At about 8am, Rohan Standard time, Saruman woke up and began his morning ritual. A short trip to the bathroom, a light breakfast and a cup of coffee while reading his paper; Saruman just wasn’t up to proper wizarding without these things.

He turned the local section, which had a general alert about a ridiculously large orcish army marching to Helm’s Deep. Saruman chuckled, excellent, soon the kingdom would be his, and in about a week Sauron would own the world.

He was interrupted in his musings of a joint-leadership venture, when Wormtongue came in, looking very worried. Saruman scowled, he was still reading damn it, and decided that whatever it was could wait.

“Sir?” the little worm said in a very small and terrified voice. No clue there.

“Go away,” said Saruman, who turned the page to find a story about how Gandalf the White was behind the, “brilliant strategy, which could save them all”. Saruman grunted; he knew that Gandalf was just winging it, he always was.

“Sir?” Wormtongue said with even more urgency and a fearful glance out the window.

“Go. Away.” He said in his best menacing voice, and chuckled when he saw an ad in the classified, very subtly inquiring about a small hobbit with a gold ring.

“Sir it’s very urgent.”

Saruman slapped down his paper and pointed a menacing finger at Grima, “I’ll tell you what is urgent and worth worrying about, interrupting my morning coffee and if you keep it up I’ll reduce you to a pile of ash,” and he went back to his paper.

“Fine,” Grima said getting up, “I just thought you’d want to know about the trees that’s all,” and he stalked out.

Saruman grunted and went back to his paper, which he read in peace, despite the constant thumping outside. Stupid orcs, can’t they work silently? Finally he finished, folded up his paper, and got up to go to the front window and look down at his minions, menacingly.

As he passed by the window, something odd caught his attention. There were several large trees outside. He had taken down all the trees though, and so it was not only odd that they should be out there, but down right impossible.

And then he noticed that they weren’t just standing there but moving about.

“Grima,” he said, sipping his coffee, “what’s going on?”

“Well, my lord, I tried to tell you that the trees are attacking, but you’re morning ritual was just far too important to interrupt so I decided to wait.”

Saruman threw all his menace into a glare and then threw a fireball at Grima, “Never speak like that to me again,” and went out onto the balcony.

TBC…