My name is Maria Barnes. This is the story of how I was changed.

Things were different in the town of Black Pine. Everyone knew that but nobody knew how much. It was the rift. We just knew it. The air around us was different. The town was different. There was a dry cleaners that vanished overnight, leaving a large raw hole of exposed red mud. People started seeing lizards the size of dogs under bridges. All the cats went missing.

Then Alison Reynolds reappeared. She showed up on the edge of town, barefoot, babbling over and over "All of this is done!"

She'd been gone for years. Fell into the rift, nobody had seen her since. We'd already heard the news from the TV, that people were starting to reemerge, the missing were popping up all over the world. Except they were crazy, and the remnants of the rift seemed to follow them. They were different. They had powers.

But now that was happening here. She was spotted by a grocery store cashier who remembered her, knew her name. The woman's name was Cheryl, she was overweight and friendly in an annoying way. She ran up to hug Alison and was electrocuted. A crowd gathered, almost immediately we all knew.

They couldn't stop her, she screamed. But she was not here to destroy, she was here to create. Get away from me, get away! I remember her screaming, light came pouring out of her eyes. She shattered. Broke into little bits of electricity or something and everyone standing around her was flung to the ground.

She wasn't dead. She gathered up again at the power station and blew out a transformer. Her voice echoed out of the power lines, she told us they were coming back now, they were changed and they were not going to change back.

"We are something else," she said. Those words stuck with me a long time.

Years had gone by. The rift people didn't like living in town with everyone else. A lot of them were from somewhere else, fell into the rift in China or Serbia and came out of it here, on the other end of the planet. I didn't get a chance to talk to many of them. People were afraid after Cheryl died. The rift people spoke to us like they knew something we didn't. None of them would explain what happened.

A boy I had a crush on in high school was one of them. He came back with deep all-black eyes, and said he could see into everyone's thoughts. The bartender from Mitch's was another. He walked with a limp now and doesn't talk anyone he used to know. We saw him walking his dog sometimes.

There's a secret I don't tell people very often. I wished I was one of them. I wanted to know what they knew. I wanted to be different.

We started to hear rumors about the rift people gathering up by the mountain. Some of them still had friends in town, people who went to visit them. They said there were wizards there. People who could do magic.

Some of the lizards under the bridge were as big as cows now.

Yea, I thought, they're probably right.

My friend Jules and I decided to go there ourselves after we talked with Maryann, who said she'd been there herself. They'd built some yurts and shanties, but some of them could shape the mountain itself. She said it was the most fascinating place she'd ever seen, a mix of people from all over the world, a market of different magics and powers collected from the rift.

There was something else. Maryann was the kind of girl into tattoos. She said she'd had something done. Something you can't get done anywhere else.

Jules and I pressed her to show us for days. She finally relented, but we had to come over to her house first. She said it wasn't the kind of thing she wanted a lot of people to know about.

Once back at her place, she told us to sit down and watch. She took off her clothes first and stood there, naked. She crossed her arms and took a hold of her hips.

She took herself off. I'm not sure how else to put it. Like removing a shirt. Underneath she was a smooth and featureless body, devoid of tattoos, nipples, even her face. The simple shape of a person.

"What do you think," she asked us. I never asked how she could talk. I was too busy gaping.

"Wow," said Jules.

"Exactly," I said. I knew that things were different. We heard it all the time. But that was when I first really believed that not only was the world going to change, but so was I.

"How do we get there?" asked Jules.

We parked our car at the old gas station where the trail started. The camp was a couple miles up the mountain, closer to the rift. I'd not been out this way since the rift opened. People thought it was dangerous. It probably was. Even the people who got out said they were never going back.

At the top of the first ridge we could actually see it. It was strange. There wasn't anything to actually see, just a part of the world that wasn't there. Just a spot where the light wasn't right, where the geometry didn't work out correctly. But looking at it, we knew that was it. Something was threatening about that spot on the south side of the mountain, something about it suggested itself to us. It was something else.

The camp was down in a valley in the shade of the mountain. It started to rain a little and we stopped under some trees to get out our jackets.

"That thing is scary," I said. "Just the feel of it."

"I know. Isn't it exciting?"

"Really?"

"I don't know. It's like some kind of … I've been reading about them. About the scientists who are studying them, interviewing the people who come back, trying to figure them out. And the more we find out about the rifts, the more we don't know … I don't know how to describe it. I've never believed in god or anything, but now I believe in these. They say it's like a dream when you fall in."

"Most of them say it was like a nightmare."

"Right, I know, I know. They say it's a nightmare, but it's real. It can kill you. But what if you knew what to expect going in? Would you stand a better chance?"

"I don't think it's a good idea."

"Oh, I'm not going in. I just wonder about it."

"Me too. But it scares me to think of going in there."

I wished I could face it as calmly as Jules. As we continued on the trail, I tried not to look at the rift. It wasn't that I was scared of it specifically. Rather, I was scared of my own impulse to break towards it. To run into it and find out what was there. As if it were calling.

Over the ridge I started to feel a little better. We were on our way to the camp. I imagined it as a scene out of a fantasy novel, wizards and alchemists selling their services in neat little stalls.

Someone was walking towards us. A man. He was approaching from the direction of the sun, still rising over the big mountain in the east. When he got closer, I realized he was one of them. Except he was made of stone.

He was not at all like a statue. He moved. He seemed to breathe. He wore clothing.

"Where are you going." He said. He did not ask the question so much as demand an answer.

"We're just here to visit," said Jules.

"Who are you visiting."

We looked at each other. "We don't know," I said.

"Okay. Get out of here before sunset. And remember, there's no laws out here. Not even physical ones. You're considered responsible for your own safety, and nothing can guarantee that. And really, do not stay after sunset."

"What happens at sunset?"

"It dreams."

We came over the ridge and walked down into the camp. A collection of yurts and shanties on the outside, squalid huts inhabited by shivering and apparently traumatized rift people. They shouted, swore at the sky and at god, scratched at the soil, or just rocked back and forth. Neither of us were ready for that, but we pressed on, mute, determined. We'd come this far. We were tourists here.

Closer to the middle were the solid stone buildings. Maryann had said they were created by the shapers, men and women who controlled the world with their dreams. It was one of the shapers who'd changed Maryann. They'd told her that the buildings had not been built, but imagined, dreamed into the world. They took the shape of ruins, yet each was a solid, single piece of stone, as if it had naturally worn into the shape of a house.

There was a lot of activity through one of the thoroughfares. This was apparently the main market. People eyed us as we approached. Somehow we did not fit it. It was obvious. But the sun was out, we were safe, so it seemed.

The spectacle of that street was difficult to describe. There are details, so many of them, so much exotica that I cannot possibly include everything. A boy with the antlers of an elk. A woman with ten arms. A man calmly riding a tiger.

We both walked slowly through the street, dazzled and overwhelmed. Some of the people dressed like we did in raincoats and hiking boots, but looked somehow changed. We followed the trail of activity to a number of men up on boxes shouting the trades of their employers.

"Stoneworking! Ace Percy's Stoneworking, we can build any size, 100% granite work, guaranteed to outlast your grandkids!"

"Futures revealed! We have here a mystic who witnessed the rift and emerged with knowledge from the future. You can talk with him for only ten dollars a minute!"

"Alterations! Want to be someone else? My employer Dr. West can perform any alterations you need. That's right folks, a rifted shaper who just so happens to be an MD."

"Hear that?" said Jules. "That sounds like the guy Maryann saw."

"I'm not sure," I said. She said he used to be a mechanic. And his name was David.

"Excuse me," said Jules to the barker. "Is Dr. West's first name David? We're looking for him."

The barker's gaze hardened. "He's down a few. Fuck off if y'ain't buyin."

We backed away, nervous and hurried off in the direction he'd indicated. The wide thoroughfare became a small trail with a few tents. We asked again and were directed further down again. Into the woods.

We kept going, both of us uncertain as to where. One thing was sure — as tourists we were not exactly welcome in the camp. Which made some amount of sense because the rift people weren't usually welcome in town. David, however, was supposed to be a local or something, an apparently normal, sane person who'd gone through the rift. He was a shaper, which meant — well, nobody was sure really, but we'd heard from Maryann and a couple others that the shapers retained some part of the rift, and were able to control the world around them with their thoughts.

The trail turned and started going up the mountain. We exchanged a look and kept going. Was he really out here, or had everyone just tricked us for asking directions?

We kept going. I don't know what it was other than gut feeling, or just the mute disgust that the rifters had used to give us directions, but I just sensed, or perhaps guessed, that they were telling the truth. Jules had the same intuition, and we kept going and going up the mountain.

We broke through the top of the thick clouds drizzling down on the camp. The sun was bright but not warm, and we climbed still higher. Now we could see his cabin — it stood on the peak of the mountain, made of wood and sending out a constant stream of wood smoke through the chimney. How anybody had hauled that much wood to the top without a helicopter was a mystery.

As we got closer over the next hour, we saw a man sitting on the front steps of the cabin. He was watching us and smoking something from a pipe. We got closer and he went inside, then came back out with a bottle of water. He wore a wool hat, a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and he had a beard. The stereotypical mountain man.

"Here," he said, once we'd summited.

"Thanks," I took the water bottle and drank. He looked at us with a little bit of amusement, his hands on his hips.

"Well," he paused. "Y'must be here for a reason, coming up to the top and all."

"We heard you were a shaper," said Jules.

"Oh yeah?"

I passed the water bottle to her.

"We know a girl named Maryann."

"Oh do you. Yea, I remember her."

"She showed us your work."

"Ahh… Yes, that's the only reason anyone makes the trip these days."

"Why don't you live in the camp?" asked Jules.

"Why don't you pack up and go home?"

"I …"

"She didn't mean it," I said. "She just blurts things out like that."

"Relax, I'm just having some fun." He smiled.

We both laughed a little.

"I'm David," he said and extended his hand to me.

"Marie."

"Jules."

"Come see this," he said. He walked up to the cabin, and standing by the steps going up to the door, pointed towards the far side of the mountain.

"It's only from above that you can see how it works. What it is. And that's the only way in. Out is on the other side, in the valley."

"So you're up here to guard the entrance?" I asked.

He smiled. "Yes."

"So nobody can go in?"

"No, anyone can go in if they want to. But you have to be ready for what you'll find in there. And it's only if you've satisfied me, that you can live with any changes wrought to you, that you'll be allowed in."

"So what kind of changes. You mean like Maryann?"

"She's a good example, sure. But she came up here and decided she didn't want to go through the rift itself, she just wanted a unique alteration, similar to getting a tattoo. I gave that to her."

"So what is it then that you're looking for?"

"Time in the rift is like time in a dream. Only it goes on for years, and it's not only your dream. It's the dreams of the rift. There's something in there, I don't know what it is, but we all felt it. Something, maybe many things, and they want to hurt us. They want us out. Eventually, we all found our own ways out, banded in small groups, making our way the best we could. The thing about dreams is, they are always changing. Anything can change, any time. You will change. Your body will change. I'm not the same person who fell into a rift on Lake Eerie four years ago. You won't be the same person if you ever come back."

"Well, I was just here to see what this was all about," said Jules. "If I could get something like Maryann did maybe."

"I do the best work of anybody. And my rates are very reasonable."

"I still kinda want to go," I said.

"What?" said Jules.

"I didn't tell you cause I was a little scared, but I could fell it — the rift I mean — calling me. Like it was something I had to do."

David looked straight at me, dourly. He narrowed his eyes. "It did the same thing to me. But first I recommend you and I talk some more. I can perform some demonstrations which might prepare you for what you might undergo inside, and your reactions to these will help determine if you can handle what can happen inside. I can make no promises as to what kind of powers you may discover, latent within yourself. Those are your own journey to make, and finding and learning them is a long, long process."

"So what do we do?"

"Come inside!" He turned and walked up the steps to his house. Jules and I smiled at one another and followed.

The inside of the cabin was a pleasant surprise compared to the outside. It was a single room with a high ceiling, a wood stove with a pile of firewood in one corner and a cot and desk in the other. The remainder of the cabin was taken up by books. It was immaculately tidy, except for a large empty cardboard box laying on its side at the far end of the room.

"I like this!" I said. "Very cozy."

"Thanks," said David. He made a tired noise and went to the stove and picked up the kettle.

"Tea?" he asked.

"Please, thanks!"

"Me too!" said Jules.

He poured a couple cups. We sat and drank.

"Should we get started then," he said and stood up, taking off his hat and throwing it on his cot.

"Sure," I said. "What's the first thing that happens in the rift?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. You start dreaming. Things happen. That's it. All I can tell you is what happened to me and the other people in there with me. And a lot of it I can't or won't remember. Dreams work that way, they change and you forget the old ones. Not many people remember anything, but almost everyone remembers that things changed. People changed. A lot. So what the premise here is, is that I shape you, I use what I learned from the rift and I change you two.

"Now," he continued, "In the rift you might have some kind of special power, nobody can say if you will or what it will be. But you might have that, and it might be useful. You might also be a shaper, in which case you can simply undo anything that happens. But often, you won't be able to. So that's the exercise, I change you and you see if you can handle it. Then you make your own decision. "

"But what about me? I don't want to go in, I just want to try out some magic," said Jules.

"By all means."

David lifted his hands so they pointed at Jules and I. He flexed his fingers, tensing them while straight, then relaxed. I knew he had done something, because something just felt different. I swallowed and my throat didn't feel right. It kind of tickled.

Suddenly my head fell off. It rolled forwards into my panicked hands, and I caught myself by hugging my head against my chest.

"So you see," said David, "Things usually start out pretty strange."

"Woah," said Jules. "You beheaded us!"

I turned myself to look at her. Her head was upside down. In her hands. She righted herself and tucked her head under her arm.

"Since this is your first day, we'll just start with that. If you have to wear your head in public, it'll stick for a couple minutes. Come back tomorrow and I'll put them back on."

"What if I lose my head?" asked Jules.

"Uh… Don't?" David shrugged his shoulders.

We laughed. It would be an interesting hike back.