Semilla Negra – Kellan Jansen

March 27, 2026

I was seven when I found the first one. Grandfather and I were in his garden, the sun hanging high in the late summer evening. We’d been digging near the tomato stakes when my fingers hit rock, smooth and cold. A black stone, small like a marble, but jade-green when I’d rubbed the dirt off.

My grandfather took it from my hand before I could ask. His fingers closed around it, and for a moment his face went strange—distant, as though he were listening to something. I couldn’t hear a thing.

Some minutes later, he dropped it back in the hole and covered it silently with dirt.

That night, I dreamt of roots birthing cities beneath the soil, threads of woven streets. He died the next morning. At the funeral, the pastor mentioned he’d spent time in Guatemala as a young man. I never knew.
The forest there was full of cities we couldn’t see—roots latticed through towers, moss half-transparent like glass. From the helicopter, circling the canyon, we noticed small hints through patches in the treeline, mounds that didn’t belong.

Jim shouted over the rotors, pointed at the grid below. Jinny took notes. I saw the canopy rise and fall in the wind like breath … joined with it.

The rotors cut out as we touched down, but I thought I heard them still—faint, coming from the wrong direction. Jim didn’t look up. Probably the canopy throwing sound.

Once we found the sphere—black and smooth, jade-green where time had worn it—it became all we could think about.

The symbols, unreadable but stunning, whispered through buzzing insects. I knelt in the mud and pressed my palm to the surfac​​e, felt a rhythm.

Cold. Old.

Our team worked fast, mostly locals. Their leader, a short, dark man called Janekon. He said, as best I could tell: We need to keep working.

I tried to explain that Jim needed a progress update. But I wanted answers.

Janekon studied me, then… said something I didn’t fully understand. The word sounded like semilla, which means seed in Spanish.

That night, I heard the metal tools ringing long after dark, as if something beneath the mud was answering my disquiet. When I fell asleep, I found the sounds in my dream.

In the morning, the air felt thicker. The ground steamed. Our generators refused to start.

Janekon said the men had heard the earth. Jim said something about groundwater. But when I lay on my cot, I felt it: the faint, irregular pulsing of something not entirely mechanical.

By noon, the sphere had changed color—a thin blush of copper beneath the grime, as though metal were rusting in reverse.

Jinny took samples. Her reading came back inconsistent, oscillation between mineral and organic. She laughed nervously. Jim rubbed his watch.

I saw Jinny double-checking the readings after the lights died. Her flashlit silhouette in the dark, the undecipherable symbols… I remembered Egypt. Hieroglyphs. Spells. Raising Osiris, the breathing god.

I dreamt of the worn-out husks at tomb doors—skins cast off, waiting.

Janekon said it was unsafe; the mud was changing. He showed me a boot print filled with something like oil—black, but shot through with green light when the sun hit.

He said the men wouldn’t stay. Jim raised his voice, then their pay.
They left.

The forest grew louder—crickets, wind, birds calling at odd intervals. As if replaying the morning out of order.
I hadn’t slept.

Jim wanted to cut into the sphere before the crew arrived from Iquitos.
At dusk, he began the incision himself.

The first strike of metal made a hollow sound, deeper than I’d guessed. The vibration rippled through the soil, up my legs. Something enormous turning in its sleep.
I waited for the echo.

For a breath, the entire forest held still—no insects, no wind.
Then the hum came again, low and slow, rising from the mud.
Jinny said it was in key.

By morning, the camp felt wrong.

The generator, running again, though no one remembered fixing it. Jim said the sphere was stable.
My notes disagreed.

Page 43 repeated itself twice—the same handwriting, but smaller. Older. The ink faded.
The sketches from yesterday had changed, too—roots curving in patterns that looked almost architectural.

At noon, the compass needles began to circle, slow and purposeful. Like the watch.
The radio hissed with a voice we couldn’t place—a man counting softly in a language. Not quite Spanish.

Janekon’s men never returned, yet their footprints led to the pit and back. I followed them. Found my own boot treads pressed into the mud beside theirs, weathered and old.

Jim thought the sphere had stabilized.

But that night, the jungle flashed white.
I saw streets beneath the canopy, glass towers turned to root, a golden plaza for our excavation pit. In the plaza, figures kneeling. Men in robes, tools in their hands, a black sphere half-buried in the mud.
One of them looked up.
His face.
My own.
Kneeling in the same mud, staring at the sphere.
Behind him, others—dozens, hundreds—stretching back through the trees. Each one digging. The same moment, cycling forward and back.
The air filled with a fine mist, skins of men, thoughts drifting slowly above the water. Echoes.
The days no longer align.

Morning comes twice before sleep once.

Jinny asks if I remember the flight in. When did we leave?

A bird, non-native, begins to call.
Even Jim stops shouting. He listens, head tilted, waiting.

That night, I dream of pages turning in the mud, script flaking into the water.
My grandfather’s copy of the Book of the Dead …. I tried recalling the spell for awakening Osiris, but what came was only breathing.

It hasn’t stopped.
Not for days, or hours.
The forest holds still.

And in the stillness, I speak.

The words come from somewhere deep—my grandfather’s voice, beneath that. My mouth moves. The air thickens.

Behind me, I hear rotors. Distant but getting closer.

I kneel at the pit’s edge. My hands move on their own, pushing dirt over the sphere, patting it smoothly the way I was taught.

The mud is cold.
Old.
I feel something small and hard beneath my palm.

A stone.
Jade-green where the soil rubs away.
I hold it up to the light.
For a moment, I’m seven years old again, kneeling in my grandfather’s garden.
As ever, I drop it into the hole and cover it with dirt.
The helicopter is close now.
I should warn them.

I hope I see this.