You’ve entered the land of spirits, where animism is the basic fact of existence.
To get to the Shadow you must either cross The Gauntlet between worlds or find one of the Spirit Irises called Loci. If you do, the Shadow arises in an exaggerated parallel.
Werewolves are natives of the Shadow and material realms. Mages invade the Shadow instead. They’re almost never welcome visitors, and the spirits offer them grudging respect at best.
Every location in the material realm possesses a Shadow counterpart. So do most objects, though in some cases, fallen trees and wrecked buildings still stand, maintained by the spiritual significance they possessed while they stood in the ordinary world. They’re made of ephemera, like everything else in the Shadow. Anyone and anything that crosses over changes into ephemeral matter, and automatically changes back when it returns to the material plane. Anything that began as ephemera arrives in the material world in Twilight.
Some places in the Shadow are of different shapes and sizes than their material counterparts. An old mansion has extra rooms, or a forest that has been cut back to a modest stand of trees in the material realm might contain miles of twisted old growth in the Shadow. A few places have no material parallel at all. To reach them, you need to cross The Gauntlet and travel the Shadow, beyond mirrored locations. Mysterium texts say that some of these places are Irises to other realms: the Lower Depths, certain Emanations, and even the Astral Realm (though falling unconscious in the Shadow to enter the Astral is probably a bad idea).
The dominant Resonance of a place determines its characteristics, because it generates Essence that permeates the region, and hosts the spirits best able to feed on it. Places with no parallel are emergent phenomena, growing from the energies of adjacent realms and greater spiritual connections that mages don’t fully understand.
The Shadow teems with spirits. There’s a spirit for almost every living thing, object, and emotion, and spirits that represent species and evolutionary roles. For instance, every cat has a spirit, but there’s a greater cat spirit as well, and a spirit of stalking predators. Mages would say that all of these belong to the same spirit choir (see below), but the spirits themselves might not agree.
Humans and most formerly human creatures do not have representative spirits. Some mages believe that the human “spirit” might be an aspect of the soul. Werewolves on the other hand are half-spirit, half-flesh in one being, and simply take both sides with them wherever they go.
Spirits with broader portfolios are usually stronger, but this is not always the case. They obey a hierarchy set by raw power and ecological niche. The meat and drink of all spirits is Essence, the energy generated by Resonance. Essence flows across the entire Shadow, but is especially concentrated around ley lines. Few spirits feed upon raw Essence, however. Instead, they hunt one another.
System
The Spirit Arcanum and other rules for spirits cover the rules for dealing with the Shadow. In addition, spells that utilize the Spirit Arcanum benefit from a –2 die penalty to Paradox rolls when cast in the Shadow.
The Spirit Hierarchy
Mages don’t speak the language of spirits without magic to translate it. At best, they bastardize a few words of the language to fill in anything they can’t describe in the High Speech. Spirits usually find this presumptuous, even cause for outrage, and can’t be fooled by any means into thinking a mage barking “Dihar” (another name for Incarna) is a native.
So the Awakened use terms that have evolved among human students of Shadow-lore. Spirits still don’t care for these, but at least the speaker acknowledges her foreign origin by using the following titles.
Mote
The insects and microbes of the Shadow. Motes possess a Rank of 0. This is not to say that the spirits of small things are always so weak, however. Mosquitos may manifest as Motes, but if enough of them gather into a cloud, the bloodsucking insect-spirits possess a greater Rank. Some physically large creatures and things might also be represented by Motes as well. Some medieval sources call them “Pawns.”
Gaffling
Gafflings are Rank 1 (“Page” or “Squire” in the old texts) or 2 (“Knight”) spirits, the weakest entities of consequence in the Shadow. They’re often spirits of common creatures and things: particular street corners or an especially vicious dog.
Jaggling
These Rank 3 (“Baron/Baroness”) or 4 (“Count/Countess”) spirits encompass significant entities from the material realm or narrow categories of beings. The spirit of a city’s principal river and the spirit of stray dogs would be Jagglings.
Incarna
Spirits of Ranks 5 to 6 (“Duke/Duchess,” and “Prince/Princess,” respectively) are called Incarnae to note that they represent the greater powers of the material realm. The chief of a sizeable spirit court is usually a lesser Incarna at least. Greater Incarnae include the heads of many spirit choirs or of mighty things in the ordinary world, such as the Amazon River or the sewers of Paris.
Celestine
The Rank 7+ (“King/Queen” and “Emperor/Empress”) Celestines are spirits of mighty global or even cosmic phenomena, such as Darkness, Forests, Rain, and the Sun. Mages might encounter a Celestine’s lesser and lower-Ranked aspect (all Celestines can create and dissolve these as they wish) but only rarely win audience with the undisguised god itself.
Choir and Court
Mages divide spirits into choirs, which represent a common concept. They note choirs of flowers and flames, for instance. In as much as spirits have a society, mages call it a local court, where powerful spirits rule over lesser ones, though always beneath the greater laws of the Shadow’s ecology.
Mastery of Spirit gives a sorcerer the power to assume a spirit Rank and rule her own court.