Part I: The Fossilized Thought (The Hardware)

The Proxanian Seeds are not seeds in any sense that a human farmer would understand. They are not biological life waiting to bloom into flora; they are fossilized neural nodes. In the permafrost of Proxan Mountain, they look like jagged, black opals—stagnant pieces of an ancient architecture.

When the Children of the Mountain were born, they did not have a name until a Seed was grafted into the base of their skull. The Seed would grow, not upward into the light, but inward into the gray matter. It was a biological installation. The result was the crimson leaf-mark on the forehead—a port for a network that spanned the entire mountain.

When I added these ground-up "seeds" to the Krones Formula, I thought I was creating a system for plants to share nutrients. I didn't realize that the Seeds are opportunists. They do not care if the host is a stalk of wheat or a human child.

In the victims of the Touch of Rose, the Seed has successfully "booted up." It has high-jacked the host's nervous system, turning the brain into a high-density biological receiver. The rose-leaf mark is the antenna. It is beautiful, it is crimson, and it is starving for a signal.

Without the other two parts of the Trinity, the Seed is a locked door. A "vegetative state" is simply a human mind being held hostage by a piece of ancient hardware that refuses to let the soul speak until the network connection is established.