Liora’s Literary Encounters: 1 Liora and the Fish of the Imagination

The morning light spilled across the meadow like liquid gold, and Liora wandered along a silvered stream that whispered secrets she could almost hear. Dew-laden grass bent beneath her steps, sparkling with tiny constellations, each a hint of worlds unseen. She had come seeking nothing, yet she felt certain that the day would hold marvels beyond ordinary perception.

And there they were: fish, glimmering with impossible colours, darting just above the water’s surface. Not ordinary fish, mind you — these were fish of imagination, their scales reflecting forms that seemed to shimmer between possible shapes, as if the river itself were a mirror of potential. Each flick of a tail sent ripples that bent the light, twisting reality in playful, fleeting arcs.

Liora reached out, and the first fish — translucent, trembling with a subtle inner glow — slipped into her hands. For a moment, it felt solid, real, and yet it was more than a thing; it was a perspectival actualisation of potential. She saw not just one possibility but a myriad: a forest of luminous fins, a cascade of prismatic 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 was more vivid for being actualised.

Another fish leapt, ghastly yet exquisite, scales like shifting shadows and light. Liora hesitated, recalling the fleeting beauty of the first, but when she caught it, she felt the climate of its potential — a tiny world of structured possibilities, each waiting to be enacted through perspective. Some fish she could hold; others slipped into the stream, returning to the river of uninstantiated potential, leaving only a shimmer in the air and a sense of what might have been.

By sunset, Liora had collected a small shoal, placing them carefully in a crystal basin. Each fish was an instance, a momentary actualisation of potential; each shimmer, flicker, and sound was construal, the first-order phenomenon of experience. Watching them, she knew that the river would teem again tomorrow, new fish leaping, ready to be perceived, grasped, and translated into understanding.

In the hush of twilight, Liora realised the truth of her discovery: the world is not a fixed collection of objects, but a field of structured potentials, enlivened only through perspective, attention, and imagination. And in that interplay, life itself became luminous — an endless dance of seeing, grasping, and being present with the marvels of the possible.

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This story foregrounds:

• System / structured potential: the river and its teeming, possible fish.

• Instance / perspectival actualisation: each fish Liora grasps.

• Construal / first-order phenomenon: the lived experience, mutable and vivid, that emerges in her awareness.

It makes relational ontology tangible, showing how potential is enacted through perspective, rather than passively existing, and how meaning emerges relationally, not representationally.