Chorisia

Chorisia's trunk is a fortress and her crown is a scandal. The silk floss tree armors itself in great conical thorns — green bark studded like a mace — and then, with perfect disregard for the contradiction, erupts in shocking pink flowers the size of a hand. The Flowering Court's suitors learn the protocol: admire from a respectful distance, or pay the toll in scratches. "Beauty," she says, "that cannot defend itself is decoration. Mine is a position." Her seed pods burst into silk floss — the namesake — drifting white over the thorns like a flag of truce she never signed. Young trees ask why the armor, when the flowers are so clearly the point. She shows them the scars where the axes tried. "The flowers," she says, "are the point. The thorns are how the point survives."