Cedra, my Cedar Dryad Mentor, had shown me the glassy fragments in dewdrops. Helen’s stories came alive by the fire and waited behind a tapestry. She taught me first to make connections.
The Hidden Library
Sarah and Helen discovered it long before I came to The Estate. After a long day of unpacking, they explored the remote ground-floor wing of the manor. Like two young girls sneaking through dimly lit hallways, whispering imagined unknowns in shadows, behind closed doors, or in the statue nooks. When they came to a dusty, draped hanging, like a medieval tapestry, Sarah whisked it aside to reveal a room with walls lined with bookshelves.
“We’ve found the best part of the house!” Helen exclaimed when Elizabeth Silverton’s Library came into view, her personal enclave of leather-bound books and stacks of parchments and folios.
I gripped Helen’s hand as she walked me there for the first time. “We’re going to a secret storyland where centuries of learning lives.” When she drew aside the tapestry that concealed the entry, she mirrored my excited gasp, and said, “It’s time you knew about this place!”
So, it was Grandma Helen who introduced me to the magic of books. She nurtured me with stories and ancient myths of unseen forces. She enticed me with tales that prepared me for what I did not know but would one day need. Her voice was the magic that fed my imagination and helped me to understand who I am. The Hidden Library became a sanctuary of ways of knowing.
While Sarah documented my growth and development, Helen taught me through fairy tales, reflections, thresholds, and both the magic of nature and the unnatural. She eased me into the knowledge of passages; how to be between worlds. I was beginning to understand.
Antique volumes told of gods and goddesses, battles and love, philosophy, literature, and lore. The wisdom and weight of time and knowledge, heroes, monsters, villains, and fabled realms of questions and wonder.
Candlelight would have danced in the leaded windows in Elizabeth’s time casting shadows like symbols from Celtic, Norse, Germanic, Roman, Arabic, Indian, and Chinese mythology. She would have gathered with colleagues and friends to read, recite, discuss, and ponder. And Sarah and Helen would return through the years to rustle pages, imagining the scratching of quills, and life in old parchment.
Helen selected stories about mirrors: “Reflections were once believed to be glimpses into other worlds,” she explained one afternoon, showing me illustrations in a book of Celtic mythology. “The mirror might reveal what existed on the other side of a boundary.”
Secure in my bedroom that evening, I stared at my mirror and asked what was behind the glass, and it rippled in reply. Sarah would later document my experiences with reflective surfaces as “anomalous reflective phenomena.” Helen called it “the sight.”
“Grandma, tell me about the girl who could see through water,” One gray March afternoon in the parlor, I pressed against Helen’s warmth in the wingback chair, a bright, cozy fire in the hearth.
“Ah, Muirenn of the Three Wells,” she said, once again transforming an ordinary moment into a timeless memory. “She lived between two worlds, belonged fully to neither, but was welcomed by both. In the misty hills of ancient Ireland, lived three sisters who guarded three sacred wells. The first well, positioned to catch the morning light, was the Well of Memory, its waters revealing forgotten knowledge of one’s past. The second, nestled in a stone circle that caught the midday sun, was the Well of Present Sight, granting clear vision of things as they truly are. The third, catching the last rays of sunset, was the Well of Becoming, showing glimpses of possible futures. The sisters warned all who came: ‘Look into the waters, but do not lean too closely. Those with untrained sight may fall between what is and what seems to be.’ For water reflections are thresholds that can be crossed by those with the blood, but without proper training, one might become lost between worlds.”
The story frightened me, but it felt familiar. The way Muirenn saw faces in still water that others dismissed as tricks of light. How she learned to anchor herself with iron and cedar before looking too deeply into reflective surfaces. The warnings that water reflections hold even more danger than those of glass or crystal.
“Grandma,” I interrupted, “these aren’t really fairy tales, are they?”
Helen’s gray eyes met mine with something that might have been a relief.
“What do you think, dear one?”
“I think they’re for children like me.”
Helen hugged me to her. “Very wise. The best stories are both entertainment and guidance.”
Her stories wove magical narratives with annotations, like margin notes to explain practical applications, Her folklore blended wisdom embedded in legend and fantastical plots. Her mirror stories showed both reflections and possibilities.
The Reflection Pool
I was fascinated by the circular water feature, a mystical element woven into Elizabeth Silverton’s original design. Encircled by an array of blooming plants, it replicated the meditation, reflection pools of medieval monks. Sarah was delighted with my interest, seeing it as scientific curiosity, edged with art and fantasy.
Neither Sarah nor Helen notice how the water ripples without wind when I am near it, nor how scenes and buildings not on The Estate appear in slants of sunlight. Eleris watches from within the water like patterns of light and motion beneath the surface. When I move closer, the water laps at the edge, to break up the reflection, causing me to step back from fascination.
“The water shows different pictures,” I told Charles when I was six while he worked on the filter one day. He didn’t seem surprised.
“Reflections can be tricky,” he said. “Best to look at them from a safe distance.”
Later that week, Sarah found that The Garden paths leading to the pond had subtly shifted, resulting in a roundabout route, preventing me from approaching the water directly. She documented the apparent change, at the same time forming a rational explanation:
“I must have misremembered” or “seasonal growth must have changed my perspective” of The Garden’s layout.
Eleris manifests, her form shimmering near the water.
She’s drawn to reflective surfaces already, she says to Cedra and Selwyn. The mirror-sight awakens earlier in her than in previous generations.
Too soon for direct training, Cedra says, but not too soon for our protection.
Eleris replies, I have diverted the water’s invitation, to create safer reflections until she is ready for deeper seeing.
Sarah saw that the water lilies had bloomed overnight, and she recorded it as an anomaly. What she didn’t see was that lily pads broke the surface into reflective fragments that interrupted images. It was my Guardians who had set up protection, so I would be shielded from what I was not prepared to visualize.
Dream Seeds
Sarah journaled her memory of my dreamscape. I wondered: Where do dreams begin, and where do they end? :
By eight, Stella had begun to show unusual botanical intuition. Plants thrived under her care; seeds germinated more quickly when she planted them, and the garden responded to her emotional states in ways I struggled to explain. I couldn’t record her dreams, but Mom and I worked out that they held consistent patterns that visited her three nights each month, always coinciding with specific lunar phases. She described such dreams later to me, as having wandered through gardens that resembled the Silverton Estate, but its plantings didn’t belong together. She told me that she received wordless instructions about which herbs could be safely combined, and which must never touch.
Stella would arrange her breakfast fruits in patterns like ancient protective symbols…Or was it my imagination? One morning, Charles came in with a basket of vegetables from his kitchen garden and set them on the kitchen countertop, when Stella was having breakfast at the table.
Charles remarked, “The patterns speak.”
Stella easily replied, “Yes, they help me remember my dreams.”
Charles said in his enigmatic way, which Stella had always been comfortable with, “Dreams plant important seeds, although, what grows from them may not appear until seasons later.”
Together, Selwyn, Cedra, and Eleris were a reliable resource on botanical properties. They knew what plants could stabilize or disrupt mirror-sight, and the remedies for threshold-crossing confusion. They knew which plants would strengthen boundaries between worlds.
Selwyn orchestrates my dream-teachings, entering my sleeping mind as patterns of growth and decay, as cycles of planting and harvesting. She plants knowledge like seeds to germinate when I need them. Satisfied that the dream-knowledge is taking root, Selwyn says to Cedra and Eleris: She creates protections instinctively. The blood remembers even when the conscious mind does not yet understand!
Mirror Games
One fall evening when I was eight, while helping Charles collect seeds, I was startled by the water reflection in the Iron Fountain. The face I saw seemed like other. I gasped. Charles said nothing, but I noticed he tapped the fountain as he passed it. That night I dreamt of blue Canterbury Bells and wind chimes, and I woke up with the faint scent of flowers on my pillow.
Sarah didn’t see the faces in my reflections, but noted in her journal:
Unusual light patterns in fountain water...
They weren’t always clear enough to frighten me, but I sensed that mirrors contained more for me than for her: Glimpses of copper hair, green and amber eyes like mine, and of faint figures beyond the glass.
The mirror doesn’t show what it should. My reflection is broken into playing in The Garden, a baby wrapped in a pink blanket, and some woman I don’t recognize. The glass ripples like water, like images breathing.
The fae keep their distance, allowing me to sense the mirror-sight awakening without overwhelming me with full visions. Eleris monitors my perceptions, making sure that I am only seeing particles, for now.
Cedra said, Mirror games help us practice.
“Why does it matter how we look at reflections?”
Cedra replied, People can get lost in what they see. They forget to stay anchored in the world around them.
Observing me from a distance, Sarah didn’t see Cedra. She thought I was pretending, as I looked around; here and there.
When the bathroom mirror fogged and there was no steam; opaque before clearing, Sarah told me it was because sudden temperature change caused condensation. I assumed the mirror had noticed my growing self-awareness. “The mirrors are waking up,” I told my stuffed animals that night, arranging them in a protective circle around my bed. “They know I can see them now.”
My Guardians observe with measured approval.
She perceives the thresholds earlier than expected, Selwyn says.
The scientist provides structure and anchoring, says Eleris.
Sarah’s documentation creates stability even as she denies what she records, Cedra added.
Fae influence was still subtle; arranging situations, rather than teaching, and creating safe opportunities for my independent discovery.
To be continued next Wednesday: Sarah uncovers Elizabeth’s design. The Garden kept secrets for a reason.
Thanks for reading!
With love,
Mel and Islay
Love the way the revelations occur, like ripples in time and water, and the way protection and guidance hovers near with love and care. It's so important to be aware and strong on the threshold of sight with iron and cedar. Beautiful work, Mary Ellen!
Love the pictures