the Things Forest Could Not See: A Novel of Erdara, Book Three, Part I

Absolutely. For Part I, we should remove anything that promises the squirrel civilization, temporal displacement, or the later embassy arc, because those belong to Part II.Here's the revised description: The forest was never empty. The Technocracy simply could not see what lived there.When a routine forestry operation begins suffering impossible equipment failures, Julius Cassius assumes there must be a rational explanation.Roots grow around machines in hours. Water appears inside sealed compartments. Workers hear voices their computers cannot detect. Pale figures move between trees but leave no trace on thermal sensors.Eventually, Julius does the only reasonable thing left.He calls an exorcist.But the ancient forest of Sylvarenne is not haunted.It is inhabited.Hidden among its living trees is an elven civilization thousands of years old, surrounded by spirits that can perceive life and magic but cannot perceive the Technocracy's artificial intelligence at all. Stranger still, the Technocracy's machines cannot properly perceive them either.What begins as a strange industrial accident becomes a first-contact crisis between civilizations whose definitions of reality do not quite overlap.As humans, elves, dwarves, werewolves, spirits, artificial minds, and one old wanderer with far too many names struggle to understand one another, they are forced to confront a deeper question: What happens when something is real, intelligent, and standing directly in front of you, but your world has no way to perceive it?The Things the Forest Could Not See, Part I is the first half of the third Erdara novel, a science-fantasy story about perception, first contact, intelligence, misunderstanding, and the dangerous certainty that nothing exists simply because you cannot see it