The Otherworld Revealed
The crossing was a step. One moment she stood in her kitchen in Galway with the kettle on the stove and the radio muttering in the corner; the next she stood somewhere else, and the sight hit her like the sea — vast, overwhelming, a flood of colour and light pouring into eyes that had never known either. She fell to her knees, not in pain but in awe, and the tears that ran down her face were the first she had ever shed for beauty.
Tir na nOg was not a place so much as a state of being. The trees were silver and their leaves were gold, and the rivers ran with water so clear it seemed to be made of crystallised air, and the sky was the purple-blue of a bruise turning to heather, lit by three moons that cast overlapping shadows in rose and amber and pale green. The Fair Folk moved through this landscape like fish through water, their forms shifting with each step — now tall, now small, now barely there at all, now so present they seemed to occupy more space than their bodies contained. Eileen saw them, truly saw them, and understood why the old stories warned against looking too long at the Sidhe: not because they were terrible, but because they were so beautiful that the human eye, once opened to them, might refuse to see anything else.
They led her to the hall where the gates stood. Two pillars of living wood, oak and ash intertwined, their branches forming an arch through