed on. Across the Brown Lands and into the far reaches of a land with sweet grass and old trees that spoke to her of tales she'd not yet heard. She loved it there and would have tarried, but there were men everywhere she went, and she was hard pressed to keep her presence hidden.

Men. There was an oddity. Their most precious flesh uncovered to the sun and heat, completely vulnerable...and somehow this was planned? It was insanity. And yet, as she passed their camps in the night, watching as they burned what could have been a cousin...it was clear that men were the lords of these lands...and she continued to avoid all of them as best a towering tree could. But as a tree, in a land full of lush forest, she was better equipped for stealth than they were. Staying perfectly still, they always passed unawares, and in amusement, it became her habit. It was some time into this new skill, on a foggy morning, that her luck ran out.

Coming through a thick line of underbrush, having grown high as the trees from lack of foot traffic or grazing, she burst onto a grizzly scene. Men wearing masks to hide their faces, were accosting a group of other menfolk. The beasts some of the men had been sitting upon were now in the dirt, their sap trickling a deep red as it mixed with the earth to make a sickening mud at the men's feet where they struggled. Ashbow froze- but it was too late. She’d been seen. The men cried out in fear, and the ones wearing masks forgot their victims entirely as they rushed at her all at once, strange and sharp tools raised high within their hands.

Ashbow turned and fled. Yet an Ent is not a hasty creature, nor one built for speed. And she would have been caught, and likely perished there beneath their violence, had it not been for the orcs. Hearing them coming, she’d hid behind a great Huorn and froze, then watched in horror as the masked men were first overtaken by the orc band, then slaughtered and roasted upon spits. It was only when the orcs had moved on that she dared move again, muttering to herself all the while she walked.

“...hmmmm....this...land....hmmm....everything bleeds.”

"She never watched the morning rising, too busy with the day's first chores," Runhild sang softly. Behind her trudged a rather elderly stallion, black in color, with silver curling about his muzzle. His ears flicked with every creak and groan the forest gave. "But oft she would watch the sun's fading as the cold of night crept across the moors."

It was uncanny, really, how alive this woodland felt. Runhild was used to open plains and sounds no louder than a breeze whirling through the grass. Here...here it felt as if the eyes of the world were upon her.

She had been warned of the forest. How the trees could come alive, move and speak. They did not take kindly to men, the tales said. One could fall asleep at the base of a massive oak, and it would swallow you whole. But stories were no more than fanciful tales told to children.

"Nothing more," Runhild breathed as another low rumble rolled through the forest. The stallion she walked with snorted uneasily, tugging at the lead. "It's all right, boy. Easy..."

She'd chosen to take a shortcut through the forest, in hopes to reach Underharrow within a matter of days. Now, she doubted the time was cut in half at all. But she could not turn back now. In truth, she was completely lost.

So, with a sigh, she continued on, singing under her breath the entire time.

It was not long before she happened upon something that made her stomach drop to her knees. The remains of a camp. Fires were doused with blood. Carcasses, cooked and uncooked, lay strewn about. And the stench! Her eyes watered from it. She pressed her sleeve to her nose. Her horse snorted again, dancing behind her. Orcs. Not here, but they were at one point. And they still could be.

Gagging faintly, she gingerly led the stallion around the disgusting scene.