Egg Cactus

WIP - Summer Camp 2023

The egg cactus is, unsurprisingly, shaped like an egg. It can grow up to a metre high and is covered in densely packed, needlelike spines about ten centimetres long. It is a rather pale green in colour and its spines are white. It has extremely long roots that have been found to extend out up to a mile. An egg cactus can live for up to two hundred years.
During the very brief wet season, it stores copious amounts of water in its trunk. This water supply can last the plant for over two years if necessary.
Egg cacti tend to grow rather far apart from each other. Too many growing in one place will lead to stunted plants that can not gather enough water to get them through the dry season.
An egg cactus blooms once every few years, always in the weeks following a rainy season. They produce a single large golden flower. The flowers are self-pollinating, and they rely on the strong desert winds to carry the seeds away. These rare flowers are harvested by the NAME people, who use them to brew a sacred golden tea.
Its existence makes travelling the Aenica Desert (not its real name) possible. Routes are planned around the locations of known egg cacti across the desert. Travellers use a long metal straw known as a thirrip to bore a hole into the side of the cactus and drain out some of the water to drink. They always make holes from the top of the cactus down so as not to drain too much. The cactus heals these wounds with a whitish scaly scab, which allows travellers to see where previous travellers have obtained water from. If the latest scab is too low, travellers will leave that particular cactus alone; they do not want the cactus to die and be unable to be used in the future.