The woods were silent. The elves had long abandoned them and the animals had gone away. Most of the ents had become Huorns, or had become part of the forest that forever guarded Isengard. The few who remained in Fangorn usually stood totally still and rarely did anything. After the march on Isengard, the ents had diminished and were slowly forgotten again, fading into buried manuscripts. One of the ents who still remained intact, Quickbeam, stood looking out upon the forest from the hill where Merry and Pippin had first met Fangorn (Treebeard). In his youth, Quickbeam had been a rather hasty ent, but as the ages of men grew longer, he could feel the blanket of age slowly draw around him, and he grew noticeably less hasty. He rarely saw the other ents, but when he did, they would greet each other in their slow tongue and then pass on to their own purposes. The world had grown so melancholy since the war of the ring. No one came walking in their woods and the race was failing. There were no entings.