Every Word But Mine

"I spent my whole life delivering parcels. Never thought I'd end up being one."

My gaze was locked onto the terrified face before me, my eyes unblinking, unyielding.

I couldn't look away. Couldn't close my eyelids. Couldn't do anything except stare at this stranger whose arm I had seized with a strength I hadn't known I possessed.

The man was middle-aged—dark hair, skin weathered by something more than age. His eyes were wide with a fear I recognised, because I had felt it myself not long ago. The fear of the impossible becoming real.

The strong hand that grabbed mine belonged to someone trying desperately to break my vice-like grip.

His fingers scrabbled against my wrist, pulling, twisting, trying to pry my hand loose. I could see the strain in his forearm, the veins standing out beneath the skin. He was strong—stronger than me, probably, under normal circumstances.

But these weren't normal circumstances.

Panic was evident in their fingers as they scrambled to pry me away.

Let go, I tried to tell myself. Let go of him.

But the command never reached my hand. The neural pathway between thought and action had been severed somewhere, leaving me a passenger in my own body—aware, watching, but utterly unable to control.

But my determination was unwavering, my mind convinced I was holding onto Clivilius itself.

The voice had claimed me. The voice had said I was his. And in my confusion, in the chaos of sensation flooding back into a body that had been dead, I had conflated this stranger with the entity that had spoken in my skull.

Then, amidst the struggle, there was a sickening snap—the sound of bone breaking.

The sound was wet and sharp and final. Like a green branch twisted past its limits. Like something that could never be undone.

I felt it happen. Felt the bone give way beneath my fingers.

Oh God. Oh God, what have I done?

I gasped, releasing my hold as my hand fell limply back into the water.

The release wasn't voluntary—it was reflex, the body's ancient response to causing harm it never intended. My hand splashed into the cool water, and I felt the temperature now, felt the way it lapped against my arms and shoulders and neck.

Water.

I was lying in water.

The face, now freed from my grasp, retreated hastily, splashing frantically as it moved away.

I watched him go—watched the way he cradled his arm against his chest, the way his face contorted with pain and shock and something else. Recognition, maybe. Horror at whatever he was seeing when he looked at me.

What am I? What do I look like?

The question terrified me almost as much as the snapping bone.

"Shit, Luke! Who the fuck is that?" a voice, unfamiliar and panicked, called out nearby.

The voice came from somewhere to my left—beyond the range of my frozen gaze. I couldn't turn my head to see. Couldn't shift my eyes from their fixed position staring at the impossibly blue sky above.

Luke! The name echoed in my mind.

The name I had spoken yesterday. The name I had seen on Facebook, attached to photographs of Shih Tzus and a partner who shared his life.

Are you Luke Smith?

I wanted to ask. Wanted to shout. But my mouth refused to open, my vocal cords refused to vibrate, my tongue lay dead and heavy behind teeth I couldn't part.

"Holy fuck!" the voice screamed again, terror lacing its tone. "What the fuck is Joel doing here?"

My eyes widened slightly at the mention of my name.

The involuntary movement startled me almost as much as hearing my name spoken by a stranger. My eyelids had moved. Not much—a millimetre perhaps, a fraction of expansion—but they had moved.

He knows me! He knows who I am!

How? How could anyone here know me? I was a courier driver from Hobart. I delivered parcels to suburban houses. I didn't know anyone outside Tasmania, had never travelled further than Melbourne, had lived my entire nineteen years within a few hundred kilometres of where I was born.

And yet this stranger knew my name.

I tried to move, to respond, but my body remained unresponsive, as if disconnected from my will.

Every command I sent—turn your head, lift your arm, move your fingers—dissolved into nothing before reaching its destination. The signals fired from my brain but met only silence, only stillness, only the terrible void between intention and action.

Am I paralysed?

The thought was terrifying.

I had seen paralysis before. Not often, but enough. A young man in a wheelchair at the shopping centre, news stories about accidents and injuries and lives changed in an instant.

Was that me now? Had the blade that cut my throat severed something essential in my spine?

I blinked repeatedly, the clear blue sky above me flickering in and out of view as I opened and closed my eyelids.

The motion was jerky, uncontrolled—like a machine learning to operate after years of disuse. But it was motion. It was something.

If I could blink, maybe I could do more.

Eventually.

"He's still breathing!" the voice shouted, a note of urgency in it.

Of course I'm breathing, I thought. I can feel my chest rising and falling. I can feel air moving through my throat—

The thought stopped there, because I couldn't actually feel those things. I knew I must be breathing—the voice confirmed it—but the sensation itself was absent. My chest might have been a thousand miles away for all the awareness I had of it.

I strained to look up, to see the new figure now kneeling over me.

Another face entered my field of vision. Different from the first. Older, perhaps. Features I couldn't quite resolve because I couldn't focus my eyes properly, couldn't adjust my gaze to accommodate the closer distance.

Do you know me? I silently implored. Do I know you?

The questions were desperate, pathetic. I was lying in water in a world that couldn't exist, surrounded by strangers who somehow knew my name, unable to move or speak or do anything except watch and think and wonder if this was death after all—some purgatory designed specifically for me, where I would be forced to observe without participating forever.

But the face vanished just as quickly as it had appeared, the sound of a scuffle filling the air.

Movement at the edge of my vision. Splashing. Voices raised in anger.

"What the fuck did you do that for?" the first voice yelled, its anger palpable.

"Take a look at his throat," came the reply from his apparent assailant.

Recognition dawned on me.

I do know that voice.

The cadence. The particular way certain vowels flattened, certain consonants sharpened. An Australian accent, but not quite Tasmanian—something softer, something from further north.

It is Luke Smith.

I knew it with a certainty that bypassed logic. This was the man from the photographs. The man who lived with my father. The man I had called yesterday morning to confirm a delivery.

And the new voice, could it be my father's?

The possibility was almost too enormous to process.

A flurry of emotions tried to surface, but my physical sensations were numb, detached.

I wanted to feel my heart racing. Wanted to feel the flush of adrenaline, the tightening of my stomach, the prickle of sweat that should accompany such a revelation. But my body offered nothing. Just the cool water beneath me and the endless blue sky above and the terrible, silent disconnect between mind and flesh.

I longed to feel my heart pounding, to experience the adrenaline rush of such a revelation, but there was nothing.

Just a void where physical sensation should have been.

My mind was awash with confusion and questions, but my body remained still and unfeeling, leaving me trapped in a state of limbo.

The face of the new voice, now identified as Jamie, loomed over me once again.

Jamie.

My father.

The man in the Facebook photographs. The man on my birth certificate. The man my mother had loved and lied about for nineteen years.

He was here. He was real. He was leaning over me, close enough that I could see the lines around his eyes, the slight grey at his temples, the way his features echoed something I saw every morning in my bathroom mirror.

I look like him, I realised.

The shape of the jaw. The set of the eyebrows. Small things I had always assumed came from some anonymous donor, some nameless contributor to my genetic code. They came from him. From this man who was staring at me with horror in his eyes.

"What the fuck!" he exclaimed, his voice laced with shock and disbelief.

He was looking at my throat.

I couldn't see what he was seeing. Couldn't turn my head or angle my eyes downward. But I could imagine. The blade. The blood. The wound that should have killed me and apparently had and somehow hadn't.

"Jamie, stop!" Luke's voice cut through the air, urgent and commanding.

Stop what? What was Jamie doing? I couldn't see, couldn't turn, couldn't do anything except lie there whilst my father did something I couldn't witness or prevent.

My mind, despite its imprisoned state within my motionless body, leapt with a tumultuous mix of emotions.

I was right! It is my father!

The revelation sent a wave of excitement through my consciousness.

After nineteen years. After three days of discovery and investigation and mounting certainty. After dying in a delivery truck with his name on my lips, wondering if I would ever meet him.

Here he was.

And I couldn't speak to him. Couldn't move. Couldn't do anything except lie in this water and stare at the sky whilst he looked at the wound that had ended my life.

"Jamie!" another voice called out, reinforcing my conclusion.

It was surreal, hearing my father's name spoken aloud, confirming his presence.

Jamie. Jamie Greyson. The name I had discovered on a birth certificate. The name I had searched on Facebook. The name I had thought about constantly since Tuesday night.

Now it was real. Now he was real. Now I was here, wherever here was, and so was he, and I couldn't even tell him who I was.

Did he know? Had Luke told him? Had anyone mentioned that the courier driver who delivered their tents was his son—the son he'd never met, never acknowledged, never been allowed to know?

A surge of panic washed over me as I noticed the sky shifting above.

The blue was tilting. Moving. The angle changing in ways that suggested not atmospheric phenomena but physical relocation.

Are they moving me?

The sense of helplessness was overwhelming, being unable to participate or react to what was happening around me.

I was being carried. Lifted. Transported somewhere by people I couldn't see for purposes I couldn't know. And I had no choice, no input, no ability to resist or consent.

I was cargo. A package. Just like the tent boxes I had delivered yesterday—passive, silent, moved according to someone else's will.

"What the fuck have you done, Luke?" Jamie's voice was strained, filled with a cocktail of anger and concern.

Done?

What had Luke done? Brought me here? Caused whatever had happened to me? The accusation in Jamie's voice suggested something more than simple transportation—suggested responsibility, culpability, guilt.

Then, something remarkable happened—I blinked and felt droplets of water splashing onto my face.

I felt something!

The realisation hit me with the force of a thunderbolt.

I can feel the water on my face!

This small, seemingly insignificant sensation was a lifeline, a glimmer of hope in the darkness.

Each droplet landed like a tiny miracle. Cold. Wet. Real. Proof that my body still existed, still connected to the world, still capable of receiving input even if it couldn't generate output.

I wasn't completely lost. Wasn't entirely severed from physical existence. The connection was returning, slowly, sensation by sensation.

First hearing. Then sight. Now touch.

Maybe more would follow.

"Help me take him back to camp," Jamie said, his voice quivering with emotion.

Camp? I thought, bewildered. Not home?

The word 'camp' conjured images of temporary setups, places far from the comforts and familiarity of home.

Tents. Campfires. Sleeping bags. The kind of equipment Luke and Jamie had been ordering—a dozen tent boxes, enough for fifty people.

Why would they take me there? What had happened to lead us to this moment?

"Wait," a woman said in a thick indiscernible European accent. "Let me check him first."

A new voice. Female. Accented in a way I couldn't quite place—German perhaps, or Swiss, the vowels rounded in unfamiliar ways.

Check me? What does she mean?

I wanted to ask, to inquire, to react, but my body remained unresponsive, betraying my desperate attempts to communicate.

Movement entered my peripheral vision—a figure approaching, kneeling beside me. I couldn't turn to look properly, but I could sense her presence, feel the disturbance in the air as she moved closer.

Her long, blonde hair lightly brushed against my face as she crouched beside me, providing a peculiar sensation amidst my otherwise numb state.

Silk against skin. Soft. Warm. Alive.

The contrast with my own dead-feeling flesh was stark, a reminder of what normal sensation was supposed to feel like.

"He's breathing," she announced, her observation stark and matter-of-fact.

Of course, I'm breathing, I thought, frustration and fear mingling within me.

If I wasn't breathing, I wouldn't be thinking. Wouldn't be lying here cataloguing sensations and recognising voices and desperately trying to move muscles that refused to respond.

But my internal cries went unheard.

"But barely," she continued, her voice laced with confusion. "I think he may actually be alive. But I don't understand how that is possible. I can't see any signs of blood in his body."

No blood?

The words didn't make sense. Of course I had blood. Everyone had blood. You couldn't live without blood—couldn't think, couldn't move, couldn't do anything.

But then I remembered. The truck. The blade. The spray of red against cardboard boxes. The pumping, gushing, seemingly endless flow from my severed throat.

I am alive! I screamed internally. Don't you hear me? I am alive!

The desperation to make them understand, to break through this invisible barrier that held me captive was overwhelming.

I had survived. Somehow. Against all logic, against all medicine, against everything I knew about human biology. The voice had claimed me. Clivilius had claimed me. And now I was here, bloodless and paralysed and terrified, but alive.

"You're right. I agree we should bring him back to camp," the woman said, making a decision that brought me a sliver of relief.

Thank God for that!

Camp meant shelter. Camp meant people. Camp meant the possibility of help, of answers, of someone who might be able to fix whatever was wrong with me.

But as soon as relief washed over me, a pounding agony started in my head.

The pain came without warning—a sledgehammer blow from inside my skull, radiating outward through every nerve ending I had managed to reclaim. My vision blurred. The blue sky fractured into prismatic shards.

Quiet your mind, Joel Gibbons, the cold, emotionless voice of Clivilius intruded, as if in response to my pain.

It was back.

The voice that had claimed me in the void. The voice that had welcomed me to this place. The voice that seemed to know my name, my thoughts, my very existence in ways that transcended normal communication.

What the fuck does that even mean? I questioned inwardly, my mind wracked with pain and confusion.

Quiet my mind? How was I supposed to quiet my mind when I was lying paralysed in water in an impossible world surrounded by strangers including my father?

The pain intensified, as if in response to my defiance.

"Ready. Lift," the woman instructed.

I felt movement, glimpses of faces, arms, and chests passed above me as I was lifted and carried.

The sensation was disorienting—the sky wheeling overhead, fragments of people passing through my field of vision like frames of a film spliced together wrong. A man's face. An arm. The underside of a chin. Blue sky. Brown dust.

The disjointed images made little sense, adding to the surreal nature of my current reality.

I was being carried. Multiple people, multiple hands, supporting my weight as they moved me somewhere. Camp, presumably. Whatever camp meant in this place.

"You coming, Paul?" the woman called out, her voice echoing as if from a distance.

Paul.

Another name to add to the growing list. Luke. Jamie. Paul. The blonde woman whose name I didn't know.

"I'll meet you there soon," a voice replied, presumably Paul's.

The man I had injured. The one whose bone I had broken. He wasn't coming with us—whether from pain or anger or some other reason I couldn't know.

The guilt twisted in whatever remained of my gut. I hadn't meant to hurt him. Hadn't meant to do any of this. I had just been trying to survive, trying to understand, trying to make sense of a situation that defied all sense.

As I lay there, immobilised, the sensation of being watched intensified my discomfort.

Eyes on me. Multiple gazes fixed on my face, my throat, my unmoving body. I could feel them even if I couldn't see them—the weight of attention, of scrutiny, of people trying to understand what they were looking at.

What were they looking at?

A dead man who wasn't dead? A body drained of blood that somehow still lived? A monster? A miracle?

I tried to shut my eyes, to escape the scrutiny of the many gazes fixed on me, but I had lost even that small semblance of control.

The blinking I had managed earlier seemed to have exhausted whatever neural resources I had recovered. My eyelids remained frozen open, forcing me to stare at whatever passed above me—sky, faces, the underside of clouds I had never seen in Tasmania's grey heavens.

I struggled internally, willing my body to respond, but the effort only exacerbated the pounding in my head.

The voice. Clivilius. It was punishing me for thinking too hard, for fighting too hard, for refusing to quiet my mind.

Just stare at the blue sky, Joel, I urged myself in an attempt to find some semblance of peace.

I tried to let go. Tried to stop struggling against the paralysis. Tried to simply exist in the moment without fighting, without questioning, without the desperate scramble for control that seemed to trigger the pain.

Gradually, my mind began to calm, the voices and shapes around me blurring and fading into insignificance.

Ahh, my mind sighed in relief, a brief respite from the chaos.

The pain receded. The pressure in my skull eased. The voice—if it was still there—went silent, apparently satisfied that I had obeyed its command.

I floated in something approaching peace. Not the peace of the void, which had been empty and terrifying, but something gentler. Something almost comfortable.