The night was quiet except for a hum. The chirping birds of the woods were asleep in their nests while their prey buzzed boldly through the air. Wind streamed softly past the trees.
"Ow!" rolled a booming voice. "Watch where you’re swinging that!" It broke the peaceful silence. Dozens of birds shot upwards from the canopy in terror. The lights turned on in a house nearby.
"All I see are leaves, Nudd! I don’t know where I am," a similar voice said. It was softer, slower, more lethargic.
Two tall pine trees stood above the rest of the shadowy forest. Moments before, the trees shared the calm with the woods, but suddenly they had begun to speak loudly to each other.
"You kicked my trunk, Lludd," the taller pine bellowed. It had acquired a face. The gaps between the branches of the tree composed a long, thin, needly mouth. Two bright stars in the sky dotted the tree’s eyes. The stars moved correspondingly to Nudd’s movements. They disappeared when it blinked.
"I can’t remember the last time I was a tree, Nudd. Moving takes practice," the tree called Lludd said. It was shorter and squatter than Nudd, and a branch that curled around itself formed a small, round mouth. Its beady eyes twinkled. Below, two piggish nostrils sucked in breath.
"Hey!" a thin voice with nowhere near the magnitude of the trees’ yelled as loudly as it could muster. The voice belonged to a tiny human trudging out of its house. It slammed the door loudly shut. "Who the hell’s making all that racket?"
"What racket? We were whispering," Lludd roared. The human stood there with a wide-open mouth at the giant pines that until then it had only known to whisper in the wind.
"Haven’t you ever seen a tree before?" Nudd asked the human, extending a long branch towards the rest of the woods. "Your cave is right by a ton of them, if you didn’t notice."
"It’s called a house, and the trees around here don’t usually talk to me," the human explained. "Do you have any idea what time it is?"
"Time?" Lludd furrowed its wooden brow. The human sighed almost silently.
"It’s past three in the morning," the human hissed, "when people like me are usually asleep. If you can’t be any quieter, I’ll have to ask you to leave. If you wake me up, I might have to go find my axe. Do you think you can control your voices a little more?"
"Sorry," Nudd said with no lowered volume, "We haven’t been in trees for a very long time, and it’s taking a while to get used to."
"We were supposed to enter a couple of foxes," Lludd added slowly and ponderously. "We don’t usually come up to earth, and we’re a little rust–"
"I don’t care what you are," the human interrupted impatiently. "Just don’t wake me up again, or you’ll find yourselves rotting on the ground with an axe stuck in you." The human stomped back into its house. It’s footsteps made little crunching sounds on the dewey grass. Nudd and Lludd frowned at each other. Their faces disappeared into a heap of pine needles.