Kindred Confession

"The heaviest secrets aren't the ones you keep from enemies—they're the ones you keep from people who'd carry them with you if you'd only asked."

With my head bowed—not in defeat but in a desperate search for clarity amidst the wreckage of the day—I started my walk toward the Portal. Each step was heavy, my legs protesting the accumulated abuse they'd endured: the running, the tumbling, the carrying of Joel's impossible weight across terrain that seemed designed to punish human ambition. My calves had tightened into something approximating wood, and my lower back had settled into a persistent throb that promised worse to come.

The dust of Clivilius clung to my skin in patches that cracked when I moved, mixing with dried sweat to create a gritty second layer I could feel with every shift of my clothing. My shirt—still damp in patches, stiff in others—rubbed against scrapes I'd collected during my tumble down the hillside, each friction point a small reminder of how thoroughly this day had broken me down physically.

But it was the lies that weighed heaviest. The ones I'd spun to Jamie, to Paul, to myself. The architecture of deception I'd constructed over mere days was already collapsing faster than I could shore it up, and I didn't know how much longer I could keep the remaining walls from falling.

I needed answers. I needed Cody.

"Luke, wait," Paul's call halted my determined stride, anchoring me back to the moment with an urgency that cut through my spiralling thoughts. "Where are you going?"

I turned to face him, taking in the sight of my brother—dust-streaked, exhausted, still visibly shaken from whatever had happened when Joel's impossible body had grabbed him. There was something in Paul's eyes now that hadn't been there before we'd fished a corpse from the river, a guardedness that suggested he was recalibrating everything he thought he knew about me.

"I have to find Cody," I answered, my voice steadier than I felt. The words were simple enough, but they opened a door to explanations I'd been avoiding since I first understood what I was.

Paul quickened his pace to align with mine, his longer legs eating the distance between us. "Who's Cody?" he inquired, confusion threading through the question.

I halted, the weight of what I was about to share pressing against my chest like something physical. The tent was behind us now, close enough that voices might carry if pitched wrong. Jamie was inside with Glenda and Joel, absorbed in medical mysteries that defied explanation, but I couldn't risk him overhearing this conversation.

Turning to face Paul fully, I scanned our surroundings with a surge of paranoia that made my skin prickle. The Clivilius landscape stretched out in its endless ochre monotony, empty of obvious observers but somehow never feeling truly private. This place had ways of listening that I didn't fully understand.

Satisfied that we were alone—as alone as one could be in a dimension that seemed to possess some form of awareness—I leaned toward my brother, closing the gap between us until I could smell the sweat and fear on him, could see the individual dust particles caught in the stubble along his jaw.

"He's a Guardian," I whispered, the word barely escaping my lips.

Paul's reaction was immediate and visceral—a sharp intake of breath that seemed to pull all the remaining air from the space between us. His eyes widened, the pupils dilating with something that might have been shock or fear or the particular disorientation of having reality shift beneath your feet.

"What the hell is a Guardian?"

The question emerged loaded with implications, a testament to the vast expanse of secrets that had stretched between us despite our shared blood, our shared childhood, our thirty-four years of supposedly knowing each other.

I met his gaze steadily, letting the answer emerge with the weight it deserved. "Like me," I confessed. The words felt simultaneously liberating and terrifying—liberating because I'd carried this alone, terrifying because once spoken, they couldn't be unsaid.

Paul's mouth opened and closed several times, his brain visibly struggling to process information that didn't fit any category he possessed. "What... how...?" His expression cycled through bewilderment, disbelief, and something that might have been the beginning of understanding.

I shook my head slowly, the gesture carrying both frustration and resignation. "I don't completely understand yet myself," I admitted, offering him the truth of my own confusion. I wasn't lying—not about this. The Portal Key, Clivilius, the whispered guidance of a dimension that seemed to have its own agenda: none of it came with instruction manuals or clear explanations.

Something shifted in Paul's expression. A spark flickered to life behind his eyes—something that looked almost like hope breaking through the accumulated horror of the day.

"But there are more of you?" he asked, the question carrying a new quality, as if the revelation that I wasn't alone in this strange guardianship offered a fragment of comfort in the midst of everything that had gone wrong.

"Yes," I affirmed, holding his gaze. "But don't tell the others yet. Not until we know it's safe."

"Safe?" Paul echoed, his brow furrowing as he tried to piece together the fragmented picture I was providing.

I hesitated, feeling the weight of what came next pressing against my tongue. The truth was brutal, and Paul deserved to hear it even if the hearing would hurt.

"I still don't know who killed..." My voice trailed off, the directness of the word too blunt, too final for what Joel represented. I corrected myself, finding words that were technically accurate if emotionally inadequate. "Who slit Joel's throat."

The admission hung between us, laden with implications that spread far beyond Joel's condition. Someone had attacked the boy. Someone had left him bleeding in my driveway, had nearly succeeded in erasing him from existence. That someone was still out there, their motives unknown, their next actions impossible to predict.

"Cody thinks whoever did it may have thought that Joel was me," I continued, sharing the harrowing possibility that had been eating at my thoughts since Cody first suggested it. The attack might have been intended for the wrong target—mistaken identity with consequences that had already proved nearly fatal and might yet prove worse.

"Shit, Luke," Paul gasped, the full implications dawning visibly across his features. His hand came up instinctively, as if to reach for me, to verify I was solid and present and not already a victim of whatever force had nearly killed Joel.

"I need answers," I stated, my feet already moving again toward where I knew the Portal waited. The urgency that had driven me from the tent hadn't diminished—if anything, it was intensifying. Every moment I spent in Clivilius without understanding what had happened was another moment Jamie had to process Joel's impossible survival, another moment for the questions to multiply beyond my ability to manage them.

Paul's voice followed me, carrying the particular weight of someone trying to keep pace with rapidly unfolding events. "Does that mean Joel is really dead?" Fear and confusion tangled together in the question.

I didn't answer. I didn't know how.

The Portal screen materialised before me. I'd used it enough times now that the process had become almost instinctive, though it never lost its strangeness. I focused my thoughts, directing them toward the destination I needed with the concentrated intention that seemed to be what the Portal required.

Berriedale home, study.

The command formed clearly in my mind, shaped by practice and necessity. The Portal responded, its surface igniting with those vibrant, swirling energies that never failed to make my breath catch.

Berriedale home, study, the voice of Clivilius echoed back, its resonance somehow both everywhere and nowhere, confirming that my instruction had been received and would be honoured.

"Luke." Paul's voice anchored me one final time, pulling my attention back from the threshold I was about to cross.

I turned to face him.

His expression held a mixture of worry and something harder to name—the particular look of someone watching a person they care about step toward danger. The accumulated revelations of the last hour had rewritten our relationship in ways neither of us had fully processed, but beneath all of it, the foundation of brotherhood remained.

"Don't get yourself killed, okay? We still need you," he said. The words were simple, almost mundane, but they carried the weight of everything we'd shared and everything that remained uncertain about what came next.

A smile crossed my lips—genuine, if fleeting—a silent acknowledgment of the bond that connected us across all the secrets and lies.

"I'll do my best," I promised, meaning it more than I'd meant most things I'd said today.

With that, I stepped into the Portal.