2 Liora and the Fish of the Imagination

The day was a silvered quiet, and Liora wandered along a winding stream that whispered secrets she could almost hear. Sunlight flickered through the trees, catching motes of dust like tiny stars suspended in air. She had come seeking nothing in particular, yet she felt certain that something extraordinary awaited.

Then she saw them: fish, glimmering and impossibly vivid, darting just above the water’s surface. Not ordinary fish, mind you — these were fish of imagination, their scales reflecting colours that had no names, shapes that bent and twisted as if obeying some secret logic. Each flick of a tail sent ripples that seemed to alter the very air around her, like the brushstroke of a painter painting the sky.

Liora reached out, and the first fish — a startlingly translucent creature — slipped into her hands. For a moment, it felt as solid as a stone, thrumming with potential. Then, as she looked closer, it shimmered and reshaped itself, revealing not one possibility but many: a forest of glinting fins, a cascade of light, a song vibrating in her mind. She understood, with a thrill of clarity, that the fish had never existed outside her grasp, and yet it was more real for being realised, even if only for an instant.

A second fish leapt from the water, ghastly and gleaming, almost frightening in its audacity. Liora hesitated, remembering the first fish’s fleeting beauty. Yet when she caught it, she discovered that each fish carried its own climate of the mind — a tiny world of structured potential, waiting to be actualised in perspective. Some she could hold briefly; others slipped away, spinning into the endless current of the stream, yet leaving traces of possibility that lingered like starlight in the corners of her vision.

By sunset, Liora had grasped a small shoal of these marvellous creatures. She placed them carefully in a crystal basin, each a perspectival actualisation of potential, shimmering and mutable, alive with the first-order phenomenon of experience. And she knew: if she returned tomorrow, the river would teem again with fish, new and impossible, waiting for her to see, to grasp, and to translate into her own luminous understanding.