“In between what?” Jeremiah asked.
Ulrick grinned from ear to ear.
“Everything.”
Jeremiah raised a brow, but before he could decide whether that answer clarified anything, Ulrick chuckled and started down the street, gesturing for him to follow.
Warm sunlight touched the back of Jeremiah’s neck as he fell into step. The air carried a dozen scents at once: baked bread, sharp spices, hot metal, flower pollen, rain on old stone, and something faintly sweet he couldn’t quite place.
Billy drifted close behind him at first, tentacles tucked in, his bubble armor catching the sunlight. Then a flash of motion overhead caught his attention, and he rose a little higher. Curiosity pulsed through the bond, bright and sharp enough that Jeremiah glanced back.
The young kraken turned in a slow circle, his bubble glimmering in the warm air as he took in the street.
Through the bond, Jeremiah felt the dark, heavy cloud that had clung to Billy since that morning hadn’t quite vanished. But now, something like wonder pushed through in brief, bright sparks. Curiosity cut into the melancholy as Billy took in the strange street, the unfamiliar smells, the movement, and the colors.
Jeremiah couldn’t blame him.
At first glance, the street looked like something he might have expected to find deeper in Central. Broad paving stones stretched beneath their feet, polished smooth by countless steps. Storefronts lined both sides of the road, some sleek and modern, with wide glass windows and glowing signs; others were built from brick, carved wood, or pale stone veined with light. Cafés, boutiques, tailors, bookshops, and restaurants sat shoulder to shoulder beneath awnings and suspended banners.
The longer he looked, however, the more he began to notice the oddities.
A building on the left had no visible entrance at ground level, only a series of circular openings stacked along its upper floors. Winged patrons came and went through them without slowing. Farther down, something that might have been a shop leaned at an impossible angle between two larger buildings, its walls made of dark shell and polished bone. A tiny wooden stall sat wedged between two modern storefronts, lit by oil lamps and staffed by a woman in clothing several centuries out of date, selling charms from a woven basket.
Across from it stood a tower of glass and light with no roof that Jeremiah could see. The upper floors blurred into the sky, fading as though the concept of distance had stopped working halfway up.
The people were no less varied.
Most were familiar enough. Humans, fae, elves, dwarves, and other near-human species moved through the street in steady currents, dressed in everything from streetwear to business suits. That much Jeremiah could have seen anywhere on Nexus.
But mixed among them were people he had rarely seen outside broadcasts or textbooks.
A pair of Beastkin walked arm in arm past a tea stand, one with tawny ears flicking above a wool cap, the other with scaled hands wrapped around a paper cup. A few stores over, a tall Vidaasi in layered robes ducked beneath a hanging sign, their draconic head tilting as they listened to a much smaller companion complain about prices. Atop a larger fountain built into a storefront, a trio of beings like living shadows danced, occasionally gesturing inside at anyone who glanced their way.
Some, Jeremiah had no context for at all.
One towered beside a storefront three doors down, a massive pillar of writhing, rope-like material that shimmered between black, violet, and oil-slick green. It was far too large to enter the shop properly. Instead, the bulk of its body remained outside while several long extensions reached through the doorway, browsing shelves within. A dozen shopping bags hung from other tendrils like ornaments.
Ulrick watched both Billy and Jeremiah take in the sights with open amusement as they walked.
“I don’t understand,” Jeremiah said at last, turning back toward him. “What do you mean, everywhere?”
“This place is what’s commonly called a liminal space,” Ulrick said. “It exists in the place between places. Those with the knowledge of how can step into it, rather than simply pass by.”
Jeremiah’s brow furrowed. He glanced over his shoulder toward the door they had come through, half expecting to see the inside of Ulrick’s bakery through the window.
Instead, he saw only the same strange street reflected back at him.
He couldn’t even tell where they had entered from anymore, despite the fact that they had been walking in mostly a straight line.
“So it’s what?” Jeremiah asked. “Just… inside your doorway?”
He was fairly certain he would have noticed so many colorful individuals passing in and out of Ulrick’s bakery on a regular basis.
Ulrick laughed, warm and deep. “Not just mine, lad. Every doorway. Every window sill and every archway. The Inn Between isn’t just a space. It’s the space. It’s—”
“Everywhere,” Jeremiah repeated slowly.
Ulrick grinned and nodded.
“How do you even make a place like this?”
“With a lot of Threshold mages,” Ulrick said, “all working together over a very long period of time.”
Jeremiah paused. “Threshold mage?”
Ulrick stopped beside him.
Billy had drifted ahead toward a floral stand tucked beneath a striped green awning. The stall itself seemed alive. Vines twisted around every support, dotted with blossoms that opened and closed as Billy approached. The bored-looking woman minding the stand smiled faintly as he circled, while several tendrils reached toward his bubble, curling and uncurling as if in greeting. Billy spun once, then tapped one gently with a tentacle through the barrier, sending pleased ripples through the bond.
Ulrick watched him for a moment before continuing.
“Threshold is one of the oldest schools of magic in existence,” Ulrick said. “Some say the oldest. Long before people started qualifying and quantifying magical law, they understood the power of thresholds. A circle of salt. A line drawn in the sand.”
He turned, his grin returning.
“Or the knocking of a door.”
Jeremiah’s gaze shifted back toward him.
Ulrick shrugged. “That said, those with a true affinity for Threshold, like you or me, are rare. It’s a nuanced art.”
Jeremiah frowned, but didn’t interrupt.
“The Inn Between doesn’t exist in just one place,” Ulrick continued, his pace unhurried as the crowd flowed around them. “In a very real way, this place is the Threshold. That which all things cross.”
Jeremiah glanced sideways at him.
Ulrick’s expression had shifted from amused to thoughtful, though the smile never quite left his face.
“It was inevitable, then,” the baker went on, “that mages with enough skill and affinity for the school would eventually find their way here and learn to make use of it. The result…”
He lifted one broad hand and swept it toward the impossible street around them that stretched on farther than it should have.
The Inn Between unfolded like a city with no single origin. People flowed in and out of shops that looked as if they had been pulled from different worlds, different eras, and different understandings of architecture altogether. To one side stood a wooden apothecary lit by hanging lanterns, its narrow windows crowded with colored bottles. Nearby, a café with floating tables shared a wall with what looked like a stone watchtower. Somewhere, a bell chimed, though Jeremiah couldn’t tell from which direction.
Billy chose that moment to drift back.
The young kraken bobbed through the air with blue and pink petals swirling inside his bubble armor like a tiny storm. A small crown of woven flowers sat proudly atop his mantle, delicate blossoms tucked together with green stems and little white buds. Billy spun once as he approached, clearly showing off.
Jeremiah blinked.
Through their bond, he could feel Billy’s satisfaction.
He stared at Billy for a heartbeat, then laughed. “You make a friend?”
Billy puffed up inside his bubble, tentacles spreading with shy, smug delight.
Jeremiah turned and stared back toward the stall.
The florist stood beneath her living awning, one hand resting on the counter as vines coiled lazily around her elbows. She was young, with coffee-brown hair, sun-warmed skin, and a freckled nose. The bored expression she’d worn earlier had softened into a small, amused grin. When she caught Jeremiah looking, she lifted her fingers in a casual wave.
Jeremiah returned it with an awkward but grateful smile before following Ulrick farther down the street.
Ulrick chuckled as they continued. “Anyone with some kind of affinity for Threshold will eventually find their way here, sooner or later. Those without can hire someone who does. Because of that, this place has been used for ages as a gathering point for mages from all over, even before the Great Unification and the creation of the Last Galaxy.”
“I’m surprised I’ve never heard of it,” Jeremiah said. “Or Threshold magic, for that matter. I know magical information in the media is… simplified. Curated, I guess. But when people talk about magic, it’s usually things like fire, water, or light. Sometimes bigger concepts like space.”
Ulrick threw his head back and laughed, loud enough that a passing dwarf in a velvet coat gave him a sharp look.
“It’s a bit of an open secret,” Ulrick said. “Known to those who need to know, but rarely spoken of outside those with the gift already. Some mage cultures even scoff at Threshold, calling it hedge magic or worse, mostly because they don’t understand it.” His grin widened.
Jeremiah raised a brow.
“In other circles,” Ulrick continued, “young mages are brought here only after learning their first spell. A rite of passage, more or less.”
Jeremiah flinched.
“Ahhh,” he said, scratching his cheek.
Ulrick chuckled and clapped him on the back, hard enough to make Jeremiah stumble half a step.
“Think nothing of it, lad. It’s nothing official, and I’ve never had much patience for uppity traditions anyway.” He gave a dismissive wave. “Besides, it’s a pain to find who we’ve come to see anywhere else.”
Jeremiah’s brow furrowed. “Where are we going?”
Ulrick’s grin widened.
“To where it all began,” he said. “Possibly the oldest place in the Inn Between, and the place where it gets its name.”
Before Jeremiah could ask anything more, they turned a corner.
The storefronts vanished, and the crowd noise fell away behind them.
In its place stretched a long, dusty road beneath a wide, sun-bleached sky.
About fifty meters ahead, a large, rustic building sat at the corner of a crossroads.
Jeremiah slowed.
The building was broad without being massive, its front built from dark wood and weathered stone. A crooked sign hung above the door, swaying faintly in a breeze Jeremiah couldn’t feel.
A frown pulled at his face as he glanced back the way they had come.
Only to see that the street was gone.
No storefronts or crowds. No warm press of bodies moving through impossible architecture. Not even a trace of the overwhelming scents that had filled the air. In their place stretched the same dusty road beneath his feet.
Jeremiah stared.
The road didn’t fade into the horizon the way roads were supposed to. It continued past the point where distance should have swallowed it, past where his eyes could reasonably follow, past where his mind could comfortably accept that anything still existed. It stretched on and on until the act of looking at it became uncomfortable, as if his thoughts were being pulled thin while trying to measure something that had no interest in being measured.
His throat tightened, and his vision swam.
He turned forward again and found the road ahead did much the same, cutting past the inn and running into the impossible distance. The road crossing it stretched left and right, vanishing into that same unbroken forever.
Jeremiah couldn’t see where they ended.
He wasn’t even sure they did.
They could have led anywhere.
Even nowhere at all.
He forced his gaze away from the roads and looked toward the spaces between them.
At first, the surrounding land seemed simple enough. A vast prairie spread around the crossroads, bright green grass rolling outward beneath a wide, empty sky, stirred by a light breeze. Simple. Natural. Almost peaceful.
But some primal part of Jeremiah told him that wasn’t the full truth.
The grass never changed. The sky stayed sky. The ground remained exactly where it was. And yet his sense of place shifted with every breath. For a single heartbeat, it felt like he stood on the edge of a familiar field near the home he and Sarah had shared. The next, it became a stretch of grassland beside an old highway. Then it was the empty edge of some world he had never seen, beneath a sky that belonged to no planet he knew.
Each impression passed without the scenery changing at all, leaving behind a strange ache of nostalgia for places he knew he had never been.
A cold thread of sweat slipped down the back of his neck.
It reminded him, faintly, of looking into the barrier of the Testing Grounds. The Wyrd Wilds had always carried that sense of unstable possibility, of being ready to become almost anything.
This place…
This place felt like it could be anywhere.
Jeremiah’s stomach turned, and the road tilted under him as he stumbled half a step.
A broad hand settled firmly on his shoulder.
“Keep your eyes on the building, lad,” Ulrick said, his voice steady and warm beside him. “It can be a bit disorienting for everyone their first time.”
Jeremiah swallowed, nodded once, and did exactly that.
He fixed his attention on the building at the center of the crossroads.
The nausea didn’t vanish, but it helped, and the world stopped pulling so sharply at the edges of his thoughts.
The building itself was large, though not massive. Two stories, maybe three, if the steep roof hid an attic. Dark wooden beams made up its face, and weathered stone formed the foundation and lower walls. The windows glowed with warm amber light despite the sun overhead. A sign creaked lazily above the door, though Jeremiah still couldn’t make out the writing from this distance.
It looked like the kind of tavern Jeremiah had seen in old fantasy illustrations. The sort of place where travelers in cloaks gathered around a hearth, where someone played a lute in the corner, and where the stew was either legendary or deeply suspicious.
That impression lasted right up until Jeremiah noticed the parking lot.
A strip of asphalt sat beside the building, cracked at the edges and marked with faded white lines. A lacquered carriage stood near the front, its wheels taller than his waist, drawn by nothing at all. Beside it sat a rusty pickup truck with one mismatched door and a cracked windshield. A sleek hover-car, similar in model to one Sarah had once owned, was parked two spaces down. And at the very back, partly hidden by the building, was—
Jeremiah blinked and tilted his head.
Is that a space shuttle?
The strange queasiness faded a little more, replaced by confusion.
He looked back at Ulrick. “Where are we?”
Ulrick’s smile turned thoughtful. “That’s a good question,” he said. “There are some who are still trying to figure that one out. Closest anyone’s come is ‘between the beginning and the end.’”
He paused, then added with a smirk, “And maybe a little left of somewhere.”
Jeremiah stared at him.
Ulrick chuckled and nodded toward the far side of the road.
Jeremiah followed the gesture and noticed a weathered signpost standing beneath a tree he was almost certain hadn’t been there a moment ago. Its branches cast a neat circle of shade over the post, despite the sun being in entirely the wrong position for it.
The post held only two signs, one pointing down each road.
As they drew closer, Jeremiah could read the weathered writing.
One simply read Here, while the other read There.
Jeremiah stared at the signs for a long moment before shaking his head and turning back to Ulrick.
“And we can find whoever we’re looking for here?” he asked.
Ulrick laughed as they reached the front steps. “I’d hope so.”
He pushed open the door.
“He owns the place.”
Inside was a homely tavern bar, much as the exterior had promised. Wooden floors. Low beams. Round tables scattered across the room. A long bar stretched along one wall, polished smooth by years of use. Shelves behind it held bottles, mugs, jars, and several objects Jeremiah didn’t recognize and wasn’t sure counted as kitchenware.
Jeremiah had just enough time to take it all in before a familiar blue window opened in his sight.
—✦—
You have entered “The Inn Between”, a System-registered Shard space.
The Shard User has been notified of your presence.
—✦—