Thricket, the Fruberry Slayer

A thricket’s wings are clumsy after lunch. This particular thricket finished its summer feast of fruberries hardly two hours ago, and the intoxication produced by their sweetness has become an alluring memory our heroine insect here wants to recapture. The smell of fruberry bread floats across the softwood trees, past ferns, tall grasses, a heavy fist-sized ball covered in a leather binding, empty burrows dug by fenecs who make a game of dodging the canons, and finally the rich buttery, tart scent reaches a sleepy spillbug who stirs awake taking a deep breath of this particular manifestation of divinity, and then that breath exhaled becomes shared through the network of living things till it causes a spring and swat of the wings by our newly met friend, thricket the fruberry slayer. A note on fruberries: they are easily the most fascinating fruit of Porra. Each bush produces berries with unpredictable flavors, and there have not been two fruberries from different bushes that taste the same; for today’s fruberry bread, I believe the flavor is…

“Esteemed father—oh these fruberries taste like chickoren! Ahum, back into character—ESTEEEMED FATHAA!” the voice danced in jest with no audience to hear it, imitating an overheard speech with theatrical enthusiasm in the same contrived tone unique to her elder brother, the source of this performance’s material; a speech which was earlier delivered with undue severity at a poor bush whilst it was being mugged for its fruberries. Earlier that day, both speech and berries were shared with the heroine thricket, the fruberry slayer of yesterhour, who would embellish the regaling with heavy nods of agreement since that seemed to please the boy giving her berries, enslaving Thricky to a now unhealthy chickoren-flavored fruberry addiction which it flies to placate at this very moment knowing full well it is her last chance for she will never be able to experience that flavor again from another bush. The rest of the scene she witnessed was too hilarious to pass up mocking, thus Evüryn, more commonly, Evy, decidedly continues her script, directing her words now to the loaf of bread sitting by the window, “how couldst thou not telleth us about a matter of extreme pertinence, father, that thou wouldst relinquish thy title for reasons beyond, beyond rationality, beyond decency—dare I say decency?—well, beyond beyond need! Ill fit to your status and—awuuuugh! You bit me Thricky, rude and incorrigible!!” (Perhaps a better fitting title for Thricky is “Aymara’s mortal nemesis which he himself enabled through his unconscious feeding of her new addiction”.) The words trembled out from the pouted lips of the performer, recalling the desperate creased face of her brother and his glimmering eyes which despondently sat on Thricky for a moment before resuming his duty as a son of a berry bush. Aymara charged the fruberries of a crime impossible for them to commit, seeing as if they could, this would’ve been the first case of a berry bush birthing a person, no less be the person that was being addressed, that is… the wielding champion of the current generation, but if anything was to explain the character of our dear Aymara it was that his siblings all believed—as it was unanimously voted—that he was adopted, or was an ancestor who passed through a time ring into the current present. He shared few qualities with his other siblings, among them the yellow tint in his eyes, around the iris, contrasted by obsidine black hair lent his appearance the gravity of an animal’s stare sitting among moon glow. Evy now, her cheeks filled to keep a laugh from waking all her siblings but two who were not at home from their afternoon naps, alas cannot adopt that weird air of her brother’s, yet an effective performance it was because a moment later a brave floating bush challenged the young girl mistaking her for Ayay, and the cackling was as inevitable as the bush’s coming revenge for its fallen, tart and poweltry-tasting progeny.