The Fold Dweller smiled and nodded, and in that moment, everything froze. Not dramatically…time simply decided to take a break, leaving The First Farmer and this mysterious visitor in a bubble of continued causality while reality held its breath.
The Outsider walked over and picked up the green-gold seed with the careful reverence of someone handling crystallized possibility.
"What is this?" they asked, though the question carried the weight of someone who already suspected.
The First Farmer, cautious but compelled by something beyond caution, answered: "It was a failed Seed. A Seed of Harvest that would have been my finest creation, but I failed. The Principle was too large, too fundamental. It kept trying to harvest itself before it could germinate. A principle that feeds on effort, including the effort of its own creation…the recursion destroyed it before it could stabilize."
