The Abandoned Backpack

“Sometimes the most ordinary objects carry the weight of extraordinary decisions. And sometimes… they’re left behind on purpose.”

The remaining minutes of the flight crawled by with the agonising pace of a melting clock in a Dalí painting—each second elongating unnaturally, as though time itself had taken on a spiteful sentience and was now revelling in my growing disquiet. The aircraft’s droning engine hum, which once existed as mere ambient infrastructure to the experience of flying, now pressed itself against my skull with merciless insistence, vibrating deep within my bones like a subsonic warning from the very machinery that held us aloft.

I couldn’t stop staring at the seat beside me.

Its vacancy was no longer a simple absence. It had become a violation—an interruption in the otherwise coherent symmetry of the cabin. A phantom limb, conspicuously missing from the collective body of passengers and yet still acutely felt. The space she’d occupied retained no trace of scent, no lingering warmth. Only absence. And in that absence: implication. The suggestion of something that refused to be rationalised.

The wine still echoed in my bloodstream—its effects diminished now but not gone. If anything, its ghost only deepened the unreality of everything, amplifying the sense that I had somehow slipped sideways through a barely-perceptible seam in the known world. It was a dreamlike state, but not the kind with soft pillows and drifting fog. This dream was taut and sharp-edged, a blade suspended just above the throat of understanding.

I found myself compulsively checking the lavatory door again, as if repeated observation might somehow will her reappearance. But the door remained steadfastly closed, the occupancy light unlit. Silent. Indifferent.

She wasn’t coming back. I knew that now. It landed in my chest with the kind of resigned finality reserved for tragic news long anticipated—like the last breath of a dying star, long extinguished by the time its light reaches our eyes.

I shifted, more out of restlessness than discomfort, stretching my legs slightly into the limited foot-space allowed by the tyranny of economy class. And then I saw it.

The backpack.

It hadn’t been there earlier—or rather, I hadn’t noticed it through the fog of disbelief and distraction. But there it was now: tucked neatly, unceremoniously, beneath the seat in front of her vacant chair. Matte black. Weathered. Ordinary in every conceivable way.

Except it wasn’t.

Not now.

Not here.

Not after what I’d seen.

The sight of it hit me like a physical blow to the solar plexus. I stared at it with wide, unblinking eyes, as though it might sprout legs and skitter up the aisle. It shouldn’t have been there. If she had vanished through the same means I had—a Portal Key, a tear in reality, a quiet stepping sideways out of existence—then why was her backpack still here? Why leave it?

You don’t step out of a world and abandon your belongings—unless you have to.

Unless you were interrupted. Or threatened. Or... hunted.

My brain clung desperately to rationality, like a drowning man gripping a piece of driftwood in a churning sea. Maybe she forgot it. But the thought was laughable the moment it formed. No one forgot a backpack on a plane. Especially not one that had, until recently, been so visibly attached to her person. People kept their bags close. They cradled them like companions. You didn't just leave them.

Unless, of course, it wasn't really hers anymore.

I leaned forward slowly, eyes narrowing as I studied it. From this angle, I could see the scuffed logo patch stitched into the upper corner. No brand I recognised. Just a stylised silver triangle, its three points asymmetrical—somewhere between an ancient alchemical symbol and a corporate design mistake.

I didn’t reach for it.

Not yet.

Instead, I sat motionless, staring at it with the reverence and suspicion one might afford a bomb with unclear wiring. The backpack was utterly inert, just an object—canvas, zippers, nylon straps. But in this moment, it felt like a black box pulled from the wreckage of a disaster I hadn’t realised I was part of.

What was inside? Ordinary things? Clothing? A passport? A half-eaten sandwich wrapped in foil?

Or something else entirely?

Something... active?

The Portal Key in my pocket pulsed faintly beneath my touch, or perhaps it only felt that way. Its surface was still smooth, still cool, but I couldn’t shake the sensation that it was responding to the presence of the backpack. That the two objects—one seen, one hidden—were in some silent conversation that I was not yet privy to.

My gaze flicked about the cabin.

Still no one watching. Still no sign that the fabric of consensus reality had noticed the tear forming quietly in row 29.

The rational part of me—the one that still wanted to believe in airports and boarding passes and announcements about turbulence—whispered that the bag was just a bag. That it likely held nothing more interesting than a jumper, maybe a notebook, a toothbrush.

But the other part of me—the one that had stood in a corridor in Melbourne and watched reality peel itself back like a curtain—knew better.

It meant something.

It had to.

She had left it behind for a reason.

Or she hadn’t left it at all.

I pressed myself back against the seat, gripping the plastic armrests with renewed intensity. My pulse thrummed in my ears, loud and steady like the beating of ritual drums. The backpack waited silently, as unassuming and patient as a loaded chamber.

And I couldn’t stop asking myself:

What if it's a trap?

What if it’s bait?

Or worse—what if it contains another Portal Key?

Or something more powerful.

Something more dangerous.

The Portal Key pressed insistently against my thigh through the fabric of my trouser pocket—a dense, unassuming weight that had grown steadily more symbolic with every hour since Seth had handed me that deceptively ordinary envelope in that long-forgotten café. Now, its very presence felt like a silent observer, as though the device itself was aware of what I was contemplating. A witness to the madness unfolding.

And the backpack. That utterly unremarkable, perfectly ordinary black canvas bag.

Could it be connected to the same extraordinary technology? To the unseen forces Seth had warned me about in hushed, conspiratorial tones? To the woman’s unmistakable recognition of the Portal Key the moment she’d laid eyes on it?

It seemed increasingly likely—almost inevitable.

My gaze flicked back up the central aisle. Still no flight attendants in sight. Likely tucked into their narrow galley spaces at either end of the aircraft, preparing to sweep the aisles for final rubbish collection. Standard procedure. Comforting, predictable. And wholly irrelevant in the face of what now sat before me.

Every fibre of my being screamed restraint. Leave the bag. Let it lie there, untouched. Do not cross this line.

But I couldn't. Not now.

The longer I stared, the more my need to know consumed me. It wasn’t just curiosity anymore—it was obsession, a clawing compulsion rooted somewhere deeper than logic, fuelled by the bitter wine and the burning sting of recent humiliation. She had looked at me. She had known. She had disappeared—and left this.

That couldn't be coincidence.

She wanted me to find it. She must have. Some buried intuition assured me of this with all the authority of instinct.

And so, finally, I moved.

Leaning forward with calculated casualness, I reached beneath the seat directly in front of hers. My fingertips brushed against the coarse canvas. It was cold to the touch—surprisingly so—and rough in texture, as though it had weathered far more than airport terminals and train platforms. The kind of surface that remembered sand, grit, and war zones.

With a swift motion honed from indecision, I slid the bag out and placed it squarely on my lap.

Immediately, the weight startled me. It wasn’t just full. It was dense—weighted with something deliberate and specific. Not the haphazard clutter of a travel bag, but the compact heaviness of contents chosen for a purpose. I adjusted my grip on the straps, my palms tingling with a cocktail of residual alcohol and the sudden spike of adrenaline.

To a passing observer, I might have looked like a man retrieving his own bag—perhaps preparing to disembark early, or double-checking he hadn’t forgotten something inside. Innocuous. Harmless.

And yet my entire body thrummed with the electrified awareness that I had just crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed.

The background noise of the aircraft—the quiet murmurs of conversation, the pages of magazines turning, the occasional muted cough—swelled alarmingly in my ears, as if the entire world had taken a sharp breath in collective anticipation. I felt exposed. Vulnerable. As though some invisible force had just taken notice.

I glanced about the cabin again. No one watching. No one moving.

But still... I could feel it. That same crawling tension I’d experienced in Melbourne, just before I opened the portal for the second time. The quiet vibration beneath the surface of reality, the subtle shift in the air. As if the laws of physics themselves were momentarily holding their breath.

My hand hovered over the zipper.

I didn’t open it.

Not yet.

I couldn’t.

My fingertips trembled where they rested, poised mere centimetres from discovery. The woman’s warning replayed sharply in my mind, as clear as if she were still seated beside me: Do you want to get us both killed?

And just like that, the flame of impulsive courage guttered, replaced by the cold wind of reason.

This wasn’t the place. Not here. Not now. Not surrounded by people. Not when I still had the taste of cheap white wine clinging stubbornly to the back of my throat and a head full of questions I hadn’t yet begun to answer.

So I made a choice.

Slowly, deliberately, I rested the bag on the floor between my feet—neither hidden nor displayed, simply there, as though it had always belonged to me. I shifted slightly in my seat, legs bracketing it naturally. No one looking twice would think anything of it. A standard commuter bag. Unremarkable. Forgettable.

My shoe pressed gently against the canvas.

Solid. Weighted.

Alive with quiet intent.

I would wait. Get to Adelaide. Reconnect with Josh—if I could. And then, somewhere private—somewhere safe—I would open it. Not here. Not in public. Not while the echoes of her absence still rang like a bell I couldn’t un-hear.

The substantial weight of the mysterious backpack nestled between my feet seemed to grow heavier with each passing moment, as though the unanswered questions it contained were accumulating mass—layer upon layer of meaning, secrets, and silent intent. It was no longer just a forgotten item. It had transformed, in my mind at least, into something mythic. A relic. A message. A trap. Possibly all three.

The low mechanical hum of the aircraft’s engines, previously ignorable, now droned insistently against the edges of my concentration—like a steadily ticking clock counting down to an event I couldn't yet name but felt drawing ever closer. My hands, finally steadied after the wine’s influence had receded, now tingled not from alcohol but adrenaline, sharp and clean as ice.

I stood quietly, looping the backpack’s worn strap over one shoulder with the easy grace of routine. But there was nothing routine about what I was doing. Every action was rehearsed in my mind before I made it, every step measured to appear unremarkable, invisible. Just another passenger making his way to the lavatory.

Around me, the cabin remained a bubble of oblivious calm. Quiet conversations murmured softly beneath the mechanical white noise. Screens flickered with cartoons and blockbusters. A toddler squealed with joy at the sight of clouds. The mundanity of it all—the sheer, comforting normality—only heightened the strange, electric unreality pulsing beneath my skin.

No one looked up. No one cared. No one noticed me slip quietly into the aisle and begin walking toward the rear of the plane.

At the lavatory door, I paused.

I turned back—not for dramatic effect, but to check. The attendants were still preoccupied, one of them kneeling to retrieve a dropped cup. No one was watching.

I slipped inside and pulled the reinforced door shut behind me with a muted clack that echoed like a gunshot in my ears. The metal lock engaged with a sharp click, and the ‘occupied’ sign glowed red once again.

This time, I wouldn’t hesitate.

I placed the backpack carefully on the closed toilet lid, hearing the faint shift of weight inside—some internal object shifting, dense and deliberate. Then I gripped the edges of the plastic sink, grounding myself as I exhaled a breath I didn’t realise I’d been holding. The air was close and acrid with the stench of industrial cleaner and decades of human anxiety. Sterile. Unforgiving. Appropriate.

Then, deliberately, with hands steadied by necessity, I reached into my pocket and drew the Portal Key.

The object felt alive.

Not in any literal, biological sense—there were no pulses, no heat signatures—but there was an undeniable sense of latent power radiating from it. It wasn’t humming or glowing, and yet it somehow vibrated with the weight of potential. It reminded me of ancient artefacts behind glass at museums: silent, inert, and yet undeniably aware.

I aimed it squarely at the narrow stretch of wall directly opposite the sink.

And pressed.

A spear of light surged forward with startling immediacy—pure, clean, and prismatic. It struck the faux-laminate surface with a sound like static amplified a thousandfold, sharp enough to rattle in my teeth. The wall did not shatter or burn, but it began to change, its texture melting away like wax under a blowtorch, replaced by a swirling, liquid expanse of pure chromatic chaos.

The portal bloomed outward in all directions.

Colours churned and folded into one another with fractal precision—gold bleeding into emerald, sapphire clashing against crimson, waves of violet laced with silver tearing through the very air as though some unseen force were painting with light and motion rather than brush and pigment. Sparks danced along the edges, casting momentary flares across the cramped interior like camera flashes from some otherworldly paparazzi.

The lavatory was utterly transformed.

This was no longer the antiseptic chamber of an aircraft but a threshold—a sacred veil between realities. The harsh fluorescence reflected and refracted within the portal’s frame, creating the illusion that the walls themselves were bending inward, drawn to the aperture like iron filings to a magnet.

I didn’t pause. Not this time.

With the backpack secure in one hand and the Portal Key gripped tightly in the other, I stepped forward.

The boundary accepted me without resistance.

There was no sense of friction, no sound, no temperature change. Just a momentary dislocation—like blinking and discovering you’re somewhere else entirely.

One moment, I was cocooned in synthetic fabric and chemical air; the next, I was standing on silence.

The stillness hit first—total, immersive, and suffocating in its completeness. No engine rumble. No recycled air or distant human conversation. Just... nothing.

Then came the pressure shift—my ears popping as if I’d leapt into a deep body of water. The air tasted different here. Heavier. Sharper. Tinged with dust, but not unpleasant. Familiar, now.

Saint Phillis.

Though I hadn’t summoned it deliberately, this strange, lifeless dimension had once again become my destination. The sudden quiet felt like an old blanket wrapped too tightly, comforting in theory but constricting in practice. Every soundless breath reinforced a single, staggering truth:

I had just opened a portal inside a pressurised aircraft and stepped through it with no safety net.

And now, I was somewhere else entirely.

I stepped cautiously onto solid ground, the air brushing against my skin with a dry warmth that reminded me of inland Australia—Broken Hill, maybe, or Coober Pedy. It carried no scent, no humidity, just the faintest trace of dust and stillness. A quiet, cautious welcome.

The landscape of Saint Phillis unfolded ahead, quietly vast. At first glance, it might have passed for an abandoned outback plain—flat and wide, with cracked earth stretching in every direction and low, scattered ridges rising gently in the distance. The silence wasn’t unfamiliar. It was the kind of silence you get miles from anywhere, where even the birds have run out of things to say.

Above me, the sky was a familiar blue, but paler—washed out around the edges like an old photograph. There were no clouds, no contrails. The light felt oddly directionless, as if the sun were present but hiding behind a veil too thin to see. Shadows formed, but lacked conviction—soft-edged and fleeting, like they hadn’t fully made up their minds to exist.

Beneath my sneakers, the ground was dry and brittle, coated with a thin layer of burnt ochre dust. It crumbled underfoot with each step, rising in faint, lazy puffs that drifted in the stillness before settling again. Not alien. Just old. Long-forgotten. Tired in a way that felt geological, like the land had once been something greater and was now only echo.

Scattered across the open plain were rocks—worn and jagged, some blackened like they’d been through fire. A few had a strange, glassy quality, catching the light in ways that made me pause. Not luminous, just... deceptive. Like they wanted to be noticed but not understood. Now and then, at the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a faint gleam—a flicker of colour where none should be. But when I turned to look directly, there was only dust and stone.

It was Earth, almost. The shapes were right. The palette was right. But something beneath the surface tugged at the edges of certainty, reminding me that I had stepped not just into another place, but a version of the familiar with the serial number filed off.

And behind me stood the Portal Screen.

Three metres by three, the translucent monolith shimmered faintly like a pane of frozen glass suspended in time. Though now inert, I could feel it humming softly with residual potential, a dormant force barely contained. Its edges glowed with a soft inner luminescence—just enough to delineate it against the barren horizon—and for a moment, I imagined it breathing. Waiting. Watching.

It had become my gateway. My exit and entry point. My link to Earth—and perhaps, eventually, to something much more. The smooth, shimmering surface was unbroken, blank, but I could feel its attention, as though it retained a memory of my arrival.

The world it had delivered me into felt at once empty and uncomfortably expectant.

It was not the alienness of Saint Phillis that unsettled me most, but its profound familiarity. The cracked earth, the scattered stones, the vast, empty silence—it might have been the Nullarbor Plain, or a forgotten stretch of interior South Australia, or some mislabelled satellite image from the outer edge of the Red Centre. And yet... it was none of those. It was more. Or less. Or simply other.

What unnerved me wasn't what I saw, but what I didn’t. There were no birds. No insects. No distant rustle of wildlife hiding just out of sight. The land was utterly still—but not frozen. A soft breeze moved across the plain, but it barely registered. No trees to shift, no grass to bend, no leaves to stir. I felt it only where it touched me—across my arms, the back of my neck—faint as breath. And I saw it only in the dust it coaxed into gentle motion, dragging lazy whorls across the surface like brushstrokes across a canvas that had been blank too long.

The silence wasn’t merely the absence of sound—it was the refusal of it. A vacuum where noise didn’t simply fail to exist, but was actively excluded. It pressed against my eardrums like altitude, the stillness carrying a kind of weight. It was as if this world had once been designed for life, then abandoned before it could be inhabited.

I adjusted the backpack on my shoulder. Its weight felt oddly amplified here—like gravity was dialled half a notch too high, or as if the ground itself resented being disturbed. Each step I took left behind a perfect imprint in the ochre dust, the breeze barely brushing the edges before they settled again with unnatural precision.

Here, every footprint felt like a signature. Something recorded. Something noticed.

The cliffs in the distance rose jagged and black, their scale deceptive, their silhouette angular and unnaturally symmetrical in places. The rock appeared volcanic in texture but lacked the sheen of cooled basalt. It was as though the stone had chosen not to reflect light. Every sharp edge, every jutting precipice, absorbed illumination like a sponge, drinking in the golden sky with silent, inescapable hunger.

Looking too long at them made my stomach churn faintly, as if my inner ear couldn’t quite agree on their distance or scale. They loomed not because they were necessarily large—but because they felt important. Anchored. Watching.

I turned back to the Portal Screen. From this angle, it resembled an ancient relic, embedded in the landscape like the last surviving monument to a long-extinct civilisation. It stood in stark contrast to its surroundings—precise geometry within an otherwise organic chaos. A machine in a garden.

It reminded me of a canvas—an untouched surface awaiting brushstrokes. And I, the reluctant artist, now stood at its edge with no idea what I was meant to create.

The air pressed close around me—not oppressive, but charged. Like the atmosphere before a thunderstorm, heavy with ionisation, as though something massive and unseen were waiting just beyond the horizon. My skin prickled in quiet alert. Each breath tasted faintly metallic—subtle, but unmistakable. Copper. Ozone. A whisper of something long-buried and recently disturbed.

This was no simulation. No dreamscape. Saint Phillis was real.

And it was listening.

As I resumed moving across the terrain, the silence—oppressive, complete—pressed down with renewed intensity. It wasn't just the absence of sound. It was the exclusion of it, the rejection of anything unnecessary in this place that obeyed laws far removed from Earth’s permissive noise.

Each crunch of my footsteps through the fine, ochre dust rang out unnaturally loud, like a whispered shout in a cathedral. The occasional rasp of canvas brushing against my shoulder or hip felt amplified, intrusive, indecent in its disruption of the sacred stillness. Even my breath—slow, deliberate—seemed profane here, too wet and mammalian against the dry, ancient emptiness that hung in the air like a forgotten presence.

I scanned the stark, irregular landscape for a place to conceal the pack. I needed discretion, shade, concealment—an anchoring point, both physical and symbolic, to leave this strange object in the care of Saint Phillis itself. And then I found it.

At the base of a distinctive, sweeping rock formation—a formation whose sharp geometry felt almost architectural in its deliberate angles—I spotted a shallow depression partially obscured beneath an overhang. The rock jutted forward at a peculiar incline, casting a deep triangular shadow across the cracked ground beneath it. Its surface was smooth, as if shaped not by wind or water, but by intention. The stone was cool under my hand, and its texture—not quite like sandstone, not quite obsidian—resisted easy classification.

I knelt before the narrow recess, brushing away the top layer of powdery dust to expose a firmer substrate below. The earth here was compact, finely fractured like volcanic stone fused with dried mud—stable, undisturbed, undisturbable. It yielded under my hand with reluctant permanence, as though acknowledging my presence while resisting my purpose.

Gently, I placed the backpack into the deepest part of the crevice, adjusting its position until it lay flush against the natural curves of the rock. The shadow cloaked it well, masking its familiar outlines with angular obscurity. I stepped back several paces, evaluating the scene with a practised eye—trained not by experience, but by some new instinct this place seemed to be awakening within me.

It wasn’t perfect. Nothing here was. But it felt right. The location radiated the same uneasy appropriateness that the Portal Key itself did: simultaneously mundane and monumental. A part of me half-expected the land to reject the offering, to spit it back out in some violent eruption of rejection. But the bag remained undisturbed, settled, as though Saint Phillis had quietly accepted it into its keeping.

“There,” I muttered, breaking the silence with unconscious breath.

The sound of my own voice startled me more than I expected. It hung in the air for half a second before vanishing into the void, absorbed utterly and completely by the atmosphere—no echo, no reverberation, no residual hum. It was like speaking underwater, or into velvet. Saint Phillis took my words but offered nothing back.

The silence, as always, endured. And it deepened. It pressed.

I turned my gaze to the horizon—the jagged cliffs still loomed like the edges of a world unfinished. Their darkness wasn’t just visual; it felt conceptual, as if they represented some boundary in meaning as much as geography. I felt their pull, distant and ominous, but I looked instead to the Portal Screen, now half-lost in the heatless, golden light behind me.

Its glassy surface remained dormant, but no less watchful. A sentinel. A door. A question, waiting to be asked.

For a long moment, I simply stood.

Eventually, I returned to the crevice, crouching once more. My hand hovered over the backpack before resting lightly on its worn surface. It was so ordinary—black canvas faded to grey at the seams, scuffed metal zips that had probably been tugged a thousand times in mundane repetition. But the bag’s banality made it more enigmatic, not less. This had belonged to her, the woman who had known about the Portal Key. The woman who had disappeared.

There was nothing normal about this.

I slid the main zipper open with slow, deliberate care, the teeth parting with a soft rasp that might as well have been a thunderclap. I paused. Waited. Nothing moved. The light did not shift. The air remained still.

Inside, the first object I pulled out was a water bottle—plastic, scratched, and half-filled with clear liquid. The condensation clung to the interior like a tiny galaxy, catching light in faint motes of silver. It was a common brand. Ubiquitous. Easily replaceable. But somehow, in this context, it felt sacred. A human artefact.

Next came a smaller zippered pouch. Matching canvas, black and unremarkable. I opened it with the same care. Inside were basic toiletries: a travel toothbrush worn down with use, a half-squeezed tube of toothpaste, a packet of tissues folded with almost ritualistic neatness.

They were ordinary. Reassuring. The woman had brushed her teeth, drank bottled water, packed tissues like any habitual traveller. And yet these things now existed here, in this place—where no birds sang, no trees stirred, and no insects crawled. The very presence of these mundane human objects made the eerie strangeness of Saint Phillis all the more profound.

She had come here. She had crossed dimensions, just like me.

And she had left this behind.

Whether by choice or necessity, I still couldn’t say. But I knew now—with absolute certainty—that the bag was no accident. It was a message, or a breadcrumb, or a puzzle.

And it was mine to solve.

My fingertips encountered something unexpectedly rigid nestled at the base of the backpack’s main compartment—a distinct, rectangular object buried beneath the layers of practical detritus. My pulse quickened instantly, an involuntary spike of adrenaline and anticipation coursing through me like a sudden electric charge. With cautious, reverent care, I retrieved the object and held it up to the dim, golden light filtering through the portal's ambient shimmer.

A notebook.

Plain. Unbranded. Deceptively ordinary.

The cover was a matte black, worn at the corners and dog-eared from repeated handling. The spine had softened with use, and the edges of several pages were faintly curled, stained with what might have been water damage or nervous sweat. It looked like the sort of thing one might buy for a few dollars in a university bookstore—utterly mundane, indistinguishable from any number of identical notebooks scattered across the globe.

And yet… here it was. Not on a desk. Not in a student’s satchel. But buried in a backpack, left behind on an inter-dimensional journey, carried through a portal into a lifeless realm.

It felt anything but mundane now.

I opened it with care, the faint crackle of its spine disturbingly loud in the silent stillness of Saint Phillis. Most of the pages were blank—untouched sheets that, under any other circumstances, would have felt disappointingly empty. But here, their absence of content was somehow more ominous than reassuring. What had been written—and why so little?

The pages that were filled contained scrawled notes written in a distinctly erratic hand—hasty, cramped, and inconsistent in size, as though penned under intense time pressure or psychological strain. Several lines had been viciously scratched out, entire phrases replaced with increasingly frantic scribbles, the ink growing darker and more forceful as the entries progressed. Some of the words appeared linked by connecting arrows or boxed in with manic insistence, lines spiralling outward in disjointed patterns that resembled a mind unravelling under the weight of knowledge too dangerous to carry.

One fragment caught my eye almost immediately:

“M— — key active”

The rest of the sentence dissolved into illegibility, swallowed by smeared ink and hastily aborted letters. The dash-truncated word could’ve been master or modified, or something entirely unrelated—but whatever it had once meant, its significance was now maddeningly inaccessible. I stared at it for a long time, willing it to make sense, trying to extract meaning from its abrupt absence. A ghost of a thought. A sentence abandoned mid-breath.

Further on, I discovered a series of numbers—coordinates, hastily penned and circled with increasing intensity, the kind of frantic pressure that nearly tore through the fragile paper beneath. They looked familiar in format, but without any contextual frame—no dates, no landmarks—I couldn’t decipher what they marked. Locations of interest, perhaps? Other portals? Hiding places? Rendezvous points? Or worse—gateways that had already been compromised?

I shut the notebook with a careful snap and exhaled slowly, the breath coming out of me like a quiet sigh of disbelief. There was nothing overtly dangerous in the bag. No weapons. No blinking devices or unidentifiable tech. Just human objects, human residue—comforting in their normality but deeply unsettling when juxtaposed with the environment in which I’d found them. And yet, that notebook, in all its frantic disarray, screamed of hidden knowledge. Of desperate awareness. Of someone operating on the outer edge of something immense and incomprehensible.

There was no longer any doubt in my mind—the woman had been part of something bigger. Not a rogue actor, not a mere coincidence. She had known what the Portal Keys were. She had recognised mine on sight. And whatever she had written in that notebook, it hadn’t been meant for idle contemplation. These notes weren’t observations.

They were warnings.

Her voice echoed in my skull once more—Do you want to get us both killed?

I paused for a moment, notebook still in hand, before gently returning it to the backpack’s main compartment. My fingers moved automatically now, methodically repositioning each item exactly where I’d found it. The half-empty water bottle. The accessory pouch. The ordinary things that had suddenly taken on the weight of hidden context. The significance of what had been left out struck me just as strongly as what had been included—no maps, no IDs, no digital devices. Nothing traceable. Nothing with a name.

It was deliberate.

I zipped the pack closed with slow precision, the sound somehow softer than before, as if the bag understood the gravity of being returned to its hiding place. I dusted off the top fabric, brushing away the thin layer of Saint Phillis’ ochre particulate that had settled during my inspection. Then I carefully repositioned it in the crevice, fitting it snugly beneath the angled overhang, tucking it back into shadow like a precious relic returned to its altar.

It disappeared into the gloom almost entirely, a black silhouette barely discernible against the deeper black of the fractured stone. Even the strange golden light here seemed reluctant to touch it.

I straightened, squinting once more at the Portal Screen across the featureless expanse behind me. It shimmered patiently, an open threshold humming with dormant energy, waiting to return me to a world that now felt impossibly far away despite being just a single step beyond.

And then that pressure returned.

Not physical. Not atmospheric. But temporal.

Time, relentless and unforgiving, resumed its insistent push against the edges of my awareness. I didn’t know how long I had left before the aircraft began its descent into Adelaide. I didn’t want to find out the hard way. Whatever mysteries remained here—however urgent, however intoxicating—would have to wait.

I took one last glance at the crevice. At the hidden bag. At the quiet cliffs that loomed in the distance like sentinels carved from forgotten epochs. I could feel it in my bones now. Whatever this was, it wasn’t just a detour from my previous life.

It was a doorway into something else entirely.

Turning back to the shimmering Portal Screen, I began walking.

Standing before the still translucence of the Portal Screen, I cast one last, lingering glance toward the sheltered crevice where I’d carefully concealed the mysterious backpack. Even from this distance, I could still visualise the black canvas nestled in its bed of ochre dust, half-shrouded by the jagged stone overhang. It looked secure—well hidden from any hypothetical observer—but leaving it behind felt like abandoning an appendage. A vital part of the puzzle now lay out of reach, its presence like a low hum in the back of my mind, the notebook’s cryptic scribbles and haunted fragments of thought calling to me with silent urgency. Whatever answers it held, I couldn’t take them with me. Not yet.

Reluctantly, I turned my attention back to the Portal Screen.

The surface had returned to stillness—clear, faintly luminescent, waiting.

As I stood before it, the screen stirred. Slowly, deliberately, a sequence of static images began to ripple across the transparent surface—each one crisp, specific, and eerily familiar. These weren’t abstract visions or conjured memories. They were records. Snapshots of places the portal had already touched through me. My office in Hobart, dim and paper-strewn. The corridor at Melbourne Airport, sterile and humming with fluorescent fatigue. The sealed lavatory door on the plane, captured with uncomfortable precision. And that other place—the unknowable one cloaked in shadow. The one I didn’t recognise, but which stirred something dormant and uneasy deep in my chest.

And the portal responded.

And then, without conscious effort, my mind reached toward one.

Not physically. Not deliberately. Just a subtle shift in attention, the faintest gravitational pull of thought.

The image on the screen responded instantly—pausing mid-cycle, solidifying in a single heartbeat. A familiar space crystallised: the aircraft lavatory. Compact. Stark. Lit with that buzzing fluorescent insistence unique to commercial planes. Grey walls, the polished metal basin, the fixed smile of the plastic waste bin. I could almost smell the overused disinfectant.

The image held for only a second.

Then—without hesitation—the portal responded.

Colour bloomed, fast and instinctive, as if it had been waiting for my decision all along. The image collapsed into light—no fade, no transition—just a sudden, silent burst of prismatic brilliance. Violets flared into gold. Turquoise surged across the screen like ink in water. The surface pulsed, alive with impossible depth, the still picture gone, replaced by something urgent and living.

The doorway had opened.

Even though I’d seen it before, the moment still caught something deep in my chest—something instinctive and old. My skin prickled. My breath caught. The colours spoke in a language my body remembered even if my mind did not. Something ancient. Something true.

Even though I’d seen it several times now, the transformation still struck awe into my chest. The hairs along my forearms stood upright, responding to a frequency my conscious mind couldn’t interpret but my instincts had long since learned to obey.

I inhaled deeply, savouring one final lungful of Saint Phillis’s strange, clean air. It held the mineral tang of unbroken geology, the sterile quiet of a world untouched by time or life. There was something sacred about it. Something final.

And then, I stepped forward.

My foot passed through the shimmering veil, and the now-familiar sensation of static energy surged upward across my skin like a rolling shiver. It wasn’t pain. It wasn’t even discomfort. It was simply other—a reminder that the rules governing this process existed beyond the limits of human understanding. The crackling presence of the threshold climbed over my legs, my torso, my scalp—and with a pulse like the beat of a distant drum, I was through.

The transition was instantaneous.

The hum of the aircraft reasserted itself violently, like a submerged memory bursting back into awareness. The shift in pressure made my ears pop with a quiet snap. I was once again confined within the bland sterility of the commercial aircraft lavatory, cocooned in plastic and chemical residue.

Behind me, the Portal collapsed without ceremony—its brilliant colours vanishing in a tight spiral of light that imploded into nothingness.

I leaned heavily on the sink, letting the sudden weight of my body settle into my bones, my fingers curled against the rim of the basin for support. The air was stale. Dry. Industrial. I’d grown used to the unnatural stillness of Saint Phillis, and returning to the ceaseless vibration of human-made machinery jarred my senses. My breath fogged the small mirror above the sink, briefly obscuring my reflection before receding to reveal a face I barely recognised—drawn, pallid, lined with tension I hadn’t realised was so visible.

I looked older. Not in years. In weight. As though the knowledge I now carried had etched itself into the space beneath my eyes and between the creases of my brow.

Slowly, mechanically, I straightened my shirt. Ran a hand through my hair. It didn’t matter what I looked like. Only that I appeared normal. No one could suspect where I had just been. What I had just done.

I released the lock with a muted metallic click, extinguishing the glowing red Occupied sign outside. That small, binary beacon—so utilitarian, so unthinking—suddenly seemed absurd in its simplicity, an insult to the infinite complexity it had just shielded from view. How could such a meagre indicator possibly encompass the magnitude of what had just transpired behind that thin plastic door?

And yet, I stepped out into the aisle as if I had done nothing more than take slightly too long adjusting a seatbelt or fumbling with the latch on a stubborn soap dispenser.

The glare of the overhead cabin lights hit me like a slap—cold, sterile, aggressively mundane. The illusion of normality reasserted itself with blunt force.

Almost immediately, I was met with the unmistakable irritation of several queued passengers, all of whom had evidently reached the outer limits of their collective patience. Their expressions, though restrained by social convention, were rich with silent judgment. The front-most figure—a balding man in a charcoal suit who radiated managerial authority—lifted his eyebrows in theatrical disapproval. His loosened silk tie, likely a deliberate affectation of casual grace, only underscored the coiled tension of someone who had been made to wait.

Behind him, a teenage girl stared daggers at me over crossed arms, her oversized headphones resting around her neck, one trainer tapping out a staccato rhythm of shared displeasure against the industrial carpet. Her expression wasn’t hostile so much as accusatory, as though I had wasted her time on purpose.

"Sorry," I mumbled, lowering my head as I moved past them, aware that my voice barely registered over the ambient drone of the engines and the soft rustle of movement within the aircraft. But their attention had already moved on, or perhaps never truly been on me to begin with. I was just another passenger—an anonymous obstruction. And yet, I felt their passing gaze like static electricity across the surface of my skin.

How long had I been gone?

There was no meaningful metric for dimensional absence. What did five minutes mean when experienced on two planes of existence at once? Time on Saint Phillis felt malleable, uncertain. Here, in the rigid confines of commercial airspace, it was relentless and inescapable.

As I made my way back to my seat, the cabin’s background noise—murmured conversations, clinking glasses, low coughs, the occasional artificial ding from a call button—felt louder than before, exaggerated and unfamiliar. Every sound, however ordinary, now grated against my senses like sandpaper on exposed nerves. The silence of Saint Phillis had changed something in me. Or perhaps it had simply revealed something I hadn’t known was there.

Sliding carefully into my seat, I allowed myself a brief glance to the right, though I already knew what I would find.

Nothing.

The seat beside me was empty. As untouched and unremarkable as it had been before she ever sat down, if indeed she ever had. The synthetic leather showed no indentation, no trace of heat or pressure. No indication that a woman had once been seated there, calmly watching me over the edge of a dog-eared paperback, offering cryptic warnings with eyes far too knowing.

She was gone.

And not in the euphemistic sense. Not in the way people disappear into anonymity or awkwardly exit conversations.

She had vanished.

Fully.

Completely.

Without trace.

I tried to tell myself that perhaps she had simply relocated to another seat. Maybe she had spoken with a flight attendant, switched places, or discreetly moved to an empty row. But I knew. I knew with the same absolute certainty with which I knew that the Portal Key in my pocket was real, and powerful, and dangerous. She hadn’t moved.

She had left.

Vanished the same way I had, through a doorway no one else could see.

I leaned back against the inadequate headrest, its plastic under-structure poking uncomfortably through the thin padding, and closed my eyes for a moment. Behind my lids, I saw the cliffs of Saint Phillis. I saw the jagged shadows of unfamiliar rocks and the crevice where her backpack now sat like a latent message waiting to be decoded. That bag existed. I had touched it. Opened it. Read its contents. And yet, here—on this aircraft—it’s like it had never existed at all.

I opened my eyes again and scanned the cabin with a methodical vigilance that must have looked, to any casual observer, like little more than idle boredom. Row by row, I studied the faces of those around me. No sign of her. No furtive glances. No subtle shifts in posture. Just passengers in various stages of travel fatigue, occupied with their books, screens, or vacant thoughts.

The space under the seat in front of hers—once occupied, now void—remained precisely as I had left it. Bare. Innocuous. Deceptively uneventful.

None of the flight crew had commented. No concerned passenger had asked about the sudden absence of the young woman who had boarded but not disembarked. No one, it seemed, had even registered her presence in the first place.

I was alone in knowing what had occurred.

Or what might have occurred.

The soft footsteps of attendants moved past me once more. The rhythm of the plane's engines persisted with relentless predictability. The world around me went on as though nothing extraordinary had happened. But in the pocket of my trousers, the Portal Key pressed insistently against my leg, a cold reassurance of everything that had changed.

I turned again to look at the empty seat beside me.

She’s gone.

The thought was no longer speculative. It had congealed into certainty.

But where had she gone? And why?

The questions collided and multiplied inside my skull, cascading into new permutations like falling dominoes—each one unlocking another unknown, another possibility. My mind spun with the helpless velocity of a carousel I could no longer dismount.

And beneath it all, ticking like a hidden metronome, was the knowledge of the backpack concealed beneath a rock in a silent, sunlit dimension that didn’t belong to this world.

It would wait for me. Or for someone. Until its purpose was revealed.

For now, all I could do was wait—trapped inside a pressurised metal tube hurtling through familiar skies, suspended in transit between Melbourne and Adelaide, between ignorance and understanding, between the person I had been mere days ago… and whoever, or whatever, I was now in the process of becoming.