4338.204 · July 23, 2018 AD
A Book Left in Darkness
Jamie came home. But not to him. The cold sheets tell their own story, and even Duke has chosen sides. So when sleep refuses to come, when the device pulses cool and certain beneath his pillow, Luke rises. He crosses again—this time into a Clivilius stripped of sun and stars, a void so complete it presses against his skin like presence. He leaves something behind. Proof. A hardcover spine standing against infinite dark.
The house breathes with quiet betrayal. Jamie's snoring drifts from the spare room; Duke's paws shift against distant floorboards. Traitor, Luke whispers, though the word falls flat, swallowed by the ache in his chest. Sleep offers no refuge, only the relentless churn of questions that have no answers.
So he rises. The device waits beneath his pillow, cool and impossibly real. In the study, he presses the button—and this time, no blood is demanded. Light erupts, colours spiral, and the wall becomes a gateway once more.
He steps through.
Clivilius at night is nothing like the burning desert of his first crossing. Here there is only darkness—vast, starless, suffocating. No wind. No sound. The silence is not absence but presence, watchful and immense. The portal's glow is the only light in existence, throwing long shadows across barren ground.
Luke crouches. Sets a book upon the sand. A marker. A promise. Proof that when he returns, this will have been real.
Then he runs.
Back through the vortex, back to the mundane walls of his study. But something has shifted. When sleep finally claims him, there are no nightmares—only visions of cities rising from orange sand.
