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After three hundred years of stillness, the great tree flowered a single flower, but it failed to be pollinated and withered away. After three hundred more years it flowered again, this time being pollinated by the primitive insects that formed from the wilted petals and colonized the land. After one hundred and fifty years of forming, a single, seedless, golden fig was produced, and fell to the ground.

The insects that ate it suddenly grew to understand that they were in fact, alive, and were capable of dealing with the truth of their death in meaningful ways. They and the children they bore formed societies within their colonies, and worked together to ensure that every individual life had meaning.

One insect, a scientist, warrior-priest, and poet, concluded that, because the golden fig brought his people awareness, and a near-perfect world, a second would bring the gift of immortality to his kind, whos natural lifespan was to be born, have children, and die over the span of a week. He discussed the idea with his peers, and his peers to the public, and though there were occasional disagreements about his belief, nearly everybody agreed with his theory.

The insect and all of his top scientists, with the approval of those they sought to help, began worshipping the tree in primordial, pre-awakening and recent-post-awakening mannerisms, believing it to be the closest in respect to the sacred time of their creation, coaxing the tree to produce a second fig.

After three hundred years of their efforts, the scientists generation and thousands of generations that came after that long dead, the project continued, and the tree flowered for a third time.

It was pollinated, and so, for one hundred and fifty years, the insects waited for it to fruit.

One morning, the sun rose, casting a golden light upon the world. The insects all awoke to find the long-awaited second fig sitting high upon the branches.

The next night, it fell, and was divided equally among all the bugs, so that none will die again. They ate the fig until only the seeds remained and continued their prosperous society, with the passage of time being the only way to test if death would take them, unwilling to kill eachother in case the fig rendered them immortal in age but not body.

Eventually, the eldest of their society stopped dying, but remained old and withered. The adults grew old but remained healthy, and the larva pupated and grew to maturity but remained childlike and stunted in their mannerisms. This brought on a golden age that lasted tens of thousands of years.

The tree, however, having created three flowers, began to die, having reached the end of its own natural lifespan. The insects, now living on a timescale similar to the trees, were able to recogize this, and panicked.

They realized the second fig had viable seeds, and planted one. They had no way of knowing this, but from deep within the great tree, stewing, seething, lived the first plant to ever touch the soil, the poisonous sapling, still alive, living within its sister. In its dying throes, it granted the great tree its virility, its sap, stamen and pistil, and while the resulting fruit gave the gift of life, that of the great tree, the seeds within that fruit were of the poisonous sapling, and would grow only more plants like it.

With bated breath the insects had no choice but to watch as the new tree they planted grew gnarled, far too quickly, and with odd leaf shapes and premature flowers. All the while, the great tree continued to suffer.

It began refusing to absorb water from the ground, causing its leaves to shrivel and fall, and the soil to get swamped. Opposite of that, it began rotting from the inside out, releasing toxins into the earth so that no new plants could grow. The insects, terrified, planted the other two seeds, but they were wrong too.

The conditions were perfect, so the new poisonous saplings began proliferating heavily, breeding with eachother, spreading thorned roots into the earth and smothering what remained of the great tree, swallowing it within a night. They bore poisonous, rotting fruits in excess, and had foul tasting leaves.

The insects were left in a state of famine, left with nothing to eat yet unable to die, cried out day and night for a hundred years, but eventually came to eat what came of the plants.

The poison, while not fatal to the immortal bugs, erroded their minds over time, and they began to worship the first tree the way they did the second, living their entire lives off what it made. Their society, though still non-violent, began to drift apart, with every individual simply no longer feeling the need to interact with others, and every other feeling the same.