Microscopic spores made from crystalline structures and photons drift silently into the atmosphere. They fall with the Northern Lights, enter the forests, and bond with the vast mycelial networks beneath the surface of the Earth.
The forest begins to change. Trees glow softly in the darkness. Mycelial networks carry strange new signals. Animals begin responding to patterns they could never perceive before.
Somewhere in that hidden realm that humans cannot see, a fae healer named Lirien faces the alien arrival head-on. What she experiences is beyond anything her kin could have imagined. Most incredible of all, her records of the event find their way into the Lumen Archive, compiled twenty-eight years later.
This is the premise behind my newly published story, The Lumenkin: A Story of Alien Arrival and Ecological Awakening.
It began, as many of my Visions to Words stories do, with a collection of images. I had created pictures of strange little winged beings who seemed part fairy, part grey alien, and found myself wondering what they were. Eventually, a much bigger question emerged: What if an alien form of life fell from the sky and merged with all life on Earth?
The Lumenkin became my answer.
It is science fiction, but also eco-fiction: a story about photonic intelligence, mycelial networks, transformation, consciousness, parallel realms on Earth, and the increasingly blurry line between scientific observation and enchantment.
Here is an extract from The Lumenkin:
The following extract comes from the Sky Rite, a traditional fae gathering that takes place on the night the Lumen Event reaches the forest. It is written from Lirien’s point a view:
“We had arrived in the Clearing of Open Branches and somehow, it appeared larger than I remembered. At its center, ancient volcanic rock protruded from the ground in slow spirals, polished smooth by centuries of wind and rain.
As we assembled around the perimeter, the shuffling of our feet ceased and our labored breathing quieted. Only the smaller sounds remained: lantern-moths retreating beneath fern fronds, stream birds squabbling about nothing, and the quicksilver rustle of lizards among bark. Then came the slow inward turning of the trees, holding us in the space for the Sky Rite.
The space felt unusually awake.
I do not know why, but I thought of the human realm, then. Separated from our own by only a thin veil, it was never far from my perception, but in this moment it felt even closer.
I had often thought of the terrible loneliness of their world, but it struck me more profoundly, in that moment. My throat tightened with sadness, and I feared I might cry in front of everyone.
I closed my eyes and told myself to let go but as I exhaled my sadness, and breathed in the joy of the Sky Rite, I felt something even more profound: our beloved Earth was holding tension. Not just the conscious beings living on her surface, but she, herself, was worried.
I looked upward because I knew something was there. And I was right. I saw it. Faint green ribbons were moving almost imperceptibly across our sky. Auroras. Unseasonal. Beautiful, but wrong.
None of my kin appeared to notice. Their wing-light had dimmed toward contemplative blue as they were preparing for the opening of the ritual. No sense of panic moved around the circle.
I wanted to shout out, ‘something is wrong!’ but speaking was forbidden.
The auroras pulsed, then, like a breath moving through sleeping lungs. Again, none of my kin saw it, because their gaze was on the ground, respectfully awaiting the Honored Elder, Maerith, to open the ritual. She stepped into the center of the circle, her wings translucent with age, carrying a bowl of mirrored water she had gathered from the deepest pool. Then she raised it slowly toward the sky, officially opening the Sky Rite.
A single inhalation from my gathered kin followed; a soft collective intake that rippled through the clearing. Then exhalation. Again and again, until our rhythms synchronized and we were breathing as one.
The effect was immediate, and the forest knew it. Leaves trembled though no wind moved them. Somewhere deep underground, roots shifted against stone with a sound like something vast and ancient awakening. All I could do was close my eyes and feel it. Feel everything.
We fae have always known the atmosphere around Earth carries memory like emotional residue: storms retain traces of ancient migrations, sunlight carries impressions of extinct forests, and auroras whisper of distant magnetic tides beyond our world.
Once, long ago, humans had listened this way, too. At least that was what our oldest stories claimed. But then they built walls between one another and filled the air with the sounds of machines, signals, urgency, and hunger. Even from the hidden forest realms, I sometimes felt their turbulence just beyond the veil that separated our realms: billions of frantic minds colliding like a swarm of insects trapped inside a clay pot. I had spent the last two decades learning how to deflect the sensations from those poor souls, so why I was overwhelmed by them in that moment, I did not know.
Tellen glanced toward me. ‘What is it?’ he whispered.
‘Nothing,’ I lied.
The second phase of the Sky Rite began with tone. No instruments were used because the sounds emerged directly from our bodies: low harmonic humming shaped collectively through breath and chest resonance. One by one we joined a shared frequency that no one needed to name until the clearing vibrated with a single layered chord.
I felt it race up my spine. The trees felt it too, and their leaves shuddered. Tiny lights appeared beneath the roots of the great trees that encircled us. At first they appeared as faint green pulses, but soon glowed brighter then threaded through fungal veins and moss beds. I could see it all, yet the others could not. Again, I wanted to shout and point, but I stopped myself.
Several nearby wings refracted sudden flashes of impossible color as though the remaining daylight was folding itself incorrectly, yet the hundreds of lungs continued to open and close together with such precision that an onlooker would think we were one being. The Sky Rite was unfolding just as it was meant to.
Until the sky tilted sideways, as though Earth had slipped half a degree out of alignment with itself. The sky darkened then, just enough for the auroras to be seen so clearly, they were impossible to ignore. Still, my kin did not notice! Yet their humming matched it unconsciously as a fragile softness moved through the air, suspended inside the collective trance.
The auroras were speaking to us, and they were doing so by joining our Sky Rite. I saw their light slowly spiral downward, emerald threaded with deep violet. Their movement resembled thought more than weather. As if that was not enough, I became aware of the human realm again. I felt the pressure of the humans’ emotions hit me: urgency, panic and awe so intense, it almost knocked me backward.
Instinctively, I clutched Tellen’s arm for balance. His eyelids opened reluctantly, like the petals of a new moon lily, revealing the whites of his eyes for a moment too long before his golden irises rolled down and stared at me.
‘Sorry,’ I whispered.
The strange sensation vanished as quickly as it had arrived, leaving only the lingering ache of contact with the human realm. Without warning, my eyes filled with tears. I wiped them roughly, willing my awareness to be only on my kin, our realm, and the Sky Rite.
That is when something shifted in our awareness. The humming ceased and all fae looked upward. Finally, they saw what I had seen moments earlier: the auroras descending lower than any natural light should reach. Thin curtains of green-violet radiance drifted silently downward, delivering tiny crystalline particles that shimmered like frost suspended in the cold.
No fae moved. Even the trees were silent. The entire forest became still beyond stillness. Then a new sound began. So soft, it was barely audible: a tone descending from the sky and the tiny green particles suspended within it. The trees knew it, then. Their trunks vibrated and their leaves trembled in harmonic sympathy. The bowl of mirrored water, now at Elder Maerith’s feet, recoiled like a creature unwilling to be seen by a predator.
Many wings flared involuntarily as the crystalline particles drifted down upon us with the lazy certainty of snowfall through still air. They briefly caught in our hair, wings, and the leaves, before the forest itself seemed to inhale them. That is when I knew, with absolute certainty, our Sky Rite had become a beacon.
Beside me, Tellen whispered, ‘Lirien…’
I could not answer.
Beneath the tones in the trees, beneath the auroral pulse and the shimmering rain of crystalline light, I heard something else: a voice without language. It was ancient, vast, and gentle beyond comprehension. And for one impossible moment, I understood that something new had arrived on Earth. The humans knew it, too, I could tell.
No command was given, yet our circle broke at once. Wings folded. Feet began to move. The elders drew the younglings inward and led the retreat into the forest. We all followed, like one swift, silent tide. No one ran, but every step carried urgency. Bare feet struck the ground, robes whispered against bark and fern, and long hair flowed behind moving bodies while the tiny green particles vanished into the undergrowth.”
Afterword
Writing The Lumenkin reminded me why I enjoy speculative fiction so much. It is a genre that gives us permission to begin with an impossible question and then take that question seriously enough to discover where it leads.
In this case, a collection of strange fairy-alien portraits led me into fungal communication, photonic intelligence, atmospheric phenomena, ecological consciousness, parallel realms and the question of whether observation itself might eventually become a form of communion.
After finishing and publishing The Lumenkin, I did something I had never previously done for an individual story. I created an illustrated guide to give my subscribers an entry into the world I had created with this story. If you’d like to explore that world for yourself, I’ve made The Lumenkin: An Illustrated Guide to the Lumen Event available as a free download. It introduces Lirien’s world, the Lumen Event, the photonic spores, the changing forest and some of the ideas behind the story, accompanied by the artwork that helped inspire it.
[Download The Lumenkin: An Illustrated Guide to the Lumen Event free here.]
And if you happen to look up at the Northern Lights afterwards and find yourself wondering whether something might be falling through them…well, that’s how science fiction stories always begin.