1-Line Wednesday | June 14
After walking a bit farther the two of them came to a small clearing. There was a massive tree in the center of it. This tree was nearly completely surrounded by swampy water, but there was a bridge connecting their path across the water to the plant.
The tree had an incredible trunk, spanning a length much longer than anything Dorian had seen before. It made the trees back home seem inadequate, like they were just weeds. In addition to its incredible length, it was also impressively high. It stood alone in the clearing, but its branches and leaves were enough to cover the sky.
“This is what I wanted you to see. This is the head of the being we call Nasrin. You saw earlier all of the tiny mangroves that were scattered throughout the swamp. Well, they were not just separate plants. All of them are in fact part of a single entity, this entity. Nasrin has lived here for so long, has grown so large, that it has continually grown offshoots of itself. But we’ve seen the roots have all led back to here.”
“How long ago did you say Nasrin was planted?”
“Nobody knows. We’ve lived in this rainforest for thousands of years. As far back as we’ve been able to identify from historical and archaeological records, it has always existed and played a critical part of the rainforest ecosystem. In fact, we believe this one tree may have been the one to start the rainforest. Everything else grew around it.”
This is a section from “The Virgin Dragon” where the main character Dorian finds himself in the depths of a tropical rainforest. The center of the rainforest is inhabited by a being called Nasrin which is speculated to be a single large entity.
This premise is based the real-world Pando, a massive forest in Utah which is actually a single tree. Pando sprawls out for 108 acres and roughly weighs 6000 tons, making it the largest single organism in the world.