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The party notices freshly cut-looking stumps scattered beside a forest path. Their rings and bark seem credible enough, but their placement and the absence of an obvious cutting route are wrong. Chef investigates the ground, Rae watches the approach and Dude sees the first one. The danger starts when the nearest stump abruptly stands and runs. It carries a club, and others stand up when the fighting begins. The landscape itself has been hiding a mobile group of armed inhabitants.

The first creature withstands impacts that would stop a softer animal. It has a trunk where a fighter expects vulnerable flesh. Tall's arrows can pierce wood and set vines growing, but holes alone do not necessarily kill or disable it. A struck stump can collide with another and provoke another attacker. The party is forced to abandon the path, improvise obstacles and shepherd slower members through rough ground while the number of pursuers increases.

The creatures do not stumble around like falling logs. They carry clubs, call across the trees and close in from different directions. When the group is cornered, a sequence of bell-like notes comes from uphill. The attackers stop. Weapons lower. Then the creatures withdraw.

Whatever the signal means to them, it reaches them at once. For the travelers, the sudden retreat is a reprieve — and another reminder that this forest has rules they have not yet learned.

Even collecting firewood becomes a slightly more troubling activity once the group has met the club-carrying stump-creatures. Fallen timber is no longer quite as reassuring as it used to be.

Later, the travelers find an old campsite with a controlled fire ring, evidence that someone knew how to live in this forest before them. The ring raises questions rather than answering them. It offers no reason to confuse its builders with the aggressive wooden creatures, or those creatures with the enormous Stump the group faced long before.