Boxes and Portals

“It’s strange how wonder and absurdity arrive the same way—a knock at the door, and suddenly you’re drowning in cardboard or colour.”

The portal folded inward and vanished, taking its colours with it like a conjurer sweeping cards back into the deck. One moment the wall blazed with impossible light; the next it was just plaster and paint again, ordinary as a tax return, bearing no evidence of the miracle it had just performed.

The silence of my study rushed in to fill the space the portal had occupied. After the vast openness of Clivilius—that endless sky, that river singing its cold song—the room felt almost suffocating. The walls pressed closer than they had any right to, the ceiling hung lower, the air sat heavier in my lungs. Everything familiar had become faintly claustrophobic, as though the house itself had shrunk while I was away.

I didn't have time to sit with that feeling. Before I could even draw a proper breath, the house erupted.

The dog flap clattered like a gunshot—that distinctive slap of plastic against plastic that always preceded chaos—and then the scrabble of claws, that particular skittering rhythm that meant Henri and Duke had returned from their garden adventures with enthusiasm to spare. They came barrelling down the hallway in a blur of cream and white fur, their bodies low to the ground, their legs churning with an urgency that suggested they'd just discovered something extraordinary and needed to share it immediately.

Their barking overlapped in the way it always did—Duke's higher and more insistent, Henri's lower and slightly wheezier—creating a chorus that bounced off the walls and filled every corner of the house with pure canine joy. They skidded around the corner into the study, saw me standing there, and their celebration reached new heights. You'd think I'd been gone for months instead of minutes. You'd think my return was the most significant event in recorded history.

A laugh escaped me before I could stop it—sudden and genuine and slightly helpless. After the intensity of everything I'd just experienced, after the river and the screen and the voice that had spoken my name, there was something almost medicinal about being tackled by two small dogs who thought the sun rose and set on my presence. They didn't care about inter-dimensional portals or impossible landscapes. They cared about me, about the simple fact of my existence, about the opportunity to press their warm bodies against my legs and demand the attention they considered their due.

I moved toward the kitchen, and that's when I noticed the grit.

Each step left faint impressions on the carpet—not visible, exactly, but tangible. I could feel the grains beneath the soles of my feet, tiny fragments that had hitchhiked back with me from a desert that existed on the other side of reality. Orange dust from Clivilius, now ground into the dark weave of our hallway carpet, mixing with fibres that smelled of vacuum cleaner heat and the lemon-scented detergent Jamie preferred.

The juxtaposition was jarring enough to make me pause. That dust had come from a place no map had ever charted, from sand that had never known human footprints before mine. And now it was here, in our house, being tracked into the pile by my bare feet as I walked toward the kettle. The impossible and the mundane, sharing the same carpet fibres.

My phone buzzed in my pocket—a single sharp vibration that cut through the dogs' subsiding celebration. I pulled it out, the screen's glow splashing across my dust-smeared fingers, and Jamie's name stared back at me above a single line of text:

Your brother's flight has been delayed by 45 minutes!

Relief washed through me first—warm and sudden, spreading through my chest like whiskey on a cold night. Forty-five minutes. Not much in the grand scheme of things, but right now it felt like a gift. Time to catch my breath. Time to figure out how the hell I was going to explain any of this.

But the relief curdled quickly into something more complicated. The message carried no trace of the morning's argument, no sharp edges of blame about the financial promise I'd broken by paying for Paul's ticket again. Just silence where conversation should have been, the particular quiet that lived beneath Jamie's words when he was holding something back. He was still at the airport, still waiting, still doing what I'd asked despite having every reason to refuse.

That steadiness worried me more than anger would have. Jamie's patience had always been both blessing and burden—a quiet tolerance that could endure almost anything but sometimes masked frustrations that were accumulating rather than resolving. I'd rather he shouted at me. At least then I'd know where we stood.

The phone's glow faded, leaving my reflection faintly visible in the dark glass. I looked tired. Dust still streaked my skin, remnants of a world I'd have to find words for soon. I pocketed the device, carrying both the relief and the unease with me as I moved further into the kitchen.

The problem of how to tell them pressed against my thoughts like a headache building behind my eyes.

The truth was the only path I could take. Whatever else I might be—manipulative, according to certain personality tests; good at reading situations and people, according to my own self-assessment—I'd never been able to sustain outright lies. They corroded something in me, turned every subsequent interaction into a performance I couldn't maintain. And this was too big for partial truths or careful omissions. This was a portal to another dimension in my study, a river that ran through an alien desert, a voice that knew my name.

But knowing I had to tell them and knowing how to tell them were entirely different problems.

The scale of it kept defeating my attempts to frame it in words. How did you explain a world beyond ours? How did you describe rivers that seemed alive with light, deserts that breathed beneath skies so blue they looked painted? Every sentence I assembled in my head sounded either too grand or too absurd, either underselling the wonder or inviting immediate dismissal.

And beneath the practical difficulty lurked a deeper fear. What if telling them changed something fundamental about Clivilius itself?

The place had been mine. A private refuge, unmarked by anyone else's opinion or judgment, where silence felt like communion and strangeness felt like belonging. The idea of exposing it—of laying its wonders bare before eyes that might scoff or doubt—made my skin prickle with protective instinct. There was danger in that exposure. Not physical danger, exactly, but something subtler. The danger that disbelief might contaminate it somehow, that bringing witnesses would unravel the thread of belonging I'd only just begun to grasp.

But secrecy wasn't an option either. I'd already set events in motion with my feverish planning, my phone call to Paul, my purchase of tent equipment that was apparently about to arrive. The words I'd spoken in my excitement now encircled me like commitments I couldn't take back. I'd promised to share, to show, to make them witnesses. What had felt like bold generosity in the moment now felt like a trap of my own making.

Paul worried me most.

My brother—fourteen months older but sometimes seeming decades apart in how we approached the world—had always been sceptical of things that couldn't be touched and measured. Broken Hill had stamped itself into him, its dust and hard edges etched into his outlook as surely as the Outback sun had bronzed his skin. He laughed quickly when my thoughts reached beyond the ordinary, not cruelly but dismissively, the way you might laugh at a child's imaginative story before redirecting them toward something practical.

To place Clivilius before Paul was to risk having it dismissed. Or worse—to risk him naming what I'd found as delusion, as breakdown, as evidence that his younger brother had finally gone around the bend that Paul had always suspected was waiting for him.

Jamie was different, but no less complicated. His patience, his measured way of examining things before pronouncing judgment, could serve as balm or as quiet condemnation that wounded deeper than outright rejection. The thought of him stepping into Clivilius, his presence altering its stillness, his eyes cataloguing its wonders with the same careful assessment he brought to furniture purchases and household budgets—it made my chest ache with anticipation and dread in equal measure.

But there was no alternative story to craft. Lies would collapse under their own weight. Evasions would only deepen the distance already growing between us. I had to bring them into it, had to take that leap of faith, even if it meant the world I'd discovered would never again feel wholly mine.

This was no longer just about me. It was about whether wonder could be shared without being diminished.

A vibration in my pocket pulled me back to the present. I drew the phone out again, checking the time almost as an afterthought, and the numbers made me blink.

Fifteen minutes.

Only fifteen minutes had passed since I'd left. Since I'd stepped through the portal and found myself beneath that flawless blue sky, since I'd run toward the river and plunged into its cold embrace, since I'd swum and floated and felt more alive than I had in years. All of that—the discovery, the immersion, the voice speaking my name, the return through colours that seemed to know where I wanted to go—had occupied barely a quarter of an hour on this side of the threshold.

The dissonance pressed against my temples. Time in Clivilius had felt expansive, almost elastic. Moments had stretched and folded according to their own logic, freed from the rigid march of minutes and seconds that governed everything back here. But the clock on my phone cared nothing for elastic time or expanded experience. It showed what it showed: 15 minutes, measured and absolute and completely inadequate to contain what I'd just lived through.

I was straddling two chronologies now. One infinite and malleable, where moments could unfurl like unfurling fabric; the other relentlessly linear, governed by timetables and delayed flights and the imminent arrival of a brother I'd manipulated into coming. Holding both in my mind at once left me slightly dizzy, like trying to walk with one foot on solid ground and the other on something that kept changing shape beneath me.

The rumble of an engine broke through my spiralling thoughts.

It was low at first—the sound of tyres on the main road, nothing remarkable—but then it grew louder, closer, turning off the street and winding up the drive. Concrete crunched beneath wheels. The engine note shifted as the vehicle slowed, then cut out entirely, leaving a silence that somehow felt louder than the noise it replaced.

My heart quickened. I moved to the kitchen window and pulled at the blinds, their slats rattling softly against my fingers. Through the narrow gap, a small delivery truck sat in the driveway, exhaust curling in thin wisps into the winter air. The company logo plastered across its side was a garish assault of primary colours, instantly recognisable, and the sight of it sent a jolt through my chest.

"Shit!"

The word escaped before I could catch it, propelled by a surge of embarrassment and dawning regret. The tent. The bloody tent. Last night's uncharacteristic extravagance—the late-night browsing, the reckless clicking, the giddy certainty that a two-thousand-dollar shelter was exactly what my inter-dimensional adventures required—had just manifested in my driveway, transformed from fantasy into cardboard consequence.

Duke reacted before I could move.

He'd been hovering near the kitchen door, having followed me from the study, and the sound of the vehicle had switched something on in his compact brain. His body went rigid, ears pricked forward, every muscle tensing with the particular intensity he reserved for potential threats. A growl rose in his throat—low and serious, the canine equivalent of a guard drawing his weapon—before erupting into sharp, insistent barks that filled the kitchen and probably carried halfway down the street.

His message was clear: Intruder. Danger. I will defend this territory with my life.

The fact that the "intruder" was almost certainly a tired delivery driver who just wanted to drop off packages and get on with his route didn't factor into Duke's calculations. Threats were threats. Barking was required.

I glanced down at myself and winced. Dust-streaked legs. Damp shorts that still hadn't fully dried from my swim in a the river. No shirt. Barefoot. I looked like I'd just rolled out of bed after a particularly restless night, or possibly like I was in the middle of some kind of episode that might require professional intervention.

There was no time to fix it. Knuckles rapped against the front door—brisk, unapologetic, the knock of someone with a schedule to keep—and Duke's barking redoubled in response.

With a resigned breath, I bent and scooped him into my arms. His body was taut with outrage, warm and trembling against my chest, his eyes fixed on the door as though he could see the threat right through it. His barks continued, slightly muffled now by proximity to my shoulder but no less determined.

I crossed to the front door and pulled it open, bracing for whatever came next.

Cool air rushed in, sharp against my bare skin after the warmth of the house. It carried the scent of damp earth and something smoky—woodfire from somewhere nearby, maybe—and with it came the figure standing on my doorstep.

He was younger than I'd expected. Early twenties at most, maybe even late teens, though there was something in his bearing that suggested he'd already learned to carry weight beyond his years. Tall, with the lean build of someone who worked physically for a living—not bulky, but solid, capable. His face was still softened by youth, touched by stubble that looked more aspirational than established, but his voice when he spoke was surprisingly deep, resonant with an authority that seemed borrowed from someone older.

"Are you Luke Smith?"

The question was professional but curious, and I caught something in his tone that went beyond routine enquiry. He was studying me with an attention that felt oddly personal, as though my answer mattered for reasons beyond his clipboard.

"Ah, yes," I managed, the syllables catching slightly in my throat.

His directness was unsettling. Most delivery drivers barely made eye contact—the exchange was transactional, mechanical, a brief intersection of strangers before they returned to their separate trajectories. But this young man was looking at me with a focus that suggested he expected something more than just a signature.

My gaze dropped instinctively to the embroidered name on his uniform shirt: Joel. The name sparked nothing, and yet... there was something. A flicker of recognition that I couldn't place, a sense that I'd encountered this face before even though I was certain we'd never met. It wasn't déjà vu exactly—more like seeing someone who reminded you of someone else, without being able to identify who.

I let my eyes linger perhaps a moment too long, cataloguing details I couldn't have explained my interest in. His wavy light-brown hair caught the pale winter light, softening the angles of a face that was still settling into its adult proportions. And his eyes—blue, strikingly so, steady and unflinching—met mine with a clarity that made me feel faintly transparent, as though he could see further into me than a stranger at my doorstep had any right to look.

The recognition kept tugging at me. Something in the shape of his face, maybe, or the particular blue of those eyes. Something that reminded me of... someone. I couldn't quite grasp it—the thought kept slipping away like a name on the tip of your tongue—but the sensation persisted, adding an edge of unease to what should have been a routine interaction.

I forced a smile, trying to project normality despite the knot tightening in my chest. Just a delivery, I told myself. A young man doing his job. Routine exchanges, signed papers, polite thank-yous, and then we could both get on with our separate lives.

But the effort of steering my thoughts into that familiar script felt clumsy. My mind kept snagging on those blue eyes, on the sense of something unplaceable but important, on the way his gaze held mine with a confidence that seemed to expect recognition in return.

Duke shifted in my arms, his initial outrage subsiding into curiosity. His compact head craned forward, nose twitching furiously as he inhaled the stranger's scent, his tail beginning to blur with uncertain enthusiasm. Some canine assessment was being made—threat levels recalibrated, friend-or-foe calculations running behind those bright eyes—and apparently Joel was passing muster.

I held Duke tighter, grateful for the warm weight of him, the grounding presence of another heartbeat against my chest.

Joel stood there still, patient but expectant.

"I have a delivery for you," he said, his voice carrying that same curious undertone that had marked his first question.

The words pulled me back into the transaction at hand. Right. The tent. The reason he was here at all, the consequence of my late-night enthusiasm made flesh and cardboard.

"Gee, that really was quick," I said, surprise colouring my tone despite my best efforts at nonchalance. I hadn't expected the order to arrive so early in the morning.

But here it was. Here he was. And the familiar itch of wanting more surfaced before I could suppress it.

"Were there any more left, did you see?"

The question slipped out with the same restless energy that had driven me through portals and into alien rivers. The thought of more—more equipment, more preparation, more tangible evidence of the adventure I was building—flared bright before common sense caught up with me.

Joel's answer was practical, measured. He advised me to contact the supplier directly if I wanted additional stock. The words were neutral, the tone steady, but something in his expression suggested he found my eagerness mildly amusing. Or perhaps mildly concerning. With strangers, it was hard to tell.

He held out a crumpled form and placed it in my hand. A simple exchange—signature for delivery, and then we could both move on.

But nothing in this house ever stayed simple for long.

Duke sprang.

His compact body twisted with an agility that always surprised me, teeth snapping toward the paper with playful intent rather than aggression. Before I could react, before my free hand could even begin to move in defence, he'd clamped his jaws around the edge of the form and ripped it from my grasp with triumphant force.

"Duke! Naughty!"

The words burst out reflexively, more reflex than command. Duke, far from chastened, celebrated his victory with theatrical enthusiasm. His small head shook back and forth, the paper flapping wildly from his jaws like the captured flag of some conquered territory. His eyes gleamed with pure canine joy—the satisfaction of a hunt concluded, a prize won, regardless of its actual value.

The paper tore. Of course it did. Duke's enthusiasm overwhelmed the document's structural integrity, and suddenly he was left holding a fragment while the remainder fluttered toward the floor in a slow, mocking descent.

Henri materialised from somewhere behind me.

The quieter one, the opportunist who preferred to let Duke do the heavy lifting before swooping in for rewards—seized his moment with perfect timing. The paper was still falling when Henri's jaws closed around it, snatching it from the air with a speed that belied his normally sedentary approach to life.

"Henri!"

My voice cracked somewhere between frustration and helpless laughter. Henri paid no attention whatsoever. He pranced away with his prize, his portly body surprisingly light, his tail waving like a victory flag. The document—already torn, now thoroughly crumpled—disappeared with him in the direction of the hallway.

"Sorry, won't be a second," I muttered to Joel, heat climbing my neck as I shifted Duke to one arm and prepared to give chase. This was not how I'd envisioned my morning going. Then again, very little about the past twenty-four hours had matched any vision I'd ever had for my life.

Joel's voice followed me as I moved.

"Where do you want it?"

The question barely registered through the chaos. I was already pursuing Henri, Duke squirming indignantly in my grip, the tattered remains of professional dignity trailing behind me like streamers after a particularly undignified parade.

"Just wherever for now," I called over my shoulder, breathless, the words tossed out without thought. Let Joel sort out the boxes. I had a dog to catch and a delivery form to rescue before it became completely illegible.

The chase carried us down the hallway in a flurry of scrambling paws and muffled exclamations. Henri, despite his preference for comfortable naps over physical exertion, proved surprisingly quick when properly motivated. He veered left at the bedroom doorway, paper still clamped in his jaws, and I followed with the desperate energy of a man trying to preserve the last shreds of his dignity in front of an attractive stranger.

Wait. Attractive? Where had that thought come from?

I didn't have time to examine it. Henri was attempting a leap onto the bed—ambitious for a dog of his proportions—and the physics of the situation worked against him spectacularly. His front paws made contact with the mattress, but his back end failed to follow with sufficient momentum. He scrabbled for purchase, slid backward, and tumbled to the floor in a graceless heap. The paper dislodged from his mouth and spiralled upward, caught by some small current of air, floating with maddening slowness toward the carpet.

I lunged.

Duke's squirming weight threw off my balance, turned what should have been a controlled grab into a clumsy stagger. My fingers closed around the paper at the last possible instant, victory tempered by the sheer ridiculousness of how it had been won. Here I was, half-dressed and dusty from another dimension, clutching a torn delivery form while juggling an indignant Shih Tzu, trying to maintain some pretence of being a functional adult.

This is all too much.

The thought arrived with the clarity of a bell being struck. What had started as a simple knock at the door had unravelled into chaos, one more example of how this morning refused to follow any script I tried to impose on it.

Retreat was the only sensible option. I shuffled backward, nudging Henri with my foot as gently as I could manage, herding both dogs toward the bedroom while Duke barked his protests directly into my ear. The volume was impressive; the indignation was palpable. He wanted to rejoin the fray, wanted to investigate the stranger who'd come to their door, wanted anything except to be shut away from the action.

I got them through the doorway with more luck than skill, manoeuvred Duke through the gap between door and frame, and swung the door shut with the kind of haste that suggested I was sealing in something dangerous rather than two small dogs.

The click of the latch was almost holy in its finality.

Silence. Blessed, temporary silence—followed almost immediately by Henri's sharp protest barks, muffled now by the closed door but no less insistent. I pressed my palm against the wood, as though physical contact might calm him, though I knew better. In a moment, Duke would join in. Then would come the thudding of small bodies against the door, the scratch of claws on paint, the gradual destruction of the barrier I'd placed between them and the world.

The memory of Jamie's expression the last time we'd had to repaint something flashed through my mind—that particular combination of resignation and exasperation that said I love you but you're exhausting me. Another repair bill waiting to happen. Another small compromise in the ongoing negotiation of shared life.

I pushed away from the door and headed back toward the living room, the crumpled form clutched in my fist like evidence of crimes committed.

The sight that greeted me stopped me cold.

Joel was just setting down another box, adding it to the nearest stack with the casual competence of someone who did this all day.

"I didn't realise there would be so many boxes," I said, and the words came out carrying surprise and resignation in roughly equal measure.

Joel straightened, brushing his hands against his work trousers with a gesture that seemed almost dismissive of the chaos surrounding us.

"Yeah," he said, with an easy shrug that suggested none of this was particularly unusual from his professional perspective. "I believe you've ordered one of the largest family tents on the market. Borderline military grade."

"Crap."

The single word landed in the pit of my stomach with the weight of stone. Military grade. Not some cheerful family camping setup that could be assembled in an afternoon with a few stakes and some optimistic tugging. No—I'd apparently ordered something designed for expeditions, for base camps, for situations where structural failure meant death rather than mere inconvenience.

My relationship with assembly instructions had always been fraught. The very thought of flat-pack furniture made my palms sweat, memories of mismatched screws and incomprehensible diagrams and Jamie's carefully neutral expression as I declared various projects fundamentally cursed. I'd once spent four hours on a bookshelf that still listed slightly to the left despite multiple attempts at correction.

And now I was looking at... this. A fortress of cardboard that would eventually need to become a tent capable of withstanding conditions in another dimension. A Herculean undertaking that would require patience I didn't possess and skills I'd never developed.

The tent had been meant as something beautiful—a gesture of commitment, a shelter for the adventure I was building. I'd pictured Jamie and me inside it, dogs curled at our feet, the sky of Clivilius overhead, the domestic and the extraordinary finally merged into something we shared. But now, standing amid the boxes, that vision collapsed beneath the sheer practical weight of what I'd taken on.

This wasn't a surprise. It was an admission of over-ambition. A monument to the gap between vision and capability.

"For a small fee, I can give you a bit of a demonstration on how to piece it all together?" Joel offered. His tone balanced professional courtesy with something that might have been amusement—or pity, it was hard to tell which.

The offer was reasonable. Probably sensible, given my well-documented incompetence with anything requiring tools. But accepting it would mean extending this encounter, spending more time under those blue eyes that kept triggering that strange sense of recognition, revealing more of my inadequacy to a stranger who already had plenty of evidence.

"Thanks, but my brother is arriving shortly, so I'll get him to look at it," I said, forcing steadiness into my voice that I didn't quite feel.

The lie settled uneasily. Paul's supposed handiness had always been relative at best—he was better than me with practical matters, but that wasn't saying much. Still, invoking my brother felt like a shield, a way to defer the problem and end this interaction before it became any more uncomfortable.

Joel's gaze lingered on me a moment too long. Those blue eyes—so strangely familiar, so unsettlingly direct—held mine with a steadiness that prickled against my skin. It wasn't hostile. It wasn't even particularly intrusive. But it carried the weight of assessment, of measurement, of conclusions being drawn about me that I couldn't access or challenge.

The sensation was maddeningly familiar. I knew this feeling. I'd experienced it countless times, in countless contexts, always from people whose opinions mattered to me more than they should.

Jamie. Joel's stare reminded me of Jamie.

Not physically—well, not entirely—but in quality. That quiet appraisal. That sense of being evaluated by criteria you couldn't see. That particular mixture of patience and judgment that could make you feel simultaneously accepted and found wanting.

My stomach tightened. The comparison had surfaced unbidden, unsettling in its clarity. Here was a stranger at my doorstep, a delivery driver I'd never see again after today, and my mind had immediately mapped his manner onto the person I shared my bed with. The person I loved. The person whose good opinion I craved with an intensity that sometimes frightened me.

What did that say about me? What did it say about my relationship?

I didn't have time to untangle it. The moment was already moving on, Joel shifting his weight in a way that signalled the transaction needed to conclude.

"Your signature," he prompted, his voice cutting through my spiral of thought with brisk neutrality.

"Oh, of course."

Heat climbed my neck as I took the pen he offered, embarrassment flushing my cheeks at my own distraction. The form was crumpled and torn from its adventure with the dogs, but the signature line was still visible, still functional. I scrawled my name across it with strokes that felt clumsy, too deliberate, as though signing a delivery slip had suddenly become a performance I was failing at.

I handed the paper back quickly, eager to end this, to close the door and process everything that had happened without an audience. Joel took it, tucked it into his clipboard, and offered a brief nod that might have been thanks or might have been assessment or might have been nothing at all.

The transaction was complete. The encounter was ending. All I had to do was usher him out with minimal additional awkwardness and then deal with the cardboard invasion in peace.

I managed polite thanks. A small, strained smile. The subtle gestures of ushering that suggested the door was waiting and his departure would be welcomed.

Joel turned to leave, and I thought we were done.

But at the threshold, he paused. Looked back. Those blue eyes found mine one more time, holding for just a fraction of a second longer than seemed strictly necessary.

Then he was gone, walking back toward his truck with the easy gait of someone whose job was complete and whose thoughts had already moved on to the next address on his manifest.

The latch clicked shut behind him, and silence flooded back in.

I leaned against the closed door, exhaling a breath I hadn't realised I'd been holding. The relief was almost physical—a release of tension from muscles that had been braced for something I couldn't name.

He really is just like Jamie.

The thought surfaced clearly now, no longer half-formed and slippery but solid enough to examine. Not just in the quality of his gaze, though that had been striking enough. Something about the shape of his face, the particular shade of those eyes, the way he carried himself with a quiet confidence that expected to be taken seriously.

I shook my head, trying to dislodge the comparison. Ridiculous. I was seeing patterns where none existed, projecting my anxieties about Jamie onto a random courier who'd done nothing more offensive than deliver my mail. The mind did that sometimes—found familiar shapes in unfamiliar faces, heard echoes in strangers' voices.

It meant nothing. It had to mean nothing.

From the bedroom, silence. Henri and Duke had apparently tired of their protests, settling into whatever passed for patience in their small canine minds. The respite was unexpected but welcome—a brief mercy in a morning that had offered few of them.

My eyes drifted to the clock on the kitchen wall. Its hands marked out the minutes with quiet insistence, each tick a reminder of the narrowing window before Jamie and Paul's arrival. The flight delay had bought me time, perhaps an hour if traffic cooperated, perhaps a little more. Enough to catch my breath. Enough to prepare.

Enough to go back.

The thought arrived with the inevitability of gravity. Of course I was going back. The portal was beckoning, the device was in my pocket, and between this moment and the moment Jamie's car pulled into the drive lay an opportunity I couldn't waste. One more crossing. One more chance to walk in that other world before I had to share it with anyone else.

I moved down the hallway with deliberate care, each step measured, my bare feet silent on the carpet. At the bedroom door, I held my breath, listening. Nothing. The dogs had surrendered to stillness, perhaps napping, perhaps simply biding their time. Either way, they weren't protesting, and I wasn't about to disturb them.

The study welcomed me with its familiar smell of books and quiet. Sunlight slanted through the window, catching dust motes that drifted lazily in the still air. The shelves stood at attention, their spines aligned in their usual orderly rows, the gap remained where one book had been taken to Clivilius. Everything ordinary. Everything unchanged.

Except for the device in my pocket. Except for what I knew the wall could become.

I drew the device out slowly, cradling it in my palm. The metal was cool against my skin, its weight familiar now in a way that still surprised me. How quickly the impossible became routine. How rapidly the extraordinary lost its strangeness when you held it often enough.

My thumb found the button. That small, unassuming surface that held the power to tear reality apart and rebuild it as a doorway.

The thrill that stirred in my chest was impossible to suppress. It didn't matter that I'd done this before—twice now, three times if you counted the test that had started everything. The act of activation never lost its charge. Each time was a first time, in some essential way. Each time demanded the same surrender, the same leap of faith.

I pressed.

The button yielded with that particular softness I was learning to recognise. The lights flickered overhead—just a stutter, just a moment—and then the wall began to change.

Colours bled into existence, spreading across the plaster in waves that defied description. Not just colours—light, alive and moving, swirling in patterns that seemed to follow rules I couldn't comprehend but could feel in my bones. The familiar geometry of the room dissolved at its edges as the portal took shape, as ordinary reality stepped aside to make room for something that shouldn't have been possible.

I stood transfixed, watching the display unfold, feeling the same breathless wonder that had gripped me the first time and every time since.

This was why I returned. Not just for what lay beyond—though Clivilius called to me with a voice I couldn't ignore—but for this moment of transformation. This instant when the known gave way to the unknown and possibility itself took visible form. The portal wasn't routine. Could never be routine. It was spectacle and promise and proof, all at once, evidence that the world was larger than I'd ever dared to believe.

The colours settled into their swirling dance, the threshold complete, Clivilius waiting on the other side.

I stepped forward, and the portal received me, and the ordinary world disappeared behind a veil of the impossible.