So out at one of our favorite campsites, there's this... tree. It is not a large tree, but it is a tree with very firm personal boundaries... which it enforces with thorns. My friend insists, half-seriously, that it is a local temporal manifestation of the Tree of Pain from Dan Simmons' Hyperion; if the Shrike were to show up while we were camping out there, he wouldn't be a bit surprised.
It grows beside the path down to the lake, and periodically it will reach out and grab an unwary traveler. (Or maybe it's more like an incautious traveler will stumble into it and get an unexpected wakeup call...) To fully appreciate this tree, you kind of have to see it. Soooo:
So what kind of tree is it? Well, according to one of the naturalists at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, it's a Honey Locust, which means that if we dropped back by later in the spring we could see it flowering. It also produces seed pods, and apparently the pulp of the pods is edible -- as are the seeds themselves.
So all in all, a pretty cool tree. Which does not mean that I won't use it to torment some PCs in a D&D game, or that I wouldn't name my next D&D character Honey Locust.
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