Reaching Out

“Sometimes the only way to hold on to your sanity is to drag someone else into your madness—and hope they don’t let go.”

I sat at my desk, surrounded by the quiet hum of the open-plan office, staring at my mobile as if willing it to explain how I’d ended up here—back in the sterile mundanity of fluorescent lighting and ergonomic chairs after traversing worlds. The yellow envelope sat beside my keyboard, taunting me with its impossible contents, its edges slightly crumpled from my restless handling. Through the tall windows at the far end of the floor, Mount Wellington loomed as it always had, a reassuring constant in the Hobart skyline that somehow made everything else feel more surreal by comparison.

My thoughts churned relentlessly, ricocheting between Seth’s cryptic letter and the kaleidoscopic portal that had opened a doorway to a barren, lifeless world. A world I couldn’t unsee, couldn’t explain away as a dream or a stress-induced episode. The memory of that heavy, ancient air still seemed to cling to my clothes, the taste of dust lingering at the back of my throat like a faint metallic echo. I wasn’t any closer to understanding what any of it meant, but one thing was quickly crystallising: I couldn’t do this alone.

My fingers hovered uncertainly over the screen, hesitating as they lingered on my older brother Josh's name in my contacts list. I hadn't properly called him since Christmas—not a real conversation, at any rate. Even then, it had been a rushed exchange, awkwardly compressed between the chaos of obligatory family gatherings and looming work deadlines.

Merry Christmas, brother. Hope you're doing well. That had been the pitiful extent of it, merely another entry in our growing catalogue of abbreviated connections and emotional shorthand.

Josh had always been the steady one, the practical one, the anchor. While I’d eagerly followed Seth down rabbit holes of conspiracy theories, Josh had methodically built a solid career in finance with Ironside Resources, a mid-sized mining company operating out of Broken Hill. He’d settled comfortably into outback life, with a close-knit circle of friends, a dog, and a routine most people would call enviably stable. What would I even say now?

Hi, Josh. So, I accidentally opened a doorway to another dimension and now I'm being asked to save it. Oh, and by the way, I might be losing my mind. The sheer absurdity of it almost provoked hysterical laughter.

I sighed and rubbed my temples in slow, circular motions. Then, before I could lose my nerve, I hit "Call."

The ringing tone cut through the office quiet like a metronome counting down my composure. My fingers tapped anxiously on the desk—three beats, pause, three beats—until, finally:

"Hello?"

Josh’s voice came through clear and low, warm and familiar. That slight Broken Hill drawl, worn in over the years, always caught me off guard—like hearing someone else wearing your jacket.

"Josh, hey, it’s me. Nathan." My voice cracked like I hadn’t used it all day. I cringed at how formal it sounded. Who introduces themselves to their own brother?

"Yeah, I got that," he said, with just enough dry sarcasm to make me feel stupid. "Everything alright?"

There was a pause. "It’s not Mum, is it?"

"No, no. Nothing like that," I said quickly. "She’s fine. Everyone’s fine. It’s just—look, I need to talk to you. About something… strange."

"Define strange." He drew the word out like he was already regretting asking. "Like… you’ve seen someone wearing socks with sandals strange, or full-blown ‘the pigeons are spying on us’ strange?"

I huffed, caught somewhere between appreciation and impatience. "Otherworldly strange."

There was a beat of silence. I could picture him now, leaning back in his chair, frowning at the ceiling like it might contain an answer. Then, the sound of him exhaling—long, slow, one of those "bloody hell, here we go" sighs.

"Mate, are you alright? You sound a bit... cooked."

"I’m serious," I said, a little too sharply. "Look, I know how it sounds, but I’m not imagining this. Something’s happened. And I think you’re the only person I can talk to about it."

Silence again.

Then: "Alright. I’m listening."

The words were cautious, like he was trying not to spook me, but also trying not to commit to anything too dramatic. I heard the faint squeak of his office chair—probably shifting forward to give me his full attention, the way he always did when things got serious.

So I told him everything.

Seth’s cryptic note. The meeting at Dandy Lane. The envelope. The strange, weightless devices. The portal.

I didn’t hold back. I let the story spill out, one impossible detail at a time, part of me hoping that the act of saying it aloud would make it sound less insane.

Josh didn’t interrupt. He just listened.

Like he always had.

When I finally concluded my improbable tale, the silence on the other end stretched out longer than I’d expected. Through the faint static of the call, I could hear the distant mechanical thrum of mining equipment—Josh’s world continuing as it always had. So ordinary. So far removed from mine.

"You’re actually serious about this?" he said eventually. His tone had shifted—still cautious, but not dismissive. Curious, maybe. Measured.

"As serious as I’ve ever been," I replied, and to my surprise, I mostly meant it. My hand instinctively reached for the Portal Key again. Its surface was cool against my skin, grounding. "I know how it sounds, Josh. But I’ve been there. Clivilius is real."

He gave a low whistle. "Bloody hell, Nathan."

There was another pause.

"I mean… a portal to another world? Mysterious tech that doesn’t make sense? You have to admit, it sounds a bit like you’ve been watching too much late-night SBS."

I gave a tired laugh. "Yeah. I’d think I’d lost it too, if I hadn’t literally walked through it."

Josh exhaled—more thoughtful this time. I could hear the faint clicking of his keyboard in the background, like he was already digging.

"I don’t think you’re crazy," he said finally. "Just... look, you’ve always had a flair for the weird. But I also know you don’t make things up. So if you’re saying this happened, I believe that you believe it. But if I’m going to help—really help—I need something concrete."

"That’s exactly why I called you," I said, a small smile creeping across my face despite everything. "You’ve always been the one who keeps both feet on the ground while I chase shadows. But this one’s not a shadow, Josh. It’s real. And I can prove it."

I glanced down at the envelope, the Portal Keys still nestled inside like sleeping artefacts. "Give me a bit of time. I’ll send you something. And once you see it—really see it—you won’t doubt me again."

Another pause. Then, quietly: "Alright."

Outside the window, a seagull wheeled past lazily in the summer light, the office humming around me like nothing had changed. But something had. I’d told someone. And not just anyone—Josh. The person I trusted more than anyone to make sense of the impossible.

I knew, in that moment, that I’d crossed a line. There’d be no unknowing now. No retreating into the safety of plausible deniability. I’d made a choice. And the world—both of them, apparently—was about to change.

After hanging up with Josh, I sat staring at the yellow envelope, the late afternoon sun filtering through the tall windows on the far side of the open-plan office. The golden beam caught drifting motes of dust—particles from two worlds now mingling quietly in the same recycled air. My heart was still racing, a potent cocktail of adrenaline and doubt coursing through me like an electric current.

I’d managed to convince Josh to keep an open mind—barely—but now I had to deliver on my promise to show him incontrovertible proof. The thought made my stomach twist into elaborate knots. How exactly does one prove the existence of a portal to another dimension? The sheer absurdity of the question almost made me laugh aloud, the kind of laugh that skims dangerously close to the edge of hysteria.

I glanced around, checking that none of the handful of remaining staff were paying attention, then shifted my gaze back to the remaining Portal Keys fanned out across my desk like alien artefacts in a government lab. Their presence was too solid, too real. This wasn’t fantasy. It wasn’t a breakdown. Whatever this was—it was happening.

Seth's parting words echoed in my mind with renewed urgency and weight: Choose wisely, and most importantly, be careful. The memory of his face in the café, drawn with profound worry and naked fear, flashed before me with disturbing clarity.

"This isn't careful," I muttered under my breath, the words hanging in the still office air like a quiet confession. A few desks away, Verity looked up briefly from her screen, her expression unreadable, brows just slightly furrowed before she turned back to her work. But what realistic choice did I have? Josh wouldn’t—couldn’t—believe me until he saw it for himself, experienced it firsthand. He’d always been that way—stubbornly practical, relentlessly analytical, needing the numbers to line up before accepting anything that disrupted his neatly structured view of the world. It was what made him so bloody good at his job in mining finance, and—at times—an infuriatingly immovable brother.

I selected one of the Portal Keys carefully, its weight both familiar and still, somehow, fundamentally wrong—like it carried a density that didn’t quite belong to this world. As if our physics could measure it, but never really understand it.

With deliberate movements that felt vaguely illicit, I wrapped it in multiple layers of protective bubble wrap, then slipped it into a padded express post envelope. My hands trembled as I sealed it shut, the act carrying a weight far beyond its grams—a quiet pressure in my chest that made it feel like something irreversible had just happened.

Every logical part of my brain screamed at me to stop. To think. To not post a piece of ancient, inter-dimensional technology through the Royal Australian bloody postal service.

Genius move, Nathan. Really top-tier thinking.

The internal voice of reason sounded suspiciously like Josh—dry, unimpressed, and probably rolling his eyes in my imagination.

Still, something deeper nudged me forward. I couldn’t fully articulate it, but the Portal Key felt like it needed to be with Josh. He was the only person I trusted completely—the same steady, grounding force he'd been since we were kids, back when the world still made sense and scraped knees were the day’s biggest drama.

If anyone could make sense of this madness, it was him. The thought of his methodical brain picking through impossibility and reducing it into manageable, logical steps gave me a strange kind of comfort. Like passing the baton mid-race—not surrender, but shared burden.

I shoved the envelope deep into my backpack and left the office with haste, muttering something half-formed about finishing early to whoever might’ve been within earshot. I didn’t check who. I just needed to move. Before I changed my mind.

The streets of Hobart pulsed with their usual late afternoon rhythm, a choreography of sun-drenched chaos that only summer could conjure. Locals and tourists wove around each other in mismatched patterns—tourists stopping mid-path to photograph the historic sandstone warehouses of Salamanca Place, locals sidestepping them with the weariness of people who had seen it all before. The scent of espresso and briny sea air clung to the breeze, comforting and oddly indifferent to my plight.

At the post office, I joined the queue, trying—failing—to ignore the rising thrum of unease gnawing at my insides. The envelope nestled inside my bag felt impossibly heavy, its modest physical weight hiding the existential gravity it represented. All around me, fluorescent lights buzzed and brochures for river cruises sat in neatly aligned racks. Packaging tape, holiday cards, cheap plastic pens. It was all so normal, so aggressively mundane, and yet I was standing here with a device that defied every known law of physics zipped inside a bubble-wrapped sleeve.

Ahead of me, a child dropped his mother’s keys. The sharp metallic clang on the linoleum floor made me flinch hard enough to draw a glance from the woman behind me. I gave her a tight, apologetic smile. She looked away.

"Next," the clerk called, her voice flat with end-of-shift fatigue.

I stepped forward, offering a strained smile I hoped passed for casual. My palm was damp with sweat, my fingers reluctant to part with the envelope as I handed it over.

"Express post to Broken Hill," I said, trying to keep my voice even. The words came out clear enough, but inside, I was spiralling. I am mailing a Portal Key to another world. Through Australia Post. What am I doing.

The clerk didn’t even blink. She typed without looking up, the rapid clack of keys a counterpoint to the chaos inside my head. Her expression never changed. Just another parcel, another transaction. Just another Wednesday.

"That’ll be thirty-four dollars," she said, monotone.

I handed over the notes with hands that didn’t quite feel like mine. Watched, heart thudding, as she dropped the envelope into a bin marked "Express." No ceremony. No pause. Just one more item in a sea of meaningless packages.

Gone.

Just like that.

A shiver chased down my spine. That envelope—so small, so absurdly unassuming—contained more than a strange device. It contained the key to a place that should not exist, a responsibility I didn’t fully understand, and the first irreversible step toward dragging Josh into all of it.

"Anything else?" the clerk asked, already half-focused on the next customer.

"No," I said quickly, backing away with the energy of someone leaving a crime scene. "That’s all."

Except it wasn’t.

Not by a long shot.

Outside, the heat hit me like a wall. I paused on the footpath, blinking against the late afternoon glare, as a thousand nightmarish scenarios collided inside my skull. What if it got lost? What if someone opened it? What if Josh didn’t see the warning note? What if—God forbid—he activated it by accident and stepped through without preparation?

What if I’d just sent my brother into something we couldn't come back from?

I shook my head sharply, like that could scatter the thoughts. It was done. The wheel was turning. Too late for second guesses or regrets.

All I could do now was hope.

Hope that Australia Post would deliver as promised. Hope that Josh would understand what the Portal Key was. Hope that—somehow—he’d forgive me for dragging him into this.

And, most of all, hope that whatever waited for him on the other side wouldn’t open another door before we were ready.

The sun was setting by the time I made it back to my apartment, casting elongated shadows across the worn floorboards and bathing the walls in deepening shades of amber and gold. Mount Wellington loomed in silhouette against the darkening sky—familiar, but now tinged with the same strangeness that haunted my thoughts. Solid, immovable, unknowable. As inscrutable as Clivilius itself.

I sank into the chair at my kitchen table with the weight of the day pressing down on me, my gaze fixed on the yellow envelope that lay before me like a sealed fate. Three Portal Keys remained—each one a fork in the road I hadn't yet walked. Three more lives I might upend. I stared at them with a growing sense of awe and dread, as though they'd begun to hum with potential, or danger. Or both.

A leaden knot of unease coiled in my chest as I fully grasped the scope of what I’d done. I'd sent one to Josh—an irreversible act. There was no pulling it back. And now I had three more decisions to make. Three more chances to get it wrong.

"Be careful," I whispered into the twilight.

I wasn’t sure who the words were meant for—Josh, myself, or the cosmos. Maybe all three. Maybe none. But the words felt necessary, like a ritual or incantation, as if speaking them aloud might create some protective boundary around what remained.

The Portal Keys didn’t move, didn’t glow or pulse. But I felt them watching me somehow, their silence heavy with implication. Perhaps it was just fatigue, or imagination... or perhaps something deeper. Some part of me had begun to suspect they weren’t entirely inert.

I sat in that stillness, the apartment dimming around me, waiting for something—confirmation, understanding, absolution. None came.

Through the living room window, the lights of Hobart were flickering to life, one by one. A quiet constellation of domesticity: porch lamps, TV screens, stove hoods. The city settling into its evening rhythm, blissfully unaware that somewhere among its ordinary postal routes, a device capable of tearing open the very fabric of reality was en route to my brother’s doorstep.

The normality of it all struck me as either deeply comforting or utterly absurd.

And somewhere else—in a world I had stood inside, but still couldn’t quite believe existed—Saint Phillis waited. A place of silence and dust. Waiting for what, I didn’t yet know.

I didn’t move from the table.

As darkness folded in around me, the apartment gave its usual creaks and sighs—expanding wood, cooling pipes, distant cars. But they felt different now. Pregnant with meaning. I found myself listening harder, irrationally attentive, as if my building were trying to tell me something. As if it already knew what I had done.

I pressed my fingers to my temples and exhaled slowly. "What have I done?"

The question fell into the room unanswered, swallowed by shadows and the low hum of my refrigerator—mundane, constant, indifferent. A soft mechanical rhythm from a world that still believed in the boundaries of science and certainty.

And I sat there in the dark, between one world and another, wondering if I had just changed everything forever.