4308.274 · September 30, 1988 AD
One Footprint Remaining
The air tastes like old pennies. Mandy says her grandmother called it the taste of spirits pressing close—strongest in places where the veil wears thin. The stars have never burned so bright, so cold, so indifferent. And the building ahead pulses wrong in the moonlight, its walls shifting like something dreaming. Violet tells herself it's just shadows. Just nerves. Just the Outback playing tricks. She's about to learn what the land does to girls who wander too far from the fire.
30 September 1988. Near midnight.
The pulsing light has vanished. What they find instead is Gordon—Michelle's brother—and his mate Liam, hunched around a campfire in the scrub. Relief should follow recognition. It doesn't. Liam's knife catches the firelight. His stories cut deeper—a backpacker found torn apart in this very place, the truth buried to protect tourism. There are things out here that hunt, he warns. And safety in numbers means nothing to a psychopath.
When Mandy needs the bathroom, Violet walks her through the skeletal ruins of Penrose Park. The toilet block looms wrong in the moonlight—walls that seem to breathe, shadows that ripple like water. Mandy slips inside. The door groans shut.
And then the night tears open.
Gloved hands. A grip like iron. Reality buckling—colours bleeding across the sky, the ground shifting to liquid beneath her feet. Violet is dragged into an impossible space where geometry fails and whispers crowd the dark. A voice threads through her fracturing mind: Welcome to Clivilius, Violet Dallow.
Morning will find only her torch, flickering weakly beside a single footprint.
