At this point in our adventure you may well be asking why I, a manifestation from another world, is narrating a story that seems to unfold within the mind of one of your humans? Let me explain.

My name is Eveline, and I met Tina by accident when she was a little girl. We met by ‘accident’ three times, if you can believe that, while we were both playing near an ornamental well built by Tina’s father. I live in a different world, and although we share the same spaces, we are normally invisible to you. Occasionally, we feel a mystical resonance, a sense of intense innocence with one of your humans, and we can show ourselves briefly but only once. After my first encounter with Tina, I couldn’t help myself. She was too innocent, too full of wonder, so I returned. On the third occasion, of course, it was noticed, and I was grounded by the Council of Shadows. Tina never saw me again, and yet here I am, inside her head, an observer with complete access to her five senses and to her most intimate thoughts and emotions.

How I got here requires me to share with you something of my world, myself and my place in my world. Compared to your world, ours might appear more ethereal, with a reverent alignment to the harmonics of nature. Your world, with its bold sunlight and rushing pace, feels distant from the subtleties we cherish. We find beauty in the slow caress of a breeze through moss-covered branches, in the quiet song of leaves that hum with ancient wisdom.

We dwell in damp, misty wooded copses, cloaked under a veil of perpetual twilight. While you might perceive this as shadowed or dim, to us it is a realm of delicate radiance, where every contour shimmers faintly, hinting at the life that thrives unseen. The air carries an aura of knowing, as though it remembers every whisper and sigh that has passed through it. Here, the rhythms of existence are gentle but purposeful, like the steady beat of a human heart or the endless ebb and flow of a tide.

Our world breathes with an unspoken harmony, a resonance that connects each element to the next. The faint glow of soft lichen, the glittering sheen of dew on grass, the rustle of vibrant autumn leaves falling to the earth, and the soundless movement of petals opening and closing are all woven into a tapestry of quiet splendour. To us, twilight is not a fleeting time of day but a state of being, an eternal now where past, present, and possibility are suspended together in balance.

Our means of communication will appear as ethereal to you as our world. We have no voice, no concept of sound waves creating noises, and therefore no words or language as you understand them. Instead, we exist within the heartbeat of nature, a delicate and intricate web of signals flowing through every part of existence.

Each tremor in the air and every ripple in the water forms part of an ever-present symphony of awareness. A shift in the breeze might carry a question, the rustle of leaves might hold an answer, and the hum of a butterfly’s wings might embody a shared memory. The flow of a stream can contain a library of long-forgotten truths. Our world speaks not in sentences but in harmonics, where meaning unfolds through the patterns of nature, layer upon layer, intricate and complete. These are not merely sensations to us; they are expressions, thoughts, and emotions passing from one being to another, unspoken yet deeply understood. It is through these subtle variations in nature’s essence and vitality field that we hear, feel, and communicate.

We, like you, cannot reconstruct the paths of history; time travel is as unreachable for us as it is for you. Yet our perception of time is untethered from your rigid chronology. Without the weight of a fixed form, we are not constrained to perceiving moments in linear succession. To you, the flow of our moments might appear impossible with events apparently happening out of sequence.

For us, the moments that ripple through an extended present, what you might call the immediate past, present, and near future, can fold into one another like overlapping waves in a pond. Experiencing time for us means feeling its presence and anticipations simultaneously, all held within the resonance of a single, fluid extended moment.

Though fleeting, this expanded here and now allows us to sense the stirrings of what was and what is just becoming concurrently, as if time itself breathes in and out rather than marches forward. Beyond this extended moment, however, we are as bound by time’s flow as any other.

This is the world I know, the world that shaped me, and the world that I carry within me, for it is not merely a home; it is an inseparable part of who I am.

The name, Eveline, has undertones with the idiosyncrasies of the Hazelnut tree often associated with wisdom for which I still search but not fertility, as it is in your world, for that does not exist in mine as I will soon explain. When stillness becomes me and my vitality slows to its nadir, I can emit a radiance visible in the human world of pure white, tinged with the shadow of pink ash at its extremities. I am certain that one of your gardeners once witnessed this transformation, for there is a Dahlia, in your world, bearing my name in hues that mirror this very essence. One day, I hope one of your poets will see it and write the line: ‘The light that emanated from her was not simply bright, but a soft radiance with the purity of white, kissed at the edges by the faintest blush of pink ash—an ephemeral glow, like the remnants of a sunset fading into night.’ And they will write it about me.

Back to our adventure, The Keepers of Lore, our gathering of the wise and each a descendant of Titania, have honoured me with the rare privilege of sharing this story, though I do not understand why they have done so. And through their grace, the Council of Shadows, our protectors of harmony, have permitted me to receive schooling in your words so I may narrate it to you.

I am an inexperienced sister, with only a few growth instantiations to my name. As such, I am still learning to harness our naturael forces, which are only just beginning to awaken within me. As I mentioned earlier, we have no equivalent to fertility; our world propagates and matures in entirely different ways. We each undergo a series of instantiations, each lasting the length of a human adult life, that determine our lifespan, purpose, and level of elderling.

Each instantiation begins with the selection of a human, followed by the imposition of the Essenscape onto their life. The Essenscape is fundamentally a trial, an enduring process of monitoring and evaluating the subject’s humanity. The term itself merges the assessment of their “essence” with their potential to “escape” the bonds of humanity and demonstrate their ability to join our world, hence the name Essenscape. The criteria for success, as established by the Council of Shadows, are stringent, leaving no room for even the slightest deviation.

At my humble level, all I can offer the human in return is the enhancement of one attribute and the engineering of one life event. I can whisper to their conscience, but it is a feeble and normally unconvincing whisper. In return, I gain, or perhaps assume, complete access as an observer to their thoughts and emotions. Although not their memories as human memory is a complex, highly subjective, and imprecise realm. It is corrupted by wishful thoughts and skewed by misunderstandings. Overall, it is far too dangerous a place for us to operate, except for the most accomplished members of our world.

When an instantiation nears its end, the human’s life and how they lived it is assessed by the Council of Shadows. If their humanity is judged exceptional and unfaltering, they are invited to join our world in place of the ending awaiting them in theirs. As a novice, they then choose their first human, impose the Essenscape, and begin their own developmental journey in our world.

The instigator of the instantiation grows stronger, wiser, and more proficient in harnessing the naturael forces if the assessment is successful. However, should the assessment fail, the instigator fades, and with too much fading, their life force will be extinguished.

On whom you impose the Essenscape is crucial to our development and survival. Its complexity is, as you might say, mind blowing. So much remains unknown and unpredictable, influenced by the choices of an immature being from another world. Yet it is this very intricacy that makes it beautiful, organic, and perfectly suited to its purpose. Every aspect must be seamlessly integrated into the evaluation, challenging our abilities and stretching them to their fullest potential.

This is where Tina permanently enters my world and I hers. Over the years, I had furtively revisited my childhood friend, perhaps subconsciously, though we do not truly have that state, but for the sake of the narrative, it fits, assessing her as my next choice for the Essenscape.

Almost forty years ago, I took the step with confidence to place my future in the hands of Tina and her interpretation of the grace of humanity. I enhanced her intuitive powers and kept the engineered life event in reserve. I bestowed upon her, as ancient tradition demands, her identity, her name for this world. I had once heard her father say, ‘Cor, Tina… you take my breath away, you do. Just look at you… like the sun breaking through the mists.’ This inspired me to call her Cortina, a sleek, elegant name that evokes in me imagery of a graceful, strong yet refined presence.