[Thenamir]

It was some moments before Thenamir could reopen his eyes, doubly blinded as they were from the earth which had found its way into them and the sudden sunlight which threatened to make the blindness permanent. His eyes were still squinting and adjusting to the brightness when he discovered that the clearing had widened somewhat. Even so, the brooding trees had left not so much as space enough between them for the squirrels to escape through. They were encircled, trapped in a living prison. The return of light brought no relief from the malevolent heaviness which clung to those in the clearing like a thick layer of pine sap.

A shadow and a figure straight out of the frightning childhood tales of his own youth parted the trees on one side of the clearing, staring each of them through in turn. It's black-pearl eyes peered out of a craggy, bark-hewn face mounted on the top of a roughtly human-shaped tree, or a roughly tree-shaped human, whose hair (or topmost branches) rose full twenty feet above the forest floor. And though the face of the giant was unreadable as to the emotions behind it, the atmosphere was not. The trees were angry. More than angry, they were livid -- filled with a rage such as only be felt by those whose lives are measured in decades and centuries rather than days and years.

Thenamir knew fear, having faced it in the smell of battle many times, but he was unaccustomed to the sheer, unreasoning, stultifying terror that filled his limbs with adrenaline but left him no will to run. He rose to his knees and tried to speak, but his body had dried his mouth in order to wet his forehead. He, in as brave a voice as he could muster, finally managed to stammer, "Shepherd...of the trees...why are we confined in this fashion? Why are you angered with us? And what do you...and they...intend to do to us?"