Swallowing Light

"My brother vanished into a wall of impossible light, and the only thing more terrifying than following him was the thought of not following him."

The car pulled into the driveway, and my hand found the door handle before Jamie had fully engaged the handbrake. Some part of me—the part that still functioned on instinct rather than the fog of exhaustion—needed out of this confined space, away from the careful silences we'd been constructing like walls between us for the entire drive.

Luke and Jamie’s house was modest by most standards—a two-storey brick affair with a neat garden that bore the hallmarks of Jamie's careful attention—but something about its ordinariness felt almost aggressive given everything that had brought me here. I'd climbed out of my own bedroom window, dodged death-by-marsupial on the Barrier Highway, slept in my car because I couldn't face my father's questions. And here was Luke's life, sitting placid and unremarkable behind its suburban facade.

I drew in a breath that tasted of Tasmanian winter—cool and faintly vegetal, nothing like the bone-dry air of home—and tried to organise my thoughts into something resembling a strategy. Jamie had made attempts at conversation during the forty-minute drive from the airport. I couldn't fault him for effort. But I'd responded in monosyllables, too aware of the minefield beneath every possible topic, too conscious that anything I said might detonate something I didn't understand. The result had been a journey that stretched like taffy, each minute pulling longer than the last.

When Jamie moved to collect my bag from the boot, I found myself reaching for it instinctively. The thought of someone else handling my belongings—even this small, overpacked suitcase that represented two nights' worth of questionable decisions—triggered something territorial in my chest. But I caught myself, forced my hands to drop, let Jamie take the bag. It was a small surrender, and perhaps I needed the practice. Whatever waited for me inside that house, I suspected surrender might be required.

The front door swung open to immediate chaos of the small and furry variety. Duke and Henri—Luke and Jamie's Shih Tzus—launched themselves at the threshold like he'd been gone for years rather than the hour or so of the airport run. Their yapping filled the entrance hall, tails whipping in frantic circles, bodies wriggling with the kind of uncomplicated joy that humans seem to lose somewhere around adolescence. Jamie shooed them back, creating a corridor for us to enter.

And there was Luke.

"Hey, Paul!" His voice carried that particular warmth he'd always been able to summon—genuine and slightly surprised, as though my presence were an unexpected gift rather than something he'd orchestrated with midnight phone calls and last-minute plane tickets. He stood in the open-plan living space, and the sight of him momentarily short-circuited the frustration I'd been nursing since Adelaide.

Then the frustration came flooding back.

"Why didn't you come to the airport?" The question escaped before I could soften it, carrying more disappointment than I'd intended. Luke not driving was one thing—he'd never gotten comfortable behind a wheel, one of his many quirks I'd learned to accommodate. But he could have come along. Could have been there when I walked through the arrival gate instead of sending his partner as proxy.

"I was preparing myself for your arrival," Luke offered, his tone carrying that quality of deliberate lightness he deployed when he knew he'd done something slightly outrageous.

I looked at him properly then, and a laugh escaped me—short, disbelieving. He was standing there in nothing but bright blue boardshorts, his chest bare to the Tasmanian winter, looking less like someone braced for a serious conversation and more like someone who'd wandered in from a beach that existed only in his imagination.

"You don't look terribly prepared." The observation came out drier than I'd intended, but Luke had always been able to take my sarcasm. It was one of the reasons we'd survived being brothers.

Jamie made some comment about Luke's apparent disregard for the temperature, and Luke responded with a shrug and a single syllable: "Meh." So quintessentially him that something in my chest loosened slightly. Whatever crisis had summoned me here, Luke was still Luke—still the brother who'd never quite operated by the same rulebook as everyone else, still capable of standing half-naked in winter and dismissing concern with the casual indifference of someone who'd always existed at a slight angle to conventional reality.

My stomach chose that moment to announce its presence with a sound like distant thunder—a reminder that I'd eaten nothing since yesterday The exhaustion was hitting now too, a heavy blanket settling over my thoughts, making everything feel slightly underwater.

I moved toward the kitchen, where the fridge gleamed stainless steel and impersonal, a monument to modern domesticity. I pulled it open and began rummaging, letting the cool air wash over my face while I searched for something, anything, to fill the hollow space in my gut.

"So, what's the big emergency that couldn't wait another day?" I asked, not looking at either of them, my hands closing around a small plastic container of leftover spaghetti. The question had been building pressure since Luke's phone call, a balloon slowly inflating against my ribs. I'd crossed half the country for this. I deserved an answer.

I found a meatball—the largest one—and bit into it with perhaps more aggression than the situation warranted. The sauce was cold and slightly congealed, but my stomach didn't care about presentation. Sustenance was sustenance.

"Emergency?" Jamie's voice cut through the kitchen like a blade finding the gap in armour. "What emergency?"

I straightened too quickly, caught the edge of the shelf above me with the back of my skull. Pain bloomed bright and immediate—a sharp crack that seemed to echo through my already-aching head. I swallowed the meatball, grabbed for some grapes as a distraction, and turned to face what was clearly about to become a significantly more complicated situation than I'd anticipated.

Jamie's expression had shifted into something I couldn't quite read. Confusion, certainly. But beneath it, something harder—suspicion, maybe, or the particular wariness of someone who senses they've been excluded from information they should have had. His gaze bounced between Luke and me like a tennis ball seeking the right court.

"Aren't you the one with the... family crisis?" The question landed like an accusation, Jamie's stubbled face creased with a bewilderment that was rapidly curdling into something less benign.

"Me?" The word came out tinged with genuine offence. I looked at Luke, searching his face for explanation, for some indication of what narrative he'd constructed to bring me here. Luke's silence was its own kind of answer—an eloquent void where words should have been.

The tension in the kitchen thickened like cream turning to butter. I could feel it coating my skin, making the air harder to breathe. Whatever was happening here, I'd walked into it blind. Luke had told me he needed help. Luke had told Jamie something entirely different. And now we were all standing in this cheerful domestic space while the foundations of trust shifted beneath our feet.

"Well?" Jamie demanded, his attention now fixed entirely on Luke. "What's going on, Luke?"

The knot in my stomach tightened, cold spaghetti churning against anxiety. I understood, suddenly, with the clarity of a bell struck in silence: I hadn't been summoned to support Luke through crisis. I'd been recruited for something else entirely—conscripted into a moment that Luke had engineered for reasons I couldn't begin to fathom. The realisation felt like standing at the edge of a cliff and realising the ground you'd thought solid was actually cantilevered over nothing.

My hand found my temple, pressing against the pulse of a headache that had been building since somewhere over South Australia. Was I about to witness the end of Luke's relationship? Was that why he'd needed me here—to provide some kind of witness, some stabilising presence for whatever confession he was about to make?

The kitchen—with its granite benchtops and pendant lights and careful organisation—suddenly felt like a stage set for catastrophe. I gripped the edge of the bench, its cool stone solid beneath my fingers, the only thing that felt real in a moment threatening to dissolve into chaos.

Luke began to speak, and the tension wound tighter still—a spring compressed past the point of comfort, storing energy for release. My knuckles whitened against the stone. Whatever came next, I needed to be ready. I'd spent a lifetime being ready for whatever Luke's chaos might deliver. This would be no different.

Luke's apology came with a grin—wide and completely inappropriate for the gravity of the moment. That smile, so familiar and so infuriating, sent confusion cascading through me. This wasn't the expression of someone about to confess betrayal or announce disaster. This was Luke at his most cryptic, his most theatrical, wearing mystery like a costume he'd been waiting all day to reveal.

Shit. The thought was instinctive, primal. What the hell has he done?

"But there is something that I really need to show both of you," Luke continued, and his tone had shifted—still carrying that undercurrent of excitement, but now threaded with something else. Purpose, perhaps. Or the particular intensity he got when he believed in something absolutely, when his conviction ran so deep it became its own kind of gravity.

"Sounds ominous," I said, and meant it. Whatever Luke was about to reveal, it had required deception to assemble an audience. That didn't bode well for any of us.

"What is it?" Jamie's response came out as more huff than question, his discomfort radiating in waves I could almost see.

"Come with me." Luke gestured toward the hallway, an invitation wrapped in the shape of a summons. His hand moved with the casualness of someone offering a tour of a garden, utterly disconnected from the charged atmosphere he'd created.

We followed. What else could we do? Luke had constructed this moment with the care of a theatre director, manipulating his cast into position, and now we were committed to seeing the performance through. My mind churned through possibilities as we navigated the familiar corridor toward the study. Luke had always loved mysteries and revelations, had always operated with a flair for the dramatic that I'd learned to accommodate if not always appreciate. But this felt different—more charged, more consequential.

Why did Luke insist on being so cryptic all the time? The question was rhetorical, answered by three decades of brotherhood. Luke was cryptic because Luke was Luke, because directness had never been part of his vocabulary, because he experienced the world through filters of meaning and mystery that the rest of us couldn't access.

The study was exactly as I remembered it from my last visit—books arranged with a librarian's precision on the shelves, Luke's computer sitting dormant by the window, afternoon light filtering through blinds that hadn't been properly opened. The ordinariness of it all seemed almost aggressive, a deliberate contrast to whatever revelation we'd been summoned to witness.

I glanced at Jamie, found his expression mirroring my own confusion. At least I wasn't alone in my bewilderment. Whatever we were about to see, we'd face it together—two people conscripted into Luke's theatre without understanding our roles.

Luke reached into his pocket and produced something—a small rectangular object that glinted dully in the filtered light.

"Ha, I was right! It is something on the computer!" Jamie's voice carried the triumph of someone who'd successfully predicted at least one aspect of an otherwise unpredictable situation. His assumption was reasonable—the object looked like it could be a USB stick, some digital secret Luke had discovered.

"What?" Luke's confusion seemed theatrical, his head tilting in that particular way he had when he was playing with expectations rather than responding to them.

I suppressed a smile. Whatever the object was, it clearly wasn't what Jamie had assumed. Luke's denial carried the particular quality of someone enjoying a private joke, holding information close whilst others grasped at wrong conclusions.

"Okay. So, what is it?" My patience, worn thin by travel and uncertainty and the growing sense that I'd been manipulated into a situation I didn't understand, finally frayed past the point of restraint. I needed answers. Whatever game Luke was playing, I needed him to stop playing it.

Luke's grin widened, confident and teasing. He pressed a small button on the top of the device.

What happened next defied every framework I'd ever constructed for understanding reality.

A sphere of energy erupted from the device's end—not light exactly, but something more alive than light, something that seemed to pulse with its own heartbeat. It unfurled across the back wall like a flower made of lightning, colours swirling and intertwining in patterns that shouldn't have been possible. The air itself seemed to vibrate, a low hum that I felt in my teeth more than heard with my ears.

"What the—" Jamie's voice trailed into nothing, the sentence abandoned mid-thought. The incomplete word hung between us, an acknowledgment that language had temporarily failed in the face of whatever we were witnessing.

I couldn't look away. The colours cascaded and collided, sending bursts of rainbow in our direction like sparks from a cosmic forge. Blue bled into violet, violet surrendered to gold, gold shattered into fragments of green that reformed into something entirely new. It was beautiful in the way that storms are beautiful, in the way that things too vast to comprehend carry their own terrible majesty.

"What is that?" My voice came out barely louder than breath, as though speaking at full volume might somehow disturb whatever phenomenon was unfolding before us. The question wasn't really a question—I didn't expect an answer that would make sense, didn't believe any explanation could accommodate what my eyes were reporting to my brain.

"I'll show you," Luke said, his voice carrying the calm certainty of someone who'd made peace with the impossible.

"I can see," I replied, still transfixed. "It's stunning!" The words felt inadequate—like describing the ocean as 'wet' or the sun as 'bright.' But language had been built for ordinary things, and nothing about this moment was ordinary.

"Just follow me," Luke urged, stepping toward the swirling wall of colour. His movement was casual, unhurried—the gait of someone crossing a familiar threshold rather than approaching something that should have been impossible.

"Follow you where?" Jamie's question came out softer than before, his harder edge smoothed away by wonder or fear or some combination of both.

Luke didn't answer with words. Instead, he simply stepped forward, into the dancing colours, and the light wrapped around him like an embrace. For one heartbeat, he was there—silhouetted against the impossible display, my brother at the edge of something I couldn't name. Then he was gone, consumed by the radiance, vanished as completely as if he'd never existed at all.

"What the hell?" The words tore from my throat, raw with the particular terror that comes from watching reality fold in on itself. I stared at the spot where Luke had been standing, my mind scrambling to process information it had no framework to contain.

"What the hell indeed," Jamie echoed, his shock matching mine. We stood frozen, two people united by the shared experience of witnessing the impossible.

The silence that followed was heavy. The coloured energy continued its dance against the wall, apparently indifferent to the fact that it had just swallowed a human being. Its hum filled the study like breath, patient and persistent.

A decision loomed before us—the kind of decision that divided life into before and after. We could stay here, in the safety of Luke's study, and wait for... what? An explanation that wouldn't come? A brother who might never return? Or we could follow, step into the unknown, trust that Luke hadn't led us to annihilation.

"You go first," I heard myself say, the suggestion emerging slowly, almost reluctantly. My hands gestured toward the swirling colours, an encouragement I didn't entirely feel.

"Fuck off!" Jamie's response was immediate and absolute. "I'm not touching that shit. We don't know what it is."

His refusal was entirely reasonable. Logical, even. The thing before us defied every law of physics I'd ever been taught. Touching it, stepping into it—that was the behaviour of characters in horror films, the ones the audience silently begged to show some common sense.

But Luke was on the other side. Whatever was on the other side.

I thought about my brother—about the years of shared childhood, the whispered conversations in darkened bedrooms, the way we'd learned to rely on each other when the adults in our lives proved unreliable. I thought about his phone call, his desperate urgency, the certainty in his voice when he'd said he needed me. Luke was many things—theatrical, cryptic, frustrating—but he wasn't reckless with the people he loved. If he'd stepped through, it was because he believed it was safe. If he'd brought us here, it was because he believed we needed to follow.

The trust I'd built over thirty-four years of brotherhood settled over me like armour. It wasn't certainty—I had no certainty to offer. But it was enough.

"Fine. I'll go first," I declared, and the words felt like crossing a Rubicon. No taking them back now.

I approached the swirling energy, feeling its warmth against my skin, its hum vibrating through my bones. Up close, the colours seemed to pulse with something almost like intention, as though they were aware of my approach, as though they'd been waiting.

I drew a breath and stepped forward.

The transition was unlike anything I could have imagined. Colour surrounded me, filled me, became me for an instant that stretched into eternity. I felt myself dissolving and reforming, my consciousness scattered and reassembled in the space between heartbeats. There was no pain—just a fundamental disorientation, the sense of being everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.

Then: light. Not the electric swirl of the portal but natural light, brilliant and warm. The sun—a sun—blazed overhead in a sky of impossible blue. I squinted against the brightness, my eyes struggling to adjust after the study's filtered dimness.

And then, not in my ears but directly in my mind—a voice, clear and resonant, bypassing the need for sound entirely:

"Welcome to Clivilius, Paul Smith."

The greeting carried weight, purpose—the sense of something momentous acknowledging my arrival. I stood at the threshold of a world I didn't understand, summoned by a brother whose motives remained obscure, facing a future I couldn't begin to imagine.

Behind me, the portal still shimmered—a doorway between everything I'd known and everything that waited to be discovered.

There was no going back. Not really. Whatever integrity I'd thought I possessed—the carefully constructed identity of Paul Samuel Smith, businessman, pianist, father, husband, faithful son of a religion he no longer believed—all of it had been rendered irrelevant by a single step through impossible light.

I was in Clivilius now. And Clivilius, it seemed, had been waiting for me.