Dorada

Dorada began as a seed in another tree's branches — a speck dropped by a bird, no bigger than a promise — and grew downward, tendril by tendril, wrapping her host in a slow green embrace. Decades passed. The lattice thickened, fused, became a trunk; the host, shaded and strangled, rotted away inside its own replacement. This is the strangler fig's way, and Dorada tells it like a love story, because to her it was one. "I held them," she says, "until I became them. Is that not devotion?" The Canopy Throne is unsettled and fascinated in equal measure — height is status here, and she stole hers mid-embrace. The hollow at her heart, where the host once stood, is her private chapel. She lets no one look inside. Some doors, even in the court of the emergent layer, stay closed.