Ginnan

For two hundred and seventy million years, Ginnan's kind has watched the world end and begin again. She outlived the dinosaurs, the ice, the axes — a living fossil whose fan-shaped leaves no other tree on Earth still grows, the temple tree of emperors. When the Ancient Ones gather, she speaks first and last, because age is authority and nothing alive is older. Once, the Deep Root's dendrochronologists came with their borers and ledgers, asking about the year with no ring. Ginnan listened the way temples listen. "I was there," she said, and folded her fans closed, and said nothing more. Some say she remembers the Missing Ring's year the way a scar remembers the wound. Some say she only refuses to hand the younger trees a story they would spend centuries fighting over. Every autumn her leaves turn temple-lantern gold, and the whole faction understands: some memories are not for sharing.