Recovered from blue lake silt layers of one of the Roots of Life deltas, the Trilax Mechanism remains an anomaly that defies our established understanding of famtohorology and astrometry.
While initial studies dismissed the device as a primitive navigational tool, recent reverse-engineering efforts suggest a complexity that further illudes our understanding of ancient technologies.
This represents the fourth attempt by the collegiate to construct a functional replica. Based on the fragmented gear ratios found in the ruins as well as current observations of the known lunar movements, we believe we have had some success modeling the elliptical dance of the six known celestial bodies.
However, the mechanism’s primary logic remains a point of contention. As some of the ancient scrolls found to allude to the device suggest, the mechanism appears to anchor its entire calculus to the orbit of Zil—the Moon of Chaos. We postulate that this was a necessity: perhaps the only way to map the erratic influence of the other moons is to measure them against the inconsistency of chaos itself...
Despite our progress in mimicking the rotation of the lower cycles, the model remains incomplete. The central arbiter gear—the component theorized to govern the interaction between the reference point and the outer rings—is missing from any known records. More importantly, its place in the workings does not appear to make any psychical, geometric sense, and recreation efforts thus far seem to be missing something fundamental and/or entirely unknown to the workings.
Without this keystone, our predictions are merely approximations.
And then there is the seventh variable. The schematics clearly indicate a place for a final, heavy, but small and unbalanced cog. However, no corresponding moon has ever been observed in its path that might speak to this missing component.
Is it a phantom gear? A placeholder for a moon that has since fallen? Or does the mechanism count something else entirely? Until we find the missing shard—or the moon it was built to track—the Trilax Mechanism will remain a beautiful, maddening enigma.