Once upon a time, in a magical land far, far away, there lived a handsome, powerful prince, so incredible that the sun itself rose at his command. This is his story.
Nah, just kidding. I’m no prince, and the powers I have are interesting at best, really more of a nuisance for the most part. And I don’t live that far away.
The handsome part is true, though. And this is my story.
So let’s get this show on the road, shall we?
You know how, according to physicists, the universe is endless? How it doesn’t have any edges? I assume that’s true, because I’m no physicist, and I imagine they know what they’re talking about.
Dimensions, though? Well, I know a bit about those, and let me tell you, they have edges. There’s a spot at the edge of two planes of existence, the point where they kind of…bleed over. Where the boundaries between the two dimensions are weakest. The Edge.
I know this because I grew up there.
Specifically, this spot is a bar, owned by my uncle. Yes, for those keeping track of my last few sentences, this does mean that I largely grew up in a bar. Don’t worry, they’re more nurturing places than you’d expect. That’s why I’ve turned out so well.
The bar isn’t the weirdest part, anyway. I’d say that distinction goes to, you know, the literal meshing of dimensions.
It’s sure made life interesting, growing up there. I’ve met a lot of…unique individuals. I wouldn’t call them *monsters—*I mean, a lot of them are kinder and gentler than half of the humans I know—but I suppose if you looked at them, that’s probably the first descriptor that would come to mind.
Extra arms, though? Not really scary if they belong to your uncle’s friend Carol. Great for super-tight hugs.
Usually, the bar is really the only place humans and non-humans can interact, since the boundaries are weakest there. I’ve seen businessmen meet for drinks with vampires, college kids take shots with dragons. Hell, I’m pretty sure I saw Elvis making out with a banshee in the back once.
It’s only possible in the bar, though. That’s why it’s so special, why it was built where it is. It quite literally straddles the border between the two dimensions, allowing guests from both sides to intermingle safely—and often drunkenly.
Outside the bar, the dimensions separate. And if a human crosses into the non-human realm and spends more than a few minutes there (or vice versa), his atoms start to become unstable. He’s not meant to exist there, and his body knows it. Within an hour, he’d disintegrate. Or maybe spontaneously combust.
I’ve seen both. Really depends on how your atoms feel like destroying themselves.
And that’s where I come in. Remember how I mentioned my mostly-annoying powers at the beginning? Well, surprise! Here they are. I can exist in both dimensions without self-destructing.
Maybe you’re like, surely that can’t be that abnormal, like, what happens if Elvis and that banshee had done more than just make out? Wouldn’t it make sense for a kid with one parent from each side to be able to operate on both planes?
Sure, I guess it would. But I’m talking about a bar on the edge of two dimensions here, where elves literally get wasted and bellow sea shanties with sailors. What about this story do you think will make sense?
Anyway, my point is, it doesn’t work like that. Most of the kids born of those unions aren’t…feasible. They don’t survive past infancy. Turns out human and non-human genes don’t mix all too well. And the ones that do survive? Well, they lean towards one side or the other. Mostly human, mostly satyr, you get the idea. And they live in whichever dimension supports that.
They’ll still visit the bar to reunite with both their parents, though, sometimes. Those reunions are always pretty interesting. (“Wow, you’ve gotten so much taller than the last time I saw you!” “No, dad, I absolutely did not, I’m literally an immortal vampire, we don’t grow.”)
As for me, I don’t know where I came from. My uncle Henri doesn’t like to talk much about it, and to be honest, I’m not sure he knows the details either. I mean, he’s not actually my uncle. Not by blood, anyway. He says he found me on the path out back eighteen years ago, all swaddled up in blankets and left sleeping on the border.
He’s a griffin, if you were wondering. But whatever you’re picturing, he probably doesn’t match up. Most of the time, he looks relatively human: a tall, broad guy with touches of silver in his blonde hair and crinkles around his lilac eyes when he smiles.
Most of the time.
Me, though? No idea. My particular set of skills, however, lent itself to making me an errand boy as a kid. Deliver a message to some selkie’s old human friend? Send the kid. Go grab Chinese takeout and bring it back to the bar so that a leprechaun and his buddies can chow down, because it turns out they really like sesame chicken? Send the kid. Find a merman who’s forty-five minutes late for his date with a very impatient human woman so that she stops loudly lamenting that this is why she hates dating apps? Yeah, that’s right. Send me.
It’s fine, mostly. Is being a glorified errand boy for humans and dragons alike at eighteen years old the most accomplished thing I could be doing? Probably not. But between that and shifts at the bar, Henri pays me well for my help. And I’ve met a lot of friends through my errands.
Oh, also—and maybe I should have led with this—it’s probably the safest option for me. Because while I can exist in both dimensions, I can’t do so…predictably.
By that I mean, I’m unstable in my own way. My atoms, that is. (Though you could probably make a case for me as a person too). I can’t always control my travels between the dimensions.
Like, I’ll be at a Pizza Hut on the human side, picking up a to-go order for some dwarves with the munchies, and I’ll sneeze. And suddenly I’ll be in a dark forest in the other dimension, with growls all around me and something big moving in the bushes, and next thing you know I’m sprinting for my life, looking for anything helpful to guide me towards the Edge, as some hulking creature chases after me.
Because, oh yeah, did I mention that not everything over there is friendly? That might be important. Most of our visitors are good, or at least have enough decency to cooperate with our rules so that they’re allowed continued use of the bar. But the things out in the wilderness, the less-human things that prey on other beings in the night?
Those guys I would call monsters.
I’ve almost died that way a handful of times. Different things can trigger my “jumps,” like sneezing. And they get worse the farther I get from the bar, the farther I venture away from the Edge in either direction. They’ve also gotten worse as I get older, which means Henri has cut back on my errands in the last few years. I think he’s worried that I’ll jump and end up straight in some monster’s lair, accidentally presenting myself as a ready-made meal.
Like I said, my atoms have their own issues.
Take the first time I jumped, or at least the first time I remember doing it. I was eight, I think. I’d started running errands for some of our more regular visitors a year or two prior, but they were mostly small things: not far from the Edge, and always accompanied by someone, usually Millie—a middle-aged woman who helped out around the bar—or Em, an old dryad friend of Henri’s. Depended on which dimension.
That day, a particularly rowdy dwarf had insisted that his ex-girlfriend was trying to dupe him out of an agreed-upon visit with his kid. (Told you those cross-dimension cases get interesting). Henri tried to calm him down, but he was only getting louder and louder, shouting that he needed someone to go get her right now.
Well, Henri looked at me. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” he said firmly.
But I wanted to. I was saving up for an electric drum set, and I wanted the handful of cash Henri and the dwarf—hopefully a generous tipper, though I had my doubts, because dwarves tend to be stingy with their money—would give me.
It was farther than I’d gone before. See, when something is at the “edge” of two dimensions, it’s hard to explain just how its location works. Walking away from the bar and into either plane won’t always output you at the same place in that world; like, there’s no one physical entrance or exit in, say, Canada. Rather, there’s plenty of locations in each dimension where the fabric is just weak enough to travel through and reach the bar. They change all the time as the fabrics of the dimensions re-weave themselves: constant shifting, countless tears in reality, just big enough to squeeze through. To find them, you just have to know how to look.
Which, luckily enough, I do. Most kids learn how to ride a bike. I learned how to travel freely between dimensions. Basically the same thing.
Millie came with me, of course, since we were going onto the human side. The dwarf said his ex was probably at her apartment in Washington DC. So I grabbed Millie’s hand, pulled her outside, and briskly turned onto the left fork in the path.
The grass and walkways around the bar faded into fog. I focused hard on the address the dwarf had given me, picturing the words burning in my mind. I’d never been to DC, but any mental image or focused thought (like an address) is enough to find the tear that’s closest to that location. All around me, I heard voices—fragments of conversations in all languages, from across the globe—as we passed countless other doors and slipped through a gap in reality.
We emerged onto a crowded city street. The fog vanished around us, replaced with chaos: horns honking, cars racing by, people shoving past us. If anyone noticed that we had just appeared, they didn’t seem to care, hurrying on about their busy days without sparing a glance up from their phones.
But probably they didn’t even notice. It’s funny, how the fabric of reality is delicate, yet thick enough to hide what it wants to. Funny, too, how brains—especially human ones—will make sense of the nonsensical things they see. You might have firsthand witnessed someone leaving my uncle’s bar and never noticed, because your brain and the structure of reality have, quite literally, filled in the gaps.
It’s hard to explain. But I promise it works, and you’re in no danger of accidentally stepping through a hole in space and time and ending up in a black hole of nothingness at the edge of existence.
Seriously. I promise.
Anyway, a quick glance around revealed that we were near the Washington Monument. It rose up in the sky behind us. Just like in photos Henri had shown me. And, unfortunately, a bit of a walk from the ex’s address.
Look, sometimes you get lucky and the nearest gap at the instant you leave happens to be exactly where you need to go. Happens more often than you’d think. But sometimes the closest place to slip through is a few miles away, and you have to suck it up and haul ass so that—in my case, at least—you still get a decent tip.
Millie and I made our way past the Monument. She’d been here before, on a family trip when she was in high school, she said. I joked that she must have last been here in the Dark Ages, then. She laughed and called me a dingus.
We split from the Mall and headed out into less-tourist-overridden parts of the city, following the directions Google Maps spit out from Millie’s phone.
It was probably about a half-hour walk. Honestly, I was enjoying it. I’d never been in either dimension for this long, this far from a door, in—well, ever. It was nice to feel the sun on my face, to watch people hustle by, absorbed in their own lives. Seeing a couple push a baby stroller past us on the sidewalk caused a weird hollow feeling in my gut. My parents had never done that for me.
But I had Uncle Henri, and Millie—who saw me staring and squeezed my hand tighter. “Almost there.”
We rounded the corner and turned onto the correct street. A block down was the apartment building. I let go of Millie’s hand and skipped ahead, pausing at the garden out front to wait. She was really taking her time! Impatient, I leaned down to smell the flowers—wow, they were strong, I might have just snorted some pollen—
I sneezed.
And immediately the sunny street around me, the flowers, Millie were all gone. I was standing in a small clearing in a forest. Maybe the sun was still shining somewhere above the thick, gnarled branches of the twisted trees, but I doubted it. The inhuman dimension doesn’t really do sun.
Because there’s no doubt that’s where I was now: the other dimension. I’d never been in this forest*,* specifically, but I knew the difference. Travel on both sides enough and it’s easy to tell.
The barest glimmers of dim light were able to slip through the darkness, giving me just enough light to make out the blanket of criss-crossing roots beneath my feet. Suddenly something rumbled in the shadows, off to my right. My heart seized.
For all the times I’d been to this dimension, I’d never come here unwillingly, and I’d never been completely lost. I was terrified.
Look, there’s plenty of danger in popping up random places in the human dimension; I could always end up on railroad tracks with a train incoming, or on the edge of a cliff, or in an alley in a sketchy neighborhood—it’s happened before. But there’s a lot more danger in popping up randomly in a place where real, live, will-eat-anything-that-moves monsters are common, and when any of those dark, hungry species would be thrilled to have a very edible boy appear in their near vicinity.
Twigs snapped in the darkness. More rumbling. I spun around frantically, cold sweat dripping down my back, but there was nowhere to go. I saw no paths out of the clearing—just trees big and twisted, growing so densely that even I couldn’t squeeze through.
Squeeze through! A door. Maybe there was a gap nearby that I could slip through, get back to the bar.
I pictured it: my uncle’s bar appearing out of the fog, its old-fashioned wooden sign blowing in the breeze, GRIFFIN’S EDGE printed in lilac lettering below Henri’s now-infamous griffin crest. Lilac accents, of course—the same color as his eyes. I thought of the well-worn steps, of the carefully-organized shelves within, of the soft glow from the hanging lights, of the wooden tables that I’d often scrubbed down after someone had thrown up over them. Of the rickety stairs in the corner, leading up to my and Henri’s rooms. Of home.
But I felt nothing. Where I should have felt the rippling of tearing fabric, there was only dead air, heavy with the stench of a decaying forest, silence broken only by my fast, panicked breaths.
The rumbling was louder now, almost like thunder—if thunder came from trees.
And suddenly, something grabbed my ankle and pulled with such force that I went crashing to the ground, yelping in shock and fear. I tried to sit up and see what it was, but as soon as I hit the damp soil, my arms, too, were ensnared, thick coils wrapping so tightly I began to lose feeling in my fingers.
That’s when I realized: it was the roots. They’d come to life, and apparently they weren’t friendly.
I had no weapons. Of course I didn’t. I was an eight-year-old kid on a mission to talk to some dwarf’s ex-girlfriend. So I thrashed wildly, attempting to bite at a root as it passed my face, and screamed.
I thought maybe it was working for a second, because the roots lifted me off the ground and began to carry me towards the edge of the clearing. A tiny little part of my mind hoped that they were letting me go, showing me the way out.
But monsters don’t work like that.
As the cocoon of roots tightened still further around my body—I gasped for breath—the two tree trunks just ahead of us parted, bending outwards like lips parting.
Like lips parting, because that’s nearly what they were. The roots held me up at an angle, so that I was barely able to see the ground behind the trees. I kind of wished I couldn’t, because with horror, I watched as the ground opened up, dirt and leaves falling away into a chasm of darkness with a horrible gulping noise. And at the edge of the gaping hole were jagged white daggers the size of my forearm: this forest monster’s teeth.
I don’t know if it had eyes, or even any other elements of a face besides its mouth. But it didn’t matter. Because that pit in the ground twisted in shape, and after a moment, I realized it was smiling.
Smiling, because it was going to eat me. My heart felt like it was going to explode in my chest, if the roots didn’t pop it first. My efforts to struggle against the roots had faded to mere wiggles; they were too strong, and so tight that I could barely feel my limbs, let alone fight with them.
Black spots were already dancing in my vision as a root tightened around my throat, tipping me forward—the mouth yawned open beneath me, its gulping noise growing louder, more *excited—*it was about to be over, and I wished I’d told Henri a proper goodbye before leaving, and I hoped it would be quick—
But something exploded around me: light, and heat, and glowing red where there had been only black. The hungry gulps turned to a terrible shriek. The roots released, unraveling so fast that I was sent tumbling back into the clearing.
I didn’t see much of what happened, because I was laying on my back in the dirt, gasping for breath, blinking slowly as the spots I was seeing began to fade. I heard it, though, and I felt embers, as the monster burned.
Finally, when I could breathe and see again, I sat up. The entire chunk of trees around the mouth was scorched. All the leaves were gone, and several of the trunks seemed to be…bleeding? There was a thick, dark liquid leaking down their trunks, and it sure didn’t look like sap. The mouth in the ground was gone, replaced with a shallow pit, and even from here I could see the edges of its contents: broken white fragments, ash, smoldering bits of roots.
And then there was a flash of movement, and my gaze drifted upwards to a still-living tree just to the side of the scorched ones.
My heart, barely calmed down, took off racing again. Was it possible for an eight-year-old to have a heart attack? I might be about to find out.
A boy, probably about my age, was sitting on a branch, his back against the trunk, one knee up and the other leg dangling lazily. He had very pale skin and very dark hair, and he held a flamethrower in one hand as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
He looked me up and down, smirking. “First time here?”
I couldn’t help it. Even though Uncle Henri had warned me that any creatures living in the depths of the inhuman dimension were deadly and evil, even though this boy’s grin sure felt wicked—I felt some urge to impress him. Maybe because he’d just saved my life, and I was grateful but embarrassed.
So I protested. “No!” I insisted. “I’ve been here before!”
He raised an eyebrow. “Really? No wonder you were such a natural then.”
“I would have been fine,” I argued hotly, knowing full well that I’d been seconds away from being devoured.
He clearly knew this too, because he simply made a non-committal noise of agreement and leapt down from the branch. He walked towards me; instinctively, I backed away, feeling uneasy. He followed, reaching out and grabbing the front of my shirt to stop me.
And then he pointed to the ground behind me, where more roots crossed, forming a thick layer over the dirt. He made a *tsk-*ing noise. “Almost stepped into another one. What an expert you are.”
The knot of embarrassment in my stomach doubled in size.
Still holding my shirt, he squinted at me. I saw now, up close, that his eyes were dark too, the irises as black as the pupils. “How are you not self-destructing?” he asked, sounding genuinely puzzled. “You don’t smell like anything inhuman I’ve met. You look human. But you’re stable.”
Fear and unease wove themselves into my growing stomach knot. I couldn’t trust him. Whatever he was, he was probably predatory too. He’d probably saved me from the tree monster so that he could eat me himself. Henri had taught me: nothing from the dark parts of this dimension was friendly. These were the things that never came to the bar. These things were not the unique beings like I knew and loved; these things were monsters.
I shoved his hands back, and to my surprise, he didn’t fight. “I don’t suppose you know if there’s a tear around here,” I said stiffly.
He continued to squint at me for an uncomfortable amount of time. Unease prickled down my spine. The longer I stayed, the more likely that another monster would find me. I had screamed. Also, he really was creeping me out. The longer I stayed, the longer I saw the glint of his dark eyes, the more I was afraid that he also wanted to devour me.
Finally, his face and voice empty of emotion, he said flatly, “Yeah. Over there,” pointing to an oval-shaped space between two trees.
I felt the air around us—and there it was! I looked at him indignantly. “That was not there before!”
Now his smirk was back. Something about it sent a fresh wave of unease through me. “If you say so.”
My fear was turning to anger—I may not be an expert on the dark woods of the inhuman dimension, but I knew inter-dimension traveling, how dare he doubt me! —and I was ready to protest again when suddenly there was a roar in the distance.
It didn’t sound like that far of a distance, though.
His head snapped to the sound, and his eyes widened. “I have to go,” he said. “You really have to go.”
He shoved me towards the gap he’d pointed out. I turned to protest…but he was already gone. Vanished, just like that, flamethrower and all.
I barely had time to process what had just happened before there was another roar, this one closer. Out of the corner of my eye, I swear I saw one of the roots move. Nope. I was out of there.
I emerged out of the fog from the other fork in the path. I’d never been so happy to see the GRIFFIN’S EDGE sign swaying in the wind. And even better was the sight beneath it: Millie and Uncle Henri, concernedly talking to a pair of cops who frequented the bar.
Henri noticed immediately and ran to me, dropping to one knee to hug me, and though he held me tight, his arms felt nothing like the roots. I started crying as he whispered, “Ian, it’s okay. I’m here, and it’s all okay.”
Eventually, through my tears, I told him about the sneeze, and about how I’d found myself transported. He was quiet for a moment and then said that he’d been afraid this would happen. We probably can’t stop it, he’d said, so we’d best teach you how to deal with it.
And that’s what he did. I got better at finding my way home, at fighting, at knowing how to identify monsters in the dark. And he made sure I always carried a weapon after that.
I never told him about the pale boy who saved me, though. I claimed I’d had a lighter in my pocket from the bar, and that’s how I’d burned the monster—but I’d lost the lighter in the process. He believed me, of course. Why wouldn’t he? I’d never lied to him before.
But something about the boy felt private. Like Uncle Henri wouldn’t approve if I’d told him about the encounter. Like it should stay something for me and me alone.
I’ve never seen the boy again, anyway. I’ve been back to the inhuman dimension plenty, and even to the dark parts—like I said, my jumps are getting more frequent—but he’s never shown up again. And I’ve never found anything in any book that says a creature like him lives in those forests.
So maybe I imagined him. It’d be far from the weirdest thing about me if I did.
Because, after all, a lot of interesting things happen here. And lately, they’re only getting more interesting. If you don’t believe me, you’re welcome to stop by and see for yourself. We welcome all guests, human or otherwise. You just have to find us.
And if you do, my uncle and I will be happy to serve you at the bar at the edge of reality.