The Threat of the Trees: Discussion Thread

[Ithaeliel]

In our minds the only way to get the Huorn from going beserk is to have the Ents come back and reassert their authority. In fact, my character's secret is that the Huorn will die off, become just non-sentient trees, if there are no Ents to guide them. The only way to have this actually work is to have the Ents stop fading. What this means is that someone has to rediscover the Entwives.
The Huorn are upset and not too bright and also hugely powerful. They are obviously in danger of being taken advantage of by some bad people, and this is what will happen in our post. There will be some agents from east of Rhun, a place that was under Sauron's influence. Sauron may be dead, but they still have large slave plantations and they are afraid The King will shut them down. The bad guys have decided to make life miserable for The King and defy his edict to get rid of the slaves. To do this, they will need a strong ally who can't be pushed around. The Huorn are perfect for this.

They will enter into an arrangement with the Huorn by conning them. These men of Rhun are not stupid. They know the best way to control a Huorn is through an Ent. They don't quite have an Ent, but they do have an Entwife. (I figure they are about the size of a tree in an orchard, smaller than the Ents.) Tolkien said if Entwives survive, they are enslaved in the south or east. This is just what we're assuming. The bad guys have threatened an Entwife into cooperating by telling her that otherwise all her people will die. She will be a tool that the evil agents use to get the Huorn to go along with their schemes. We don't want to spell out all the ins and outs in advance, since we would just see how the plot goes and how everyone reacts, and pitches in. But this one Entwife would be physically hidden by the baddies. Only when the good guys rediscover her would they learn that Entwives still survive and they desperately need rescuing out east. We would set up the bad agents and the captive Entwife in our first few posts, exposing the infomation a little at a time, so everyone could gradually see what was happening.

I could not have put it better myself, Child. That will work well. However, would it be logical to say that these descendants of Easterlings had enslaved all the Entwives? If so, that would eliminate the need for part of the company having to split off and go search for the remaining Entwives in the southeast, ultimately cutting down our time. I like the idea of the climactic battle, though (two-part battle: Ents/Entwives vs. the Huorns, the company vs. the Easterlings).