119
Bunking off
🩳

"Let's take a look around, lessons can wait!" you say to Daniel and the two of you walk down the wooden corridor (which is actually the hollow inside of just one great branch of this mighty tree) towards the trunk.

You enter the tree trunk about three stories up, and you can see Ravenwing students darting to and fro across the floor, heading off to their lessons. Some of them are whistling for parrots who fly off into the depths and retrieve arcane books, scrolls of ancient wisdom, and the occasional comic.

Soon they have all gone allowing you and Daniel the chance to explore uninterrupted.

The first place you go to is a room labelled 'FRUIT CORNER", just across the trunk from you. Fruit Corner turns out to be a large spherical room, with woody growths emerging from the walls and ceiling. At the end of each growth hangs a fruit that looks a bit like a giant strawberry and glows with a faint golden light.

You pick one from a branch and nibble the end tentatively. Immediately your eyes light up and you cram more into your mouth.

"It's..." scrunch "the best thing..." scrunch "I have ever tasted..." scrunch "in my whole life!"

It's like eating the best fruit salad you can imagine but also as if a luscious cream has been mixed in plus dollops of honey. After eating just one of these magical fruits you find you are completely full - and not in a feeling-sick-sort-of-way but in a totally-satisfied-and-not-at-all-feeling-sick kind of way.

The rest of the day is spent climbing up the inside of the tree trunk and sliding at tremendous speeds down the spiral wooden slides that are naturally polished with amber.

You also find a door in the tree to go outside and chamber around the branches for a while. You encounter the magical giant squirrels that live in the canopy - once normal red squirrels, eating the nuts of the tree has given them the power of speech as well as growing them to the size of kangaroos.

They invite you to climb on their backs, and they race to the top of the tree with you and Daniel clinging onto their fur and shouting with delight.

You swim in the pools of streaming water far out in the branches, captured in natural dips of the wood, and heated by some magic of the tree itself.

You meet the ancient raven with only one eye who lives at the very top of the tree, the raven that was befriended by the founder of Ravenwing House, Rebecca Ravenwing, all those centuries ago.

Finally you go back to the library inside the trunk of the tree and whistle for all the books you can think of.

Daniel reads 'Travels through the multiverse' by Daniel Colliers-Wood, a mind-blowing book which he will write in 25 years time. Also 'The Crying Potato' by his brother Robin Colliers-Wood, due to be published in only five years.

You enjoy 'Adventures with Dragons' by Arthur Otley and also 'Mr Poopy Head' by your brother Evan Otley, which he will write when he is only seven.

As you eat just one more delicious fruit-salad-fruit from the fruit corner room, the other Ravewing students traipse back into the massive trunk.

"Arthur, Daniel," shouts one anonymous bit-part student. "it's dinner time!"