I found myself in a wasteland. The environment was arid, and stingy. The ground was parched and cracked. Whatever trees there were, were stunted. There was a red hue in the sky, which was neither light nor dark, just constant.

I was in a dreamscape of some kind. I didn’t feel the elements. I didn’t feel hot or cold. I didn’t feel the wind blow against my face. It felt pretty much like being in a dream, except I had control of my thoughts. I wasn’t just a spectator.

Ahead of me, I saw what might be a grouping of trees. I figured that would be the first place to look for Tasha and Raven and started walking towards it.

I feel I walked a full day and the trees never grew closer. About the only way I could measure anything was by my belly. I started getting hungry, and a little thirsty. These were things to do with my physical state in the real world, lying. These needs were seeping into my dream state.

Nothing else was changing. I kept walking and the trees remained the same distance away from me as when I began. The only measurement I had of any kind, was from my alternative state of being. My physical body was getting hungry. Because of my state of hunger, I reasoned I must have been walking in my dream state for about a day.

I stopped to think things over. I wasn’t getting anywhere by walking. What was this wasteland all about if I could not move beyond where I stood? I looked at the trees on the horizon. They were not available to me. Maybe, I should be looking right in front of me?

I started looking a few yards ahead of me and wandered aimlessly from one bush or rock to another. I’d look at anything that caught my eye. Still nothing. I’m sure I was in that place for at least a full day, maybe more, by that time. I was getting hungry as hell, thirsty and now I had to piss too. That became distracting. For some reason I became vain as hell and felt I had to piss behind a bush or something, even though there was no-one around. I started running from bush to bush looking for a place to take a piss, but every time I tried to pee, something stopped me. I bet I spent about an hour looking for the right bush to piss behind.

Finally, I had to stop and piss. No more looking for the right bush. I couldn’t hold it anymore, and let go where I was standing. Oh, that felt good, and the flow. I’ll bet I pissed five minutes. It was one of those ones where halfway through you realize it’s going to be a long one, and so you start looking around as you wait for it to be over.

That’s when I started to notice my surroundings were more than wasteland. I was looking at a shadowy world. It was hard to make out because the sky still couldn’t decide if it was day or night, but I could see a forest line in one direction, and the foot of a mountain in the other.

Personally, I think it was my piss that nourished the parched earth and sprouted the Borderland, but later I was told it probably happened around the time they stuck a catheter in my dick, and started feeding me intravenously. My vanity was my subconscious not wanting me to piss my pants in the real world.

Whatever. I kind of knew where I was now, and starting to feel more energized too. I was no longer distracted and started to look around me with interest. That’s when I saw something interesting. It was closer to the mouth of the cave. It was a body. A big one.

I walked over. It was the mother Sasquatch. She was lying on her back and Wild Eyed Jack’s axe was planted into her right between the rib-cage. I kicked her a few times to make sure she was dead, even though it was obvious she was. That’s how scary she looked close up.

I jumped on top of her and grabbed the axe with one hand in front of the other. It was stuck in there; probably into her spine, but with a few tugs, it came loose. I held it up to examine it. It was a warrior’s axe. The handle was nicely curved and easy to hold, and made of a very hard wood. All in, it was maybe two and a half feet long. Leather straps ran crisscross over the wood to make for better gripping. The axe head itself was hand forged, and perfectly weighted. The blade was more curved than we find today, and razor sharp. It would be a very competent weapon in close combat. Its weighted balance was reassuring. This was a finely crafted weapon.

I looked around and tried to figure out what to do next. This was where the battle with the Grendel and its mother took place. There was no sign of Tasha and Raven even though they were part of the battle. I didn’t expect there would be. They left the place and came and found us at the burial grounds. I supposed I’d find them around there. I walked into the cave a bit, but saw no sign of anything there. No Grendel. I couldn’t get very deep into it before it was too dark to see at all. I didn’t spend much time there.

I came back out of the cave, and tried to figure out what direction the burial ground would be. I had a general understanding of the geography of the area. Being at the cave gave me an idea of north and south. I tried to figure out where the burial site would be in relation to the cave. I decided to head in what I figured to be a southwest direction. Hopefully I’d find Raven and Tasha somewhere along the way.

I made my way into the forest, and after only a few steps it got really dark in there. What little sunlight there was, barely penetrated those trees. There was only enough light to allow me to see a few yards ahead of me.

There were no signs like moss growing on one side of a tree to give you a sense of direction. There was life in the forest. Forest life that sounded like the regular going ons of any forest. Mostly small birds and squirrels flying or leaping from one tree to another.

I suppose I wandered around for a few hours before I concluded I had already lost all sense of direction, and in fact, was lost. Was I still heading southwest? I didn’t know. I was trying to maintain my southwestern course, but there were so many twists and turns it was impossible to tell how well I was doing. I didn’t even know how to get back to the mouth of the cave. If I stumbled upon Raven and Tasha, it would be because of dumb luck.

I started wandering around, here and there, pretty much having given up on the whole venture. I had absolutely no idea what my next step should be. I was full of energy and had no need for sleep, and quite frankly, I was getting bored. That’s when I started playing with the axe.

I was falling in love with that axe. You could chop through a sizable tree with just a few swings, and it was perfectly balanced for throwing. I had never been much of an axe thrower, but with this thing, man, bullseye every time. It was so balanced. What a weapon.

Now when I was hiking, I looked for stuff I could whack at. A low hanging branch or a tree sapling growing out of the ground. Things like that. It kind of made being lost more fun. I might come across a whole thicket of saplings and instead of walking around them, I’d whack my way right through them, and then go back and inspect my handy work.

One day I stumbled onto a place I had obviously already been, and this gave me an idea. I could make my search a little more controlled if I purposefully marked the trees I was passing. From then on, I started looking for a good sized tree and would chunk out a big piece of bark on the side in the direction I planned to walk. Pretty soon, I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew where I had been. Now I could backtrack if I needed to, and Raven and Tasha might come across my markings and be able to find me.

One day, I don’t know which, I was chopping away at one of the bigger trees I had found. I was going at it with particular vigor, being especially bored. It gave me pleasure to hear the echo of the axe bouncing back to me when the sound hit the surrounding trees.

‘Stop making all that racket,’ I heard from behind me.

It kind of scared me, being used to being so alone, but I knew the voice. It was Raven. I looked over to where his voice came and barely made out his and Tasha’s forms standing maybe fifteen feet away from me. They were walking towards me. I noticed Tasha retrieved one of her Bowie knives and it was strapped to her side. Both looked to be in fine form.

‘What are you guys doing here?’ I asked, kind of like an idiot, but they caught me off guard.

‘Looking for you,’ Raven replied. ‘We tracked you, even though you’ve mostly been going in circles’.

‘And making so much noise, it was impossible not to find you,’ Tasha added.

‘Just marking my territory,’ I said, really happy to see them.

‘Well, you better find a quieter way to do it. The dragon will hear all this chopping’.

‘Way out here?’ I asked.

‘In here,’ Raven replied. ‘The dragon hears everything’.

‘Sorry about that,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve been losing my mind a bit’.

‘How’d you get the axe?’ Tasha asked.’

‘Just pulled it out’.

‘Yeah, but how’d you get close enough to the cave with all the Mark-Steppers’?

‘I didn’t see anyone,’ I said.

‘Can I hold it?’ Tasha asked, reaching for it.

I drew it away. For some reason I didn’t want to give it to her. ‘No’.

She grabbed at it again. This time more aggressively. I shoved her off and held the axe high overhead. ‘It’s mine,’ I said. I didn’t feel like letting her touch it.

‘You guys!’ Raven said, ‘We just reunited and already you’re going at it. We need to talk, especially since Ethan’s been making so much noise. Someone’s going to come looking for him. It sounded like you were issuing a challenge the way you were chopping at those trees’.

‘Maybe I was,’ I replied.

‘Well, you should know what you’re up against before you do,’ he said. ‘Something big is going on here’.

‘Like what’?

‘Like a gathering’.

‘A gathering of what?’ I asked. ‘All I’ve seen is squirrels’.

‘A gathering of Mark-steppers. Tasha and I have been watching them. They’re hard to make out at first. Kind of like vibrating shadows, and you can feel them when they’re nearby. It feels like a predator is near you. They’re very difficult to make out until you’ve seen a few of them’.

‘That makes sense,’ I replied. ‘They sound like minions from where I come from. They’re hard to recognize in my world too. Look just like the rest of us’.

I wasn’t surprised to discover Mark-steppers were nothing more than dead minions running around in the Borderland.

‘Whatever they are, Tasha and I are starting to feel like we’re turning into them. They are predatory and we have become predatory because of them. To protect ourselves, we have had to hunt them down, before they hunt us down. It’s been kill or be killed, and it’s getting as though there’s nothing else in us. Just thoughts of killing’.

I took a closer look at the two of them, and there was something different. They looked a little faded I thought. Not much, but something like that. Something was different.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I think we have to get you out of here fast. This is a world for lost souls. It looks like if you’re going to live here, you become one too’.

‘Yeah, well, how do we get out,’ Tasha asked. ‘We’ve been looking for a way out since we got here.

‘Maybe I can just think us out,’ I said. ‘That’s how I got myself in.’

I turned my focus to returning to our reality. Nothing. I did it just how I thought myself into this place. All I did was close my eyes, and imagine myself in the Borderland. It was that easy. This time I imagined myself lying beside Raven and Tasha in the Big House. Nothing. I tried again. Nothing. I tried it with us all holding hands. Nothing.

‘I don’t think we’re going to get out the way I came in,’ I said. ‘Judging from how simulations work, I would say there’s more in here for us to do before we can leave’.

‘Simulations?’ Raven asked.

‘I’ll tell you about it later,’ I replied, remembering he and Tasha knew nothing about who I really am. ‘Just trust me. We’re here for a reason, and we have yet to find it. You better tell me about this gathering’.

‘Well,’ Raven said. ‘Tasha and I fought the Grendel, and both of us were knocked out. When we woke, we buried Jack as much as we could and Tara sent us to try to find you guys. We weren’t even to the forest line when we started to feel the Mark-steppers around us. Sometimes it felt like a chill was passing you by. One time when this happened, Tasha struck out with her Bowie knife and killed one of them. In death it became recognizable. Still a shadow, but it had outline and features. It was human. Now that we can recognize them, we see them everywhere. Some Sasquatch and other beasts walk among them, but most are human. In groups and individually, they’re making their way to the cave.

‘I don’t know if it’s because we’re becoming more like them or what, but as soon as we started recognizing them they started to recognize us. They knew us to be different and their enemy. We had to hide and quite often found ourselves in a fight for our lives if we ran into each other. Finally, we figured out, they’re not looking for us. There’s so many of them heading to the cave, we run into them, but they don’t expect to find us in the Borderland. This gave us an advantage. They became easy prey and we began to hunt them. We always find them first, and we’ve been able to avoid or kill them. The problem is, now we only think like predators.

‘We’ve got so good at hunting that we’ve been able to capture a few. Some of them speak English and we’ve been able to extract from them what’s going on. They’re gathering for what they call the final war’.

‘How have you been able to do all this?’ I asked. ‘At best, you’ve only been here a week or two’.

‘A Week!’ Raven exclaimed. ‘We’ve been here for years. We’ve been here almost as long as we can remember. That’s why we have to get out’.

‘Yeah, well. What’s this war about?’ I asked.

Raven looked at me like he was looking at a fool. ‘The final battle between good and evil,’ he said. ‘All these Mark-steppers are coming to serve their master. There’s a lot of them. If they ever find their way to our world, which I assume is the plan, we are in for an epic battle’.

‘Well, I think we have to get closer to the cave,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty sure whatever else it is we seek, will be found by the cave. Let’s hope it’s a way out of here. Are you sure Mark-Steppers are still heading to the cave? I was there about a week ago, and there wasn’t a soul there’.

‘That’s because there weren’t any souls there, just dead Mark-Steppers. You couldn’t see them, and they couldn’t see you. You were from two different planes of existence. You weren’t aware of each other. Now that you’ve been here for awhile, you’ll be identifying with this plane of existence more. You’ll probably start seeing things as they are here.

‘So you think I’m going to get like you two?’ I asked.

‘Right,’ Raven replied.

‘We figured out a way to walk among them,’ Raven continued. ‘It’s basically like what you’ve been doing. You don’t see them, so they don’t see you. What we do is know they’re there, but don’t acknowledge them, and they don’t acknowledge us. We see them, but we consciously decide not to be affected by them. Once you see them, if you can convince your mind you’re not seeing them, you won’t. If you can do this, you can walk side by side and they won’t notice you’.

‘The problem is,’ Tasha says, ‘It’s hard to do until you’ve done it a few times, and know you can do it’.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’ll start by practicing on you two. You’re starting to freak me out. It’s kind of like looking at you from only two dimensions, like a cartoon or something’.

‘Cartoon,’ Tasha replied, like the thought had just come to her. ‘Yeah,’ she said, nodding her head in agreement.

‘Well, whatever you do, you better figure it out if you want to get close to the gathering,’ Raven said.

The problem was, now that I’d seen Raven and Tasha in that quasi Mark-stepper way of theirs, I couldn’t stop seeing them that way. It was like looking at one of those optical illusions, where at first you see this old lady, but if you look long enough, a young lady appears, and now you can’t see the old lady to save your life. That’s what it was like, and the trick to seeing one or the other is to know they’re both there, and changing your focal point to see things the way you want. You switch your focal point. Once I realized this, it got easier to see them.

‘We do this kind of thing all the time in the New World,’ I said, drawing looks of confusion because I still hadn’t told them I was from the future. ‘It’s a metaphysical switch, we recognized back when we came to understand outcome is dependent on the observer. That was back when we discovered a particle could be either material or a wave. I’m surprised this space and time hasn’t started to utilize the switch more widely. Basically with just a thought, you switch to which of the two realities you want to be in. That’s the principle you’re using.

I got pretty good at seeing Raven and Tasha in the reality of my choosing. Because they were in a transitional phase, it was a little bit tough. They were phasing in and out of their two realities. To speed up my learning curve, we decided to capture some Mark-steppers. They wouldn’t be jumping in and out of phase. Whenever a small party came into our territory, we would kidnap them, and I’d talk with them to see how they thought, or just stare at them if they couldn’t speak English. Eventually, I got pretty good at switching world perspectives. We were ready to enter the cave.

Well, we got to the cave and everything was running smoothly. Even though they were there, and I could see them, I was able to phase them out of my consciousness. Like I said, I’ve done stuff like this lots of times. It was no big deal.

When we first arrived, the amount of lost souls walking into the cave was unbelievable. You’d think they were going to a rock concert or something. The idea was, we’d make our way into the cave ourselves, and go as far down as we could get. Hopefully we’d see something that might signal a way for us to get out of the Borderland.

When we passed the dead mother’s carcass, Tasha said to me, ‘Give me the axe,’ to which I responded, ‘No way’.

We kept walking. The Mark-Steppers were coming from all directions and entering the cave. I couldn’t believe the numbers, especially since I had seen none the first time I arrived. Once we got close to the mouth, we were soon bumping against the Mark-steppers making their way into the cave. Quite a feat when you’re trying not to acknowledge them, but we were doing okay. We joined the throng which was moving into the cave.

Like I said, I was doing fine. That was until I saw the Griffin standing guard; a beast with the body of a lion and the head of a raptor. I was not prepared to see it. It caught me off guard, and I forgot all about maintaining my perspective. I freaked and started to look for a place to hide. Immediately, I was recognized and the crowd started turning on me. Seeing me being attacked forced Tasha and Raven out of their protective states of mind too. Very quickly, we were surrounded by a guttural, angry mob, trying to take us down.

‘Give me the axe,’ Tasha yelled.

‘No,’ I yelled back. Admittedly I hadn’t thought of using it with all the commotion, but now that she mentioned it, I thought I might.

‘Give it to her,’ Raven shouted, and then he gave me a shove. ‘Look around you man’.

I looked around. We were getting swallowed up by the Mark-steppers, and I noticed I had drawn the Griffin’s attention too. I didn’t want to do it, but deep down I knew it was the right thing. Reluctantly I handed the axe to Tasha.

What a shit storm that started. Lord, that girl has a lot of pent up anger. She cut through those Mark-steppers like they were mindless zombies. Bodies piled up on either side of us as she cleaved an opening out of the cave. Now recognizing the axe for what it was, Mark-steppers started hanging back on their own accord, and a way out of the cave opened up.

The Griffin, now fully aware of our presence, flew over and placed itself between us and the exit. What an impressive beast when its wings are fully outstretched. Upon landing, it seemed to recognize not only the axe, but Tasha as well, and stared motionlessly with its beady eyes, trying to decide what to do next.

What played out next reminded me of something a guy back at the commune told me about. He used to own a pitbull, and he told me the difference between pitbulls and other dogs. Other dogs like to do a little song and dance before they fight. Maybe it gives them a chance to reconsider and give themselves a chance to call the whole thing off. A pitbull won’t do that. As soon as there’s a sign of aggression, the fight’s on. All it wants to do is kill that other dog, and it attacks. It will do this even if the odds are against it, and it will fight to the death.

That’s pretty much how Tasha likes to fight. She was on the Griffin while it was still thinking things over. Holding the axe, high over her head with both hands, she ran at the Griffin as fast as her legs would take her. The beast cocked its head and jumped back a pace. Tasha kept running, and the Griffin continued to hop backwards, it's great wings fluttering with each jump. Tasha threw her axe at one of the Griffin's partially extended wings, and cleaved it cleanly off. The great beast screeched and turned protectively, and in the moment of distraction, Tasha swept past to it’s hind quarters and started stabbing it with her Bowie knife.

The two started circling, with the Griffin pecking at Tasha while she hung on stabbing it. Raven ran over to the axe which had previously been blocked by the Griffin. He grabbed it and headed towards the fight. He struck the axe into the exposed neck of the Griffin. With a final screeching squeal, the animal dropped dead. Raven handed Tasha her axe.

‘Come on,’ she said and ran to where the dead mother’s carcass lay. She drove the axe deeper into the exact same spot where I had pulled it out only days before. She not only cut deeper into the Sasquatch’s body, she cut a hole into the very fabric of reality. After a final look back, we turned and jumped back; right back into our world and bodies.

The Dragon

The dragon lifted its head. Even from his deep layer, he could feel the tear in his world. A violation, but a curiosity too. What caused the tear? What lay on the other side? Of course the dragon knew. He knew there was life in the other reality. That’s where he was first banished to. It was where he got his Mark-Steppers from. He knew he had followers living there now. The only thing he didn’t know was how to physically get back into the other world. That had always eluded him.

With great interest the dragon made his way to the wound. He sniffed and looked around. Looked at the piles of dead Mark-steppers and the fallen Griffin. It sniffed again, and smelled the growing stench of the dead Sasquatch mother. It was where the smell of the other world was strongest. Right at the festering carcass.

The dragon heaved in it’s chest and expelled the heat of hell from it’s lips. The heat exposed a fissure. ‘There,’ it thought, looking at the exact spot where Ethan retrieved the axe only a few days before. ‘There is where my world has been wounded’.

Enraged, the dragon blew more fire, at first wanting to cauterize the wound. When the flames subsided, he had only managed to open it further. He stood looking and thinking. It came to him, he had found the entrance to the other world, and he was able to open it.