Kaara Tibur had never climbed so high before in her life. She looked over the horizon. The night was still young.
She was scaling the stoney trunk of a towering Ingen Tree because she wanted to surprise her camp with a bushel of its fruit. The young xia relied only on her ivory white tail to catch her if she fell. She coiled it around branches and hooked it into handholds as she scaled ever higher.
Her deep red hair was frizzed, windblown, hastily braided and easily mistaken for a bird’s nest. There were even a few stray branches in it.
Climbing this tree felt like scaling a mountain more than a tree. Its bark was jagged and stoney from centuries of age. Though, unlike stone, the bark could bend and stretch instead of shattering under pressure, but that just made it easier to climb.
She felt like an ant crawling up such a massive tree like this. And looking down below at her tribe’s camp, people certainly looked like ants from up here too.
She pulled herself atop one of the Ingen Tree’s monolithic branches, its girth so wide she could stand on it as if it were flat. The wind was so intense this high up, she could feel the branch itself swaying like the buck of a ship at sea.
She grinned, extending her arms out like wings and pretending to be a bird for a moment. She ran along the branch, “Ka-Kaw! Ka-Kaw!” giggling to herself as she flapped her arms, only to stop when she remembered why she came here in the first place.
For such a massive tree, it bore incredibly tiny fruit. Upon a webbing of branches, leaves, and vines grew fleshy bluish peach-like fruits. They hung off the branches by thick wooden vines in clusters much like grapes.
Deciding she had earned herself a snack, Kaara anchored her tail to a nearby branch and started pulling up one of the massive bushels.
She really was an ant in more ways than one. The small girl could lift several times her own body weight like it was nothing.
She plucked a few of them and sat cross-legged on the ground. Her tail swayed, flopped, and wagged. This would be her first Ingen fruit!
Chomp!
Her face turned from a pleased grin to a dark bitter grimace.
She’d misjudged the ripeness of this one. It was insanely sour, and had some sort of film that stuck to her tongue. She scrunched her nose and tossed it off the edge- and in a dramatic gesture- scraped the flavor from her outstretched tongue.
She picked another one, sniffing it and squinting, “You gonna cooperate with me Mr.Ingen fruit, or will you be joining your husband at the bottom of the tree?”
Kaara puppeted the fruit, speaking from the corner of her mouth,
“Oh no! Please! I promise I’ll be delicious! Please don’t throw me to the worms!”
“Alright, but only because you asked nicely.”
Chomp!
Her face darkened again, “Perhaps your children will be more honest than you. Good day, Mr.Ingen fruit. Let’s hope Ingen Jr. doesn’t join you…”
She imagined her magic pooling in the palm of her hand just beneath the fruit, and soon enough water gushed from thin air, catapulting the fruit to the treetops below. She gave it a salute, “Though, your effort was valiant.”
Kaara carried on like this, taking one bite after another, and shooting each fruit off the edge with her water magic before finally learning what a ripe Ingen fruit looked like.
“Oh, the ripe ones are more yellow huh? Sorry about the loss of your family Sir Ingenios the third.”
“Their sacrifices shall only make me taste all the sweeter my good lady Kaara. Now eat me! In the name of my family, satiate your belly-” The fruit said before being chomped in half by Kaara’s jagged shark-like teeth.
Juice gushed from it in a mess that ran down her chin. She squealed in delight at the sweetly acidic flavor of the fruit, her tail drumming happily on the petrified branch she sat atop. She licked her hands clean, and washed away the rest with her magic.
Kaara took off the fur shawl she was wearing and repurposed it as a knapsack, filling it with as many yellow Ingen fruits as she could, and even stuffing the rest of her clothes with them. She then imagined water as thin as a blade and twice as fast, swiping her hand over the thick wooden vine of the Ingen tree and cutting clean through it.
She turned, coiling her tail around its stem and dragging what remained of the unripened fruits along with her. When she got to the edge, a thought hit her.
“Arik won’t be awake for another couple hours, and Rorik is probably gonna go hunting the moment he wakes up. How am I gonna get these down?”
Kaara leaned over the edge, she estimated it had to be at least thirty seconds of freefalling before she hit the ground. And thirty seconds of height was just too tall for Kaara to break her fall with water magic.
She looked up. There was still so much tree left. This massive tree had to be one to two minutes tall!
If Rorik were here he could’ve used his earth magic to give her a ride on a flying boulder. And Arik could’ve used wind magic to help her float safely to the bottom.
She grumbled to herself. Should she just try to climb? But her dad always told her never to climb when she didn’t have her tail to hold onto things.
In order to ponder this incredibly important conundrum further, Kaara decided to hang upside down from one of the branches like the opossums she greeted earlier this morning.
The sun was cresting over the horizon, and she could see everything. The sprawling plateaus in the distance near Punuuk and Yvian, the river Kix funneling off into Puluria Canyon towards the boundless horizon.
It was hard to believe that nearly all the terrain around the Ingen Tree was made by powerful champions who had lived and died nearly a thousand years ago.
It all looked so… natural.
Kaara could even see the small specs of her camp so close it felt like she could jump and land right on top of it if she dropped from the right branch.
As the sun crested over the horizon it took her breath away. Its red-orange hue bloodied the night sky. The Kix River sparkled in its radiance, a warm breeze swung Kaara where she was hanging. She saw a geyser erupt right out of Puluria Canyon, pushing sky high into the air.
It sparked an idea.
