Just a quick personal opinion about quest natures.
As you mentioned, I think we have reasonable examples of theistic quests, and I think a fair bit of greek, norse, and other myths give examples too. It focuses around the actions of key figures who get to define the world.
For spirit quests the model that jumps to my mind are the stories of faerie—where things are seldom quite what they seem, often arbitrary, and there are lots of people of local power to deal with, each following their own nature.
For essence quests I think the key is to look at the nature of essences. They are very much purely what they are. That is, a god of a river is the god, who takes form in the river. The spirit of the river may have all sorts of characteristics along with the riverine nature. But the essence of a river is simply, purely, perfectly a river. And so tends everything else—and this pure, almost logical nature—it considered desirable*. Breaks in this order are probably the cause of most quest-worthy travel. So I imagine something a bit like "The Land of Logic" if you happened to have read that L. Sprague de Campe story. You travel through hills which are perfectly hills, then they end and you are in mountains, which are perfectly mountains—nothing fuzzy or poorly defined. Well, nothing fuzzy or poorly defined except where things are breaking down, which is probably exactly where you are headed....
All just IMO, based on no official sources. Hopefully when the Heroes of Malkion (or whatever it ends up being called) FINALLY sees the light of day (IIRC it was originally written for Hero Wars) we'll see some examples.)
-Bryan
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