The Inverted Pillars

Seven Originals

The silence in the chamber was not empty; it was heavy, pressurized, like the air inside a bell jar. It hummed with a frequency so low it wasn't heard but felt a vibration in the teeth, a subtle trembling in the marrow of the bones.

Senshi stood in the center of the room, the bark map still clutched in his hand, his eyes fixed on the message scratched into the far wall. They are not seeds. They are the original seven.

He turned to Himari. She was standing near the entrance, her mismatched eyes wide, reflecting the blinding gold light of the seven living cylinders. She hadn't moved since they had stepped inside. Her hand was still resting on the hilt of her bone-knife, her posture coiled tight, like a spring ready to snap.

"Himari," Senshi said softly. "Come look at this."

She didn't answer immediately. She was staring at the circle of glass cylinders, her gaze darting from the ten dark, petrified cuttings to the seven blazing with golden light. The air around the glowing cylinders was warm, shimmering with heat distortion, while the dark ones seemed to radiate a cold so profound it made the breath mist in the air.

"Senshi," she whispered, her voice tight. "Do you feel that?"

"Feel what?"

"The Pulse," she said, stepping closer, her boots clicking softly on the metal floor. "It's not uniform. The ten dark ones... they're silent. Dead. But the seven glowing ones... they're not just pulsing. They're syncing."

Senshi closed his eyes and reached out with his senses. The dense marble of his Faridah in his chest began to vibrate, reacting to the ambient energy in the room. He felt it then a complex, polyrhythmic thrumming. It wasn't the slow, tectonic heartbeat of the Gravity Root outside. This was faster. Sharper. It felt like a choir of seven distinct voices, each singing a different note, yet harmonizing into a single, overwhelming chord.

"They're alive," Senshi said, opening his eyes. "But not like the Root. The Root is a plant. This... this feels like a nervous system."

Himari walked slowly toward the nearest glowing cylinder. She stopped three feet away, holding her hands up as if approaching a wild animal. The golden light washed over her face, highlighting the sharp angles of her cheekbones and the silver scar of frostbite on her jaw.

"I need to know what they are," she said, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "The map says 'original seven'. The wall says 'not seeds'. But I need to see."

She looked at Senshi, her mismatched eyes locking onto his. "I'm going to use Iteration."

Senshi frowned. "On the cylinders? Himari, Iteration works on your own memories. You replay a second of your own past. You can't replay the past of an object."

"I can if I touch it," she corrected, her tone clinical, detached. "Matter has memory, Senshi. Every atom holds the echo of its previous state. If I press my skin to the glass, I can force the object to replay a microsecond of its own history. It's like reading the rings of a tree, but instead of time, I see the event that shaped the ring."

"Is it safe?"

"No," she said simply. "The older the memory, the heavier the weight. If I push too deep, if I try to see something the object wasn't meant to remember... it can burn out my synapses. I could end up like Elian. Looping."

"Then don't do it," Senshi said, stepping forward. "We don't know what's in there. It could be a trap. A psychic ward."

"We don't have a choice," Himari said, turning back to the cylinder. "Pillar Seven has days left. The Rot is eating the world. If these things are the 'originals', if they are the source of the Roots... then they are the key to everything. I need to know what we're dealing with."

She took a deep breath, steeling herself. She reached out and pressed her bare palm flat against the cold, diamond-like surface of the glass.

Instantly, her body went rigid.

Her mismatched eyes rolled back, the silver one glowing with a faint, ethereal light, the black one seeming to expand, swallowing the iris whole. Her lips parted, but no sound came out. Her fingers, pressed against the glass, began to tremble violently.

Senshi stepped closer, his hand hovering near her shoulder, ready to pull her back if she started to convulse. "Himari? What do you see?"

For a long moment, there was only the hum of the cylinders and the ragged sound of Himari's breathing.

Then, she gasped.

It was a wet, tearing sound, like air being sucked out of a vacuum. She stumbled backward, ripping her hand away from the glass as if it had burned her. She fell to her knees, clutching her hand to her chest, her face pale, sweat beading on her forehead.

"Himari!" Senshi knelt beside her, grabbing her shoulders. "What happened? What did you see?"

Himari looked up at him, and for the first time since he had met her, Senshi saw genuine, unadulterated terror in her eyes. Her hands were shaking so hard her bone-knife rattled in its sheath.

"It wasn't a seed," she whispered, her voice cracking. "It wasn't a plant. It wasn't even... biology."

"What was it?" Senshi pressed, his heart hammering against his ribs.

Himari swallowed hard, struggling to form the words. "When I touched the glass, I didn't see growth. I didn't see roots spreading or leaves unfurling. I saw... decision."

She looked back at the glowing cylinder, her gaze filled with a mixture of awe and horror.

"I saw a microsecond of its past. Just a flash. But in that flash, the cutting inside... it moved. Not like a plant reacting to light. It moved like a muscle. It coiled." She shuddered, wrapping her arms around herself. "And then it turned. Senshi, it turned toward me. Not toward the glass. Toward me. It saw me."

Senshi stared at the golden light pulsing within the cylinder. The idea was impossible. Plants didn't see. Roots didn't make decisions. They grew. They consumed. They held.

"It was thinking," Himari whispered, the realization hanging heavy in the sterile air. "In that microsecond, I felt a mind. A vast, ancient, alien mind. It wasn't sleeping, Senshi. It was waiting."

She pushed herself up to her feet, wiping the sweat from her face with a trembling hand. "These aren't seeds. They're prisoners. Or... or kings. Something that was put here to be contained. Or to be preserved."

Senshi looked around the room, the golden light suddenly feeling less like a beacon of hope and more like the glare of a thousand watchful eyes. They are the original seven.

If these were the source of the Roots if the Gravity Roots that held the Pillars were just extensions of these entities then the entire world was built on the backs of sleeping gods. And his mother had found them. She had hidden them.

"Why seven?" Senshi murmured, looking at the seven glowing cylinders. "And why are there ten dead ones?"

"Failed experiments?" Himari suggested, her voice regaining some of its tactical steadiness. "Or maybe... maybe the original entity was split into more pieces, but only seven survived. Only seven were strong enough to hold the Tension."

She walked slowly around the circle, examining each cylinder with a newfound wariness. She didn't touch them again. She kept her hands clasped behind her back, her eyes scanning the glass for any sign of movement.

Senshi joined her, walking the perimeter of the circle. He looked at the ten dark cylinders. They were indeed dead brown, petrified, devoid of any light. But as he looked closer, he noticed something strange about the fluid inside them. It wasn't clear like the golden cylinders. It was cloudy, thick with a dark, sediment-like sludge.

"Himari," he said, stopping in front of one of the dark cylinders. "Look at this."

She walked over, peering through the glass. "Sediment. Decay. The cutting inside has rotted away."

"No," Senshi said, leaning closer, his breath fogging the glass. "Look at the shape. The sediment isn't random. It's... layered. Like it was shed."

Himari frowned, squinting at the dark mass at the bottom of the tank. "Shed? Like skin?"

"Like a shell," Senshi corrected. He looked at the next dark cylinder. The same thing. A dark, cloudy fluid, and at the bottom, a pile of what looked like dried, black flakes.

"They didn't rot," Senshi realized, a cold dread pooling in his stomach. "They hatched."

Himari’s head snapped up. "What?"

"The ten dead ones," Senshi said, his voice rising in urgency. "They aren't dead. They're empty. Whatever was inside them... it broke out."

He spun around, scanning the seven glowing cylinders with renewed panic. If the dead ones had hatched, what about the living ones?

He ran to the nearest glowing cylinder Cylinder Number One. He pressed his face against the glass, peering into the golden fluid.

The cutting was there. It was coiled tightly, a mass of golden, fibrous nerves pulsing with light. It was intact.

He ran to the second. Intact.

The third. Intact.

The fourth. Intact.

He was halfway through the circle, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm against his ribs, when he stopped.

Cylinder Number Seven.

It was different.

The golden light inside was dimmer, flickering erratically like a dying bulb. The fluid, usually clear and viscous, was cloudy, swirling with a dark, oily substance.

And the glass was cracked.

Senshi stepped closer, his breath catching in his throat. The crack wasn't on the outside. It wasn't a stress fracture from the pressure of the room or the age of the glass.

The crack started from the inside.

A jagged, spiderweb fracture radiating from the center of the cylinder, where the cutting should have been. But as Senshi peered through the fractured glass, his blood turned to ice.

The cylinder was empty.

The golden fluid had drained away, leaving only a thin, oily residue on the glass. The cutting the "Original" that had been pulsing with life just moments ago was gone.

And on the inside of the glass, etched into the surface by something sharp and hard, was a single, jagged mark.

A claw mark.

Senshi stumbled back, his mind reeling. The message on the wall echoed in his head. They are the original seven.

But there were only six left.

One of the Originals was gone. One of the source-entities, the ancient, thinking things that powered the world, had broken out of its glass prison.

And it was loose inside the Root.