An exerpt from David Orsini’s
The Enchantments

“I’m calling on the two of you to set things right,” Robert Steerforth says. “There’s much to be done, back there on Earth. There’s so much that both of you can do.”
      “To make things better?” Melanie asks him.
      She wants Robert to clarify more precisely the nature of this new assignment.
      “To influence what happens,” he answers her after a moment’s reflection. “To bring justice into the lives of the five persons that you will be meeting. To teach them how to accept responsibility for their behavior.”
      Now Captain Randall Johnson, Melanie’s husband, comes into it.
      “There’s so much we can do here,” he says. “There are so many lived-out lives to review and so many judgments to make about the newly dead.”
      Clearly, the captain and Melanie are uneasy. Their doubts are understandable. So Robert perceives as he considers their present situation. It is a long time since they completed their previous missions on Earth, millions of miles away. It is an even longer time since they walked along the various paths of the Earth as human beings who participated in the happenings of the era into which they had been born. It has been many decades since Randall died and several years since Melanie also sprang free of ordinary time. Right after that, they entered the world not of the dead. They left their dead selves far behind them, back there, within Earth that is time-trapped and temporary.
      Robert understands exactly what they are feeling and why. Despite his experience and his assurance as a Spirit, he too has sometimes had misgivings just before he embarked upon a new mission to Earth. As a reliable and undaunted Spirit, he now regards that territory as somewhat foreign. Time-trapped and fallible, Earth often disguises its dangers and masks its deviousness. Even the hardiest Spirits need to navigate its treacheries with steel-true courage and keen-eyed awareness.
      Sojourn, the new world that he and Melanie and the captain now inhabit, is also time-bound. But it is tethered to a more quickened, supernatural time that precedes the journey into the Eternal. Spirits, Shadows, and Shades live here. Apparitions, Phantoms, and Specters—their ghostly relatives—also reside here, roomless and unhoused as they navigate the waves and ripples…whorls and coils and spirals of always-mystical space. For those who are allowed to become embodied once again, Sojourn is a vast world that never seems crowded. Capacious rooms and long, wide halls and corridors go on expanding with sinuous velocity. Space keeps winding and curving and meandering even as it spreads its voluminous dimensions into still wider rooms, corridors, fields, plains, avenues, and whole cities. There is an Art Deco look to many of the rooms, and modernist architectural designs bring stylized individuality to private homes, corporate buildings, and thriving streets. The beauty of the decor within homes, inside business centers and halls of justice, and along public thoroughfares here in Sojourn melds with their functionality. Every room, every building, and every street offer precise amenities and understated usefulness.