"Mommy, wait!" cried the little boy, his covers pulled up to his chin as he stared after his mother with wide eyes.

His mother paused in the doorway, her hand on the light-switch, poised to flick it to off. "What is it?"

"Check under the bed for me?" Jeffrey whimpered, pulling his covers up to his nose.

His mother blinked in surprise, then sighed as she came back into the room. "I thought you'd grown out of believing in bed monsters..."

Jeffrey was silent as he watched his mother drop to her knees beside his little bed. His mother lowered her head to the carpet long enough for only the briefest, most cursory of glances under the bed, then got back to her feet.

"No monsters," she announced.

"None?" Jeffrey repeated.

"None."

"You're sure?" whined the boy, sounding more distressed than reassured.

"Positive. Now go to sleep," his mother commanded, and crossed the room back to the door again. "Good night," she said, and flicked off the switch.

Jeffrey fidgeted under his dragon-printed sheets as his mother closed the door, and the wedge of light shrank down into a hair-thin line, and then vanished, leaving him in the darkness that turned his room into an alien landscape. As happened in any child's room robbed of light, the shadows present--cast by his hat rack, his toy box, his cabinet, anything--became dark and menacing.

Jeffrey stared at the dark-on-dark outline of his closet door for a long time, then leaned over just enough to peek at the floor beside his bed. His mother said there was no monster under there, but hadn't she always been wrong whenever he'd asked before? He knew he had a monster under there. He'd heard it, seen it before. Sure, it had been quiet the past few nights, but that worried Jeffrey more than anything else. Was it gone? Or gathering its strength?

He glanced at his closet again, then swallowed nervously--his throat clicking dryly--and slowly, cautiously leaned over his bed. Perspective skewed as he gradually lowered his head, until he almost got dizzy and feared he'd fall, and had to close his eyes.

But he continued to drop his head until he felt his hair--short and sandy blonde, it was--brushing the carpet. He hung there, eyes still closed, upside-down like a frightened baby 'possum as the blood rushed to his head. It wasn't too late to pull back up again. He hadn't seen anything yet.

But what was better? Knowing, or not knowing?

Without opening his eyes, he dropped one hand down and carefully, carefully reached into the darker darkness beneath his bed.

His fingertips encountered fur.

Jeffrey didn't have fuzzy slippers. Or stuffed animals.

The fur pulled away from his hand with the softest of rustles, shadow sliding over shadow.

He didn't have pets, either. He opened his eyes.

Two glowing orbs of an eerie purple-blue looked back at him.

And Jeffrey heaved a huge sigh of relief, and smiled at the orbs as they blinked at him. "I thought you were gone," he whispered, smiling.

His Monster made a chortling kind of sound at him as he sat back up again and snuggled, now contented and secure, back into his sheets. The Monster under Jeffrey's bed smiled as it listened to him settling back in place, and purred to itself as the boy drifted off into happy slumber.

For not all Monster-Under-the-Bed were scary, and Jeffrey's Monster could only feed off his dreams. When he had nightmares, His Monster got sick from them. Nightmares were poison for Jeffrey and his Monster, tainting his mind and his Monster's stomach.

Jeffrey's Monster curled up under his bed, its long fur whispering over itself as the nighttime creature got comfortable. Jeffrey's Monster at most times looked like nothing more than a giant ball of fluff, a dust-bunny of massive proportions, because Jeffrey liked fur. It made him think of the big, furry dog his family had once had. So Jeffrey's Monster was furry, and little else beside that and its glowing eyes. Even the eyes were from Jeffrey's imagination, because he felt better when he saw those purple-blue orbs. They were his favourite colours, and they calmed him. The colour he was scared of was the yellow of old paper and discoloured teeth and ancient bones.

Eyes like those that now peered out of the closet, as the door softly creaked open. Eight eyes, tiny and set in an odd, circular pattern. Spider eyes.

Jeffrey's Monster-Under-The-Bed slid out of its pose of relaxation and growled as the Monster-In-The-Closet peered into the room. The Closet-Monster jumped in surprise, its spider-eyes going wide--Jeffrey hated spiders--and then it chittered angrily as Jeffrey's Monster began to slink towards it.

I want him! the Closet-Monster shrieked, bearing insectoid mandibles and snapping at the air with crablike claws. Jeffrey didn't like scorpions, either.

He is mine! Jeffrey's Monster howled back, as gleaming teeth and massive claws suddenly showed through the heavy fur. Jeffrey liked to imagine his Monster was fierce and vicious to anyone but him, with fangs like sabres and claws like daggers, and so it was. All the better to protect him with.

The boy slept on in blissful unawareness as his Monster threw itself at the intruder and the two locked in battle. They crashed into the hat rack, the toy box, the cabinet, but nothing shook with the impacts or crashed against their weight. Their screeches and yowlings were inaudible to him as they flew about the room, biting, clawing, slashing, shedding monster blood that had no smell and would leave no mark nor dampness.

The Closet-Monster wanted his nightmares. The Bed-Monster protected his dreams.

Though the battle raged long and hard, the intruder had no chance of winning, and Jeffrey's Monster succeeded in driving it out through the cracks in the windowpane. His Monster watched it run, its form dissolving into a shapeless moonlight shadow as it fled in search of a child without a guardian monster. Jeffrey's Monster didn't care about those children, though, and neither wished the Closet-Monster luck nor misfortune.

Jeffrey's Monster slid back under his bed and licked at its wounds, resuming its contented purr. Its boy was safe, its meals assured. That was all that mattered.

But then, one day, as always has to happen sometime, Jeffrey grew up. Though still a child, he reached that age where boys and girls can't believe in Monsters anymore, whether good or bad. Though his imagination and dreams remained, the belief was gone, and the dreams turned to dust in the mouth of the Monster that had been his. Jeffrey's Monster was now Nobody's Monster, and as Jeffrey began to forget he had ever believed in Bed-Monsters and Closet-Monsters, Nobody's Monster had to leave, or starve.

So it left, fleeing into the night the same way countless Monsters before it had fled when Nobody's Monster had beaten them so long ago. It fled the village it had dwelled in for so long, as Jeffrey had been the last boy both old enough and young enough to believe, which was why Nobody's Monster had defended him so fiercely. Now it would have to find a new child, unclaimed or with a weaker Monster it could drive off, or it would starve and wither away into a wisp of unremembered fantasy.

As it travelled, its hunger leeched it of its strength, until it was no longer the powerful, well-fed Monster it had been. Now it had no choice but to find an unclaimed child.

Just before Nobody's Monster reached the limit of its endurance, it came to a place of many, many people. The mighty creatures called dragons soared the sky--Nobody's Monster had spent many times in a shape like theirs before--and twirled around a shining white tower that stretched up higher than the clouds. The place was called Cy Dragonstake, and it was here that Nobody's Monster was saved. There were people everywhere, and it found children among them. Not many, and not all of them still had the innocence it took to feed a Monster, but they were all unclaimed, and all the Monster needed was one.

It had to enter the tower and dart up the stairwells to get to the room where the boy slumbered on, his dreams vibrant and shining with imagination. His fears were small, and if they caused his nightmares, he was at least free of them this night. Shapelessly the Monster slid into the darkness under his bed, whispering a sigh of relief as it was finally able to feed.

The dreams washed over it, filling it, the fantasies contained within them pouring into the Monster like water into a parched well. It was certainly one of the brightest imaginations the Monster had ever claimed, and far more inventive than Jeffrey's had been. As the boy's likes and dislikes entered into the Monster, they crafted it into a shape far, far different from the furry, vaguely doglike shape that had last housed it.

Feathers coated it as fur once had, everything from soft and downy around its mouth to long, crisp feathers along its new arms and legs. A stormy blue-grey colour joined its natural black-blackness, striping the feathers in an elegant pattern Jeffrey would never have conceived. It eyes returned, but rather than glowing purple-blue, they were black and full of stars. The Monster became something wiry and bipedal, with a mane of horns and a sharp maw filled with teeth--and those fierce, protective teeth were about the only thing its new shape had in common with its old one. If it had stepped out from under the bed, the Monster would have swelled to a height as tall as the tallest man, but for now it kept itself smaller and restrained to the comfortable bed-shadows, one new, humanlike hand clutching the hilt of a sword worthy of any legendary hero. Its feet were birdlike talons, scaled and clawed in ebony, and mighty wings stretched from its back.

When the creation of its new shape was completed, the Monster observed itself with wonder. This shape was mighty, and made it wish there was another Monster around to test its new self against. But for now, all was peaceful. Hunger sated and body shaped, the Monster settled into a state of rest under the boy's bed, surveying his dreams rather than feeding from the energy.

That was how it learned it was now Rowan Sendarwing's Monster, and that there was a strange thing soon to happen with creatures called bipedras...