Vitae

Thrown in the harbor, every wood floats. Vitae sinks. Lignum vitae — "wood of life" — is among the densest woods on Earth, so heavy with resin it drops straight through seawater like a stone, and he has never once apologized for it. Shipwrights prized him for propeller bearings that needed no oil; he outlasted the ships. The Painted Bark faction, all surface and shimmer, finds him baffling: a tree whose glory is interior, invisible, measured in specific gravity. "You trade in how things look," he tells them. "I trade in how things endure." His flowers are a startling blue, his heartwood a deep olive-brown, and his philosophy fits on a dock piling: the sea tests everything, and most things float because they are empty. He is full. He sinks. He remains.