The fresh fruit rested in the hands of the young phalamancer, who squeezed it impatiently with a telling disdain. “Under-ripe, pah!”, she spoke, a soft insult to the mother tree which lay rooted in the nearby ground. A white front of fragile ships cruised above in a sea of endless blue. The day’s heat was testing nature; it was the robed phalamancer’s desire to test herself. The fruit was a conduit, and a communion of abundancy and desire. From a bite the world’s sins became seeds of experience, the fruit’s honeyed essence brought true knowledge of expectation, duty. Her road traversed was gone, so past the plantations of red apples she stepped, to a tree with curiously pale fruit hung low, untouchable and solicitous. Her mood hopeful, she took the offering. Chewing, she waited a moment, swallowed, the test of her potential. Nothing was heard but the breeze between trees. Then as though in vivid dreams realized, her white horse came, ivory tusked and vital, and speaking its name she rode to a faraway place.