Liora and the Relational Mythos: 1 Liora and the World-Tree

At the edge of a mist-wrapped valley, Liora found a tree unlike any she had seen. Its trunk glimmered with veins of silver, and its roots plunged deep into the earth, twisting and branching as if exploring unseen dimensions. Above, branches unfurled into clouds, each leaf shimmering like a tiny sun. This was the World-Tree, a living web of potential, where the possible and the actual entwined in endless patterns.

As Liora approached, the tree seemed to sense her presence. A root quivered, revealing a hidden alcove where miniature worlds glimmered like dew-laden constellations. Each was a perspectival actualisation — a cut through the tree’s immense structured potential. Some worlds showed the rise and fall of civilisations, others captured moments of quiet beauty or sorrow, each fleeting yet vivid.

She reached out and touched a silver leaf. Light coursed through her fingers, and the tree whispered: the branches above mirror the roots below, the heavens reflect the earth, and all possibilities exist simultaneously, waiting for construal. Liora realised that the World-Tree was not a static object but a system of potential meaning, enacted differently each time attention fell upon it.

With care, she traced a path along a root, and a garden of possibilities bloomed around her: a phoenix rose in miniature, rivers spiralled through crystalline valleys, and stars wheeled in intricate patterns overhead. Each emergence was a reminder: mythic beings, lands, and events are not “fixed” realities, but relational phenomena — they exist as potential, actualised through attention, and lived through experience.

By twilight, Liora sat beneath the canopy, feeling the pulse of the World-Tree in every heartbeat. She understood that myths, like the tree, are not merely stories to be observed; they are systems to be enacted, explored, and experienced. Each encounter — each branch touched, each root followed — was a relational cut, a moment where potential became intelligible in lived, first-order experience.

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Relational Ontology in the Story:

• System / structured potential: the World-Tree itself, encompassing all latent mythic possibilities.

• Instance / perspectival actualisation: each miniature world or pattern Liora encounters.

• Construal / first-order phenomenon: her lived, immersive experience of the tree’s marvels.

This story establishes the mythology series, showing that mythic structures, like natural and literary phenomena, are relationally enacted: the infinite potential of meaning only emerges through perspective, attention, and experience.