Iris

Once a year, Iris undresses in public — and the whole Painted Bark faction comes to watch. The rainbow eucalyptus sheds its bark in ribbons, and each fresh layer underneath cures through impossible colors: green to blue to purple to orange to maroon, until the trunk is a living spectrum. The faction trades in appearances — surface is identity here — and Iris is their war-captain because no one else can change their skin so completely and so joyfully. Young painted-barks come to her shedding anxious about who they are becoming. "Watch," she says, and peels. "The tree underneath was always the tree. The colors are just the news." Of the Missing Ring she says the faction's truest thing: a ring is interior, bark is exterior, and she has never once confused the two. What the world didn't grow that year, it also didn't show.