First Step into Clivilius

"I thought stepping into another world would make me feel bigger. Mostly, it just made me miss home."

Jeremiah turned to the vortex behind him. He didn't speak, didn't move his hands—just focused, the same way I'd seen him step through it. And the light answered. It drew inward, tightening, the colours folding into each other like petals closing at dusk. The charge went out of the air. And in the space of three breaths, it was gone.

Kenneth's room snapped back into itself. The far wall was just a wall—chipped paint, dusty skirting board, the faded poster of Allan Border that Kenneth had stuck up the summer before he left. The model plane hung motionless on its fishing line. The cricket bat leaned in its corner. Everything exactly as it had been.

Except for me, sitting on the bed with a piece of impossible metal in my hand.

Jeremiah crossed to the bedroom door—quietly, carefully—and eased it shut. The latch clicked softly into place. He stood with his back to it for a moment, listening. Down the hall, nothing. Dad's breathing. The pipes. The house, asleep.

He turned back to me.

"The Portal Key works differently to mine," he said, his voice low. "When you activate it, the portal it opens is yours. Not mine. It leads to your location—a place in Clivilius that's been... assigned to you, for want of a better word. No one else has been there. No one else can reach it."

"Assigned by who?"

"By Clivilius itself. I don't fully understand the mechanics—none of us do. But the device bonds to the Guardian, and the location bonds to it. It's yours."

I turned the Portal Key over in my hand. The markings caught the faint moonlight from the window—fine, deliberate lines, like something etched by a hand steadier than any I'd known. It didn't look like much. It looked like something you'd find in a junk drawer and throw out without thinking twice.

"How do I use it?"

He showed me. Where to press, how to angle it, what to expect. His instructions were precise but simple—the kind of directions you'd give a bloke about a new piece of farm gear. Hold it like this. Point it at the wall. Press here. The portal will open in front of you. Step through when you're ready.

"When I step through," I said slowly, "you can't follow me."

"No. My Portal Key doesn't work with your portal, and yours doesn't work with mine. Different Portal Keys, different locations. You go alone."

The word alone sat between us like something dropped.

"And when I want to come back?"

"Turn around. Your portal stays open on the other side for as long as you will it to. Walk back through. You'll be here again. In this room."

"Just like that."

"Just like that."

I looked at the Portal Key. Looked at the wall. Looked down at my feet—just socks, grubby at the heel from crossing the house in the dark. I was still in my jeans and work shirt. No jacket. No shoes, just the socks I'd had on since the pub. I was dressed for climbing out of bed in a farmhouse at midnight, not for stepping into another world.

"I should probably put some shoes on," I said.

Jeremiah almost smiled. Almost. "That would be sensible."

"Yeah, well." I stood up from the bed. The springs creaked. "Nothing about tonight has been sensible."

I didn't go to get shoes. I don't know why. Maybe because leaving the room felt like breaking the moment—like if I walked out into the hallway and came back, the spell would snap and I'd lose my nerve. Maybe because some stubborn, reckless part of me wanted to do this exactly as I was. Socks and jeans and a work shirt. No armour. Just me.

I raised the Portal Key. Pointed it at the far wall—at the chipped paint and the skirting board where Dad's patch job still showed.

My hand was shaking. I could see it. Jeremiah could see it. Neither of us said anything.

I pressed.

Something bit me.

Sharp and sudden—a needle-point of pain in the pad of my index finger, like a snake strike in miniature. I flinched, nearly dropped it, and looked down. A tiny bead of blood was welling up from my fingertip, dark and round in the moonlight. And as I watched, the blood moved. Not dripped—moved. Drawn down into the seam of the metal, like the thing was drinking it. The markings woke—a brief, fierce flare of light running through the etchings like veins filling with colour—and then settled. The metal grew warm in my palm. Not hot. Just warm. Body-warm. The temperature of something alive.

I looked at Jeremiah. He was watching with an expression I couldn't read—not surprised, so he'd known. He'd known and hadn't warned me.

"It bonds to you," he said quietly. "Only you. No one else can use it now."

I stared at the bead of blood on my fingertip. Already drying. Already part of something else.

Then it fired.

A point of light shot from the device—clean, fast, silent—and struck the wall. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the light spread. Not like Jeremiah's portal—not that slow, organic unfurling of colour. This was sharper. Brighter. Like a crack running through glass, spreading outward in lines that raced across the plaster and then opened.

The vortex bloomed. Different from Jeremiah's—the colours cooler, bluer, the movement tighter and more angular. But it was unmistakably the same kind of thing. A doorway. A hole in the wall of the world, and silent as his had been—not a breath of sound coming off it. Except this one I could feel. Not hear. Feel. It was mine—the blood it had taken had made it mine—and standing in front of it was like standing in front of something that knew me. A pull under the breastbone. A recognition. Like the metal and I had been introduced somewhere I couldn't name, and were speaking the same language now, one that didn't use sound at all.

The room filled with light. Kenneth's things—the cricket bat, the desk, the model plane—cast long, shifting shadows across the ceiling. The portal stood open, steady and alive.

I stared at it. My portal. My door.

Jeremiah stood by the bedroom door, arms at his sides. He didn't speak. Didn't nod. Didn't give me a reassuring smile or a speech about destiny. He just stood there, and for the first time all night his expression was completely unguarded. Whatever was on his face—it might have been hope, or fear, or the particular tension of watching someone stand at the edge of a thing he'd already jumped from himself.

I looked at the portal. I looked at my feet—sock-footed, filthy, ridiculous.

I stepped through.

Cold.

That was the first thing. Not a thought, not an image, not a sound—just cold. It hit me like a wall. Not the familiar chill of a Gawler winter morning, where the frost on the troughs cracked under your Blundstones and your breath hung white for a second before the sun burned it off. This was different. This was deeper, older, the kind of cold that didn't come from weather. It came from the ground. It came from the air. It came from the silence itself, as if temperature and emptiness were the same thing and this place had perfected both.

My feet struck earth that wasn't earth—hard, frozen, rough—and the cold came straight up through my socks like they were made of paper. The shock of it jolted through my ankles and into my shins like I'd stepped onto a sheet of corrugated iron left out in a frost. I stumbled, caught myself, and stood there gasping, every nerve in my body screaming at me to move, to run, to get off this surface that bit up into my soles like a thousand tiny teeth.

I didn't run. I couldn't see where I'd run to.

It was dark. Properly dark. Not the warm, velvety dark of the farm at night, where the moon always gave you something to work with and the stars lit up the paddock in silver and blue. This was a darkness that felt present. Like it was a thing in itself, not just the absence of light. It pressed against my eyes, my skin, the inside of my chest. It had weight.

Behind me, the portal glowed—a wash of blue-violet light that spilled across the ground in a rough circle, maybe ten or fifteen feet across. It was the only light. The only light in the whole world, for all I could tell. Everything beyond its reach was black.

I took a breath. The air was thin and cold and tasted of nothing. Not nothing like clean air—nothing like nothing. No eucalyptus, no dust, no hay, no cow dung, no diesel, no Mum's bread baking. The air at home always tasted of something, even when you'd stopped noticing it. You'd breathe in and your lungs would fill with the whole history of the place—the soil, the seasons, everything that had ever lived and died on it. Here, my lungs filled with cold, and that was all. Like breathing inside a freezer that had never once held food.

Then the voice came.

It didn't come from anywhere. That was the wrong way to think about it. It didn't arrive through my ears the way sound does—no direction, no distance, no echo. It was simply there, inside my head, as if someone had set a thought down behind my eyes that wasn't mine. Clear and calm and certain, like a sentence that had been waiting to be spoken since before I was born.

Welcome to Clivilius, Cody Jennings.

My heart stopped. Or it felt like it did—that full-body lock-up that hits when something happens your brain hasn't got a box for. I spun around, fists up—a reflex, nothing more, the thing you do when a noise comes out of the shed at night and your body decides to be ready before your mind's caught up. But there was nobody there. Just the portal behind me, glowing steady and quiet, and the darkness pressing in from every side.

"Who said that?" My voice cracked. It came out louder than I meant, rough and raw and too small for this place. And the strangest thing—it didn't carry. At home, if you shouted in the back paddock, you'd hear it roll out across the land, bouncing off the shed and the trees and the hills. It went somewhere. It had somewhere to go.

Here, my voice left my mouth and stopped. Like the air swallowed it. Like the darkness absorbed it the way black cloth absorbs light. There was no echo. No bounce. No return. Just the sound of my own words being eaten by a silence so total it felt malicious.

Nobody answered. The voice didn't come again. But the fact of it—the way it had known my name, my full name, and spoken it inside my head with a familiarity that made my skin crawl—sat in me like a splinter lodged too deep to dig out.

Something here knew me. Something here had been waiting.

I stood very still and tried to breathe. In. Out. The pale ghost of my exhale curled in front of my face, lit faintly by the portal glow, and vanished. I watched it disappear and thought: that's me. That's my breath. I'm real. I'm standing somewhere. This is happening.

I crouched down and touched the ground. My knees protested—the cold had already got into the joints—and I ran my fingers across the stone floor. It was dry, smooth in patches, rough in others. No moss. No lichen. No damp, no slime, no trace of anything that had ever grown or crawled or dripped here. Just clean stone. Like a room that had been built and sealed and never once opened.

I straightened up and looked around, turning a slow full circle in the portal light. The cavern ran off in two directions—behind me, the walls narrowed towards what looked like a dead end, the stone closing in. Ahead, the space opened up, the ceiling climbing higher, the walls pulling apart. And in that direction—far off, barely there—the darkness changed. Not lighter, exactly. But different. Less solid. Like there was something at the end of the cavern that wasn't more cave.

An opening. An entrance. Or an exit, depending on your perspective.

I started walking towards it.

The stone floor was brutal even through the socks. Every step was a negotiation—the ball of my foot finding a smooth patch, then my heel coming down on a ridge of rock that sent a jolt up my leg. I went slowly, carefully, the way you'd pick across a creek bed in the dark. The portal light behind me faded with every step, the blue glow thinning as the distance grew. I walked into the dark with my hands out against the cavern walls to guide me, feeling the stone shift and change under my fingers. Here it was smooth, water-worn. Here it was jagged, crystalline. Here it was so cold it burned to touch.

The cavern narrowed, then widened again. The ceiling dropped—I could feel it, the sense of the walls drawing in, the air pressing closer—then climbed away again. The floor sloped down for a stretch, then levelled out. I counted my steps the way I counted rows at sowing. Something to hold onto. Something to keep the mind working. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. The only sounds were my own breathing and the soft scuff of my feet on the stone. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.

Something caught my right foot—a jagged spur of rock I never felt coming. It went straight through the sock like the wool wasn't there and opened the skin underneath. Not deep. But enough. Enough to sting. Enough to feel the blood come warm against all that cold.

"Stupid," I muttered. "Stupid, stupid, stupid. Could've gone back for your Blundstones. Could've taken thirty seconds."

But I hadn't. And here I was. Bleeding on the floor of a cave in another world because I was too stubborn to put shoes on.

I limped on. The air was changing as I went—still cold, still mineral, but there was something else in it now. A faint, wet edge. Not humidity exactly, but the ghost of it. Like the memory of weather. And the darkness ahead of me was changing too. Still dark, but textured now. Grainy. The kind of dark that had something behind it.

The cave mouth came up on me faster than I expected. One moment I was walking between walls of stone, the next the walls fell away on both sides and the ceiling vanished and I was standing at the edge of something vast.

I stopped. The ground roughened at the lip of the cave—the smooth stone behind me, frozen earth and grit ahead. And beyond it: the world.

I looked up.

No stars.

The shock of it hit me physically, like a hand pushing against my chest. I blinked. Looked again. Tilted my head back and searched the sky the way I'd done a thousand times in the back paddock at home, where the Milky Way stretched from horizon to horizon like a river of light and you could pick out the Southern Cross with your eyes half-shut.

Nothing. The sky was black. Not overcast—I couldn't feel cloud cover or smell rain. Just... empty. A vast, featureless dark above me, stretching edge to edge with nothing in it. No stars. No moon. No faint suggestion of light from any direction at all. It was like looking up into the inside of a closed eye. Like staring at a ceiling that had been lifted clean away, and finding nothing behind it but void.

At home, the sky was the biggest thing there was. It was the first thing you saw in the morning and the last thing you saw at night. The Southern Cross, the Milky Way, the vast spray of stars so thick it looked like someone had flung a bucket of white paint across black canvas. I'd grown up under that sky. It was as much a part of the farm as the soil. As the house.

Its absence here felt like a wound. Like something had been cut out of the world and the scar had never grown over. I felt it in my chest—a hollowness, a grief for something I hadn't known I'd miss until it wasn't there.

Then something touched my face.

I flinched—hard, violently—and brushed at my cheek. My fingers came away wet. Cold and wet, but not with anything I could see. I held my hand up and waited.

Another touch. On the back of my hand this time. Then my forearm. Then my forehead.

Snow.

It was falling from that black sky—not heavily, not in any kind of dramatic flurry, but softly, quietly, in scattered flakes that drifted down through the still air like ash off a fire burning somewhere I couldn't see. They landed on my skin—my arms, my face, the collar of my work shirt—and melted almost the instant they touched, leaving nothing but tiny cold kisses that were gone the moment they arrived.

I held my hand out, palm up, and watched them come. Small flakes, delicate, each one there for a fraction of a second before it dissolved against the warmth of my skin. I'd never seen snow before. Not properly. I'd read about it, seen it in films and on Christmas cards—those tidy white drifts piled on fences and rooftops like icing sugar. But this wasn't that. This was sparse and quiet and lonely—single flakes wandering down out of the dark like they had nowhere in particular to be.

I caught one in the middle of my palm and held my breath, watching it sit there for a heartbeat—a tiny crystal, impossibly intricate, catching the faint glow from the cave behind me. Then it was gone. Melted into my skin. Didn't even feel wet. Just cold, and then nothing.

"Blimey," I whispered. The word came out thin and strange and far too small for the moment, but it was all I had.

I stepped out from under the cave's overhang and the cold hit me properly—the full, unbuffered force of it, no stone walls left to hold it off. The wind found me. Not strong—a low, steady push from somewhere off to my left—but freezing in a way that went through my work shirt like it wasn't there. The kind of cold that didn't argue. Didn't negotiate. Just took.

I took one step past the threshold. Two. The ground changed under me—stone giving way to frozen earth and loose gravel, and then something softer. Snow, thin and patchy, crunching faintly under my feet. And beyond that—nothing. Dark so complete I couldn't tell where the ground stopped and the sky started. Like standing at the edge of a cliff, except there was no cliff. Just the world, falling away into black in every direction.

The snow came straight through what was left of my socks in seconds, and the wet made everything worse—colder, heavier, the wool starting to freeze stiff against my skin. So I bent down, right there at the edge of the world, and peeled them off. Both of them. Wrung them out with fingers that had mostly stopped taking orders, and shoved them into my back pocket. Bare feet on frozen ground was a special kind of stupid. Wet wool freezing onto me was worse. At least this way the stupid was honest.

I couldn't go further. There was nowhere to go. I couldn't see the ground three feet in front of me. Couldn't see my own hand unless I held it up against the faint glow leaking out of the cave behind me. The dark wasn't just an absence of light—it was a presence. A wall. Solid and featureless and total, pressing against my face and chest like something with weight.

So I stood there. At the edge of a world I couldn't see.

The snow was still falling—soft, steady, landing on my arms and my face and my shoulders. I held my hand out, palm up, and let the flakes gather. They dissolved almost as fast as they landed, each one a tiny cold sting and then gone. But for a moment—just a fraction of a second—I could feel every single flake as it came down. Distinct. Deliberate. Like the world was introducing itself to me one piece at a time.

And from somewhere out there—far below, far off—a sound. The low, slow crash of water on rock. Not a creek, not a river. Something far bigger. An ocean, maybe, or whatever served as one here. The waves didn't break the way they did on the South Australian coast—sharp, bright, full of themselves. These ones groaned. Long and heavy and tired. Like the sea had been at it since before anything lived to hear it, and would go on long after everything had stopped listening.

I couldn't see it. Couldn't see anything. But I could hear it, and I could smell it—faint, riding in on the wind. Salt. Minerals. The ghost of water. The land fell away somewhere ahead of me, I was sure of it—I could feel the slope starting under my feet, the ground tilting down. But I couldn't follow it. Not barefoot. Not blind. Not alone.

The emptiness out there was total. No lights on the horizon. No far-off glow of a town, a house, a campfire. Not a single point of reference in any direction. Just the dark and the wind and the snow falling silently through it.

I was the first person to stand here. The first to hear this ocean, to feel this snow, to bleed on this ground.

The thought should have felt momentous. It felt terrifying.

"What have I done?" I said it out loud, not because I expected an answer but because the silence was starting to feel like it was dissolving me. Like if I didn't make a sound, the darkness would forget I was here and I'd stop being real. "What the bloody hell have I done?"

No answer. Just the wind and the waves and the snow landing softly on my skin and melting away.

I thought about Mum. Not a memory, not a wish—a physical ache. The thought of her hit me in the gut like a fist. I could see her so clearly—standing at the stove in the morning, sleeves pushed up, the kettle just starting its whistle. She'd turn and look at the doorway, expecting me. And I wouldn't be there. She'd check the time. Check the yard. Call my name from the verandah, her voice carrying out across the gravel to the shed, the chook pen, the paddock gate. Cody? Cody, love, are you out there?

And Dad. He'd be outside already. He'd hear Mum calling and he'd know. Not straight away—he'd tell himself I'd slept in, or gone for a walk, or taken the ute off somewhere without a word. But he'd know, in the end. He'd come and stand in the kitchen doorway with his arms folded and his jaw working, and his face would say everything he'd been holding back since the night before. I told you. I told you about that man.

And they'd be right. Both of them. Right about all of it.

The cold was in my bones now. My bare feet had gone past pain into a numb, far-off throbbing that I knew was bad. My fingers were stiff. My jaw was clenched so hard my teeth ached. The work shirt might as well have been tissue paper for all it was doing against the wind. The snow was settling on me—on my shoulders, in my hair, on my eyelashes—and I let it. Every flake a tiny freezing reminder that this was real, and I was here, and the whole world I'd known was on the other side of a hole in a cave wall.

I'd seen enough. Or—I'd felt enough. Seen nothing, really. Just dark and snow and the shape of my own breath vanishing into the void. But the feel of it—the scale, the emptiness, the flat crushing indifference of a world that didn't care one way or the other whether I stood in it—that was more than enough.

Whatever this place was, whatever it was going to become, I wasn't ready for it. Not tonight. Not barefoot, not freezing, not with my family asleep and none the wiser and the taste of my father's disappointment still in my mouth. This world would wait. It had been waiting—empty, patient, endless—long before I turned up, and it would go on waiting whether I stood here shivering at the mouth of a cave or took myself home to bed.

I turned around. The cave mouth was right behind me—the faint glow of the portal deep inside it, blue and violet, throwing shifting light across the stone walls. It looked like a window. A window into a lit room on a cold night, seen from outside, from the dark, from the cold.

I walked back in. The stone walls closed around me and the wind dropped away, and even the cold eased a fraction—not warm, nothing like warm, but out of the worst of it. My cut foot left faint dark prints on the cave floor behind me—the only mark I'd leave on this world tonight.

The portal grew as I came up on it—that oval of swirling light, blue and violet and alive, throwing its glow across the cave walls. It was opaque. Solid. The light moved and coiled inside it, restless and endless, but I couldn't see through it. Couldn't see what was on the other side. Kenneth's room might be there. Jeremiah might still be standing by the door. Or it might open onto nothing—onto somewhere else, somewhere worse, somewhere I'd never come back from.

I had no way of knowing. Just the Portal Key in my hand, and Jeremiah's word, and the fact that I'd walked through it once already and come out somewhere real.

I stood in front of it for a long moment. The light played over my skin—my arms, my chest, my bare, bloodied feet. It was the only warmth in this world. Not warmth I could put a temperature to—or maybe it was, I couldn't tell anymore—but a pull. A recognition. The sense that whatever waited on the other side of that swirling wall of colour, it was closer to home than anything in this cave, this dark, this empty frozen silence.

I had to trust it. The way you trust the ground when you step off a verandah in the dark. The way you trust the road when you drive home at night. Not because you can see what's ahead, but because you've been there before and your body remembers the way.

I closed my eyes. Took a breath. And stepped through.