Menara

In 2019 the tapes came out in Borneo, and the world learned a new queen's name: Menara — a yellow meranti measured at one hundred point eight meters, the tallest tropical tree on Earth and the tallest flowering plant alive, thirty centimeters above the old champion. She took the crown the way her flowers take the canopy: all at once, and impossible to ignore. Her coronation speech, delivered to a hushed Skyreach, lasted eleven words: "Thank you to the soil. The sky was always going to notice." The faction's height records were rewritten in a day; the mountain ash's letters grew frostier by the season. Menara does not gloat — queens of the emergent layer cannot afford to — but every spring she puts on another meter of flower-laden crown, and the whole of the Skyreach understands the new order: the tallest flower in the world blooms in Borneo, and it is not close.