The Berriedale Crossing

Kain Jeffries arrived at the house on Wallcrest Road, Berriedale, expecting nothing more complicated than confirming his uncle was alive and well. Jamie's car sat in the driveway. The morning was cold, ordinary, unremarkable. He knocked on the door and waited.

It was not Jamie who answered. Luke Smith appeared in the doorway looking dishevelled and disoriented, and his response to a straightforward question — was Jamie home? — was anything but straightforward. After a visible struggle to compose himself, Luke offered that Jamie had popped out and been collected by his friend Gladys. The explanation was thin. Although the car in the driveway supported it. But Kain, uncomfortable with confrontation and eager to complete the errand his mother had sent him on, accepted it rather than press further.

What Kain did not know was that Jamie Greyson was not out with Gladys. Jamie was in Clivilius — an alternate dimension accessible through a Portal that Luke possessed and controlled. Jamie had been taken through days earlier and was currently nursing an infected wound in the fledgling settlement Luke had been building on the other side. Luke's brother Paul was there as well, along with Jamie's dogs. The house was empty of everything that should have filled it, and Luke had been living alone with the knowledge of what he had done and the growing desperation of a settlement that needed more hands than it had.

When Luke invited Kain inside to wait, the decision was not hospitality. It was calculation. Luke had assessed Kain's physical capability — the construction-trained build, the youth, the practical skills — and recognised in his visitor precisely the kind of resource the settlement lacked. The plan formed rapidly and without the moral deliberation it deserved. Luke needed to get Kain through the Portal, and he was prepared to do so without consent.

The deception that followed was clumsy but effective. Luke fabricated a request for help moving a TV cabinet downstairs, using the pretext to guide Kain toward the sliding door at the far end of the living room. Behind that door, where a stairwell landing and wall should have been, Luke had already activated the Portal Key — an artefact that tore open a passage between dimensions, filling the space with a churning display of light and colour that defied physical explanation.

Kain's instincts had been sounding warnings throughout the visit. The absent dogs. The nervous host. The coffee beans scattered across the kitchen floor where Luke's shaking hands had dropped the jar. Every detail registered as wrong, but politeness and the desire to avoid making a scene overrode what his gut was telling him. He followed Luke to the door.

When it opened, Kain had a fraction of a second to process what he was seeing before Luke struck him from behind. His hands caught the doorframe — reflexes honed on construction sites buying him a momentary hold — but Luke kicked the back of his knee, and the compromised balance was enough. Kain fell forward into the Portal and was taken.

He landed on dry, packed earth beneath an alien sky — rust-red hills stretching in every direction, warm sun on his back, and a voice that bypassed his ears entirely to announce itself directly inside his skull: Welcome to Clivilius, Kain Jeffries.

Everything he had been building — the apprenticeship, the house in Kingston, the life with Brianne, the child due in three months — had been torn away in the space of a single morning. He had come to Berriedale to check on his uncle as a favour to his worried mother. He would not be returning.

Luke followed through the Portal moments later, carrying whatever justification he had assembled — that necessity demanded it, that the settlement needed Kain's strength, that the moral calculus of survival outweighed the violence of what he had done. Whether he believed his own reasoning was a question only Luke could answer. What was beyond dispute was the act itself: he had deceived a man who trusted him, struck him from behind, and forced him into another world without warning or consent.

Back at Jeffries Manor, Louise Jeffries waited by her phone for the call that would tell her Jamie was fine. It would not come. The son she had sent to ease her worry about one missing family member had now become another.