The Breath the House Took

"The house hadn't moved. The house hadn't changed. But I could feel the distance now — between what they knew and what I carried — and it was wider than anything I'd crossed tonight."

Kenneth's room. Warm air. The smell of dust and cedar and washing powder.

My legs gave. Not completely — I caught myself on the edge of the bed, one hand gripping the iron frame — but the relief was so sudden and so total that my body just folded. Like it had been holding itself together through sheer will, and the moment it recognised safety, it let go of everything at once.

I stood there, bent over the bed, breathing. In, out. In, out. The air tasted of home — eucalyptus and old wood and the ghost of tonight's fire — and it filled my lungs like something I'd been starving for. I couldn't get enough of it. Every breath was a reclamation. Every breath said: you're back, you're here, the floorboards are real, the ceiling is real, the house is holding you.

Allan Border's faded grin. The cricket bat in the corner. The model plane, turning slowly on its string from the draught the portal had made.

The portal was still open behind me. I raised the key — my hand was shaking badly, slippery with sweat — and willed it closed. I didn't know the word for what I did. Just wanted it shut. Wanted the room to be a room again.

The light drew inward. Tightened. Folded. And was gone.

Silence. Real silence — not the vast, devouring silence of the cave, but the small, populated silence of a house at night. The clock downstairs. The pipes. A possum on the roof, moving carefully across the tin. Sounds with edges, sounds with history, sounds that belonged to a world that knew what living things were.

Jeremiah was still standing by the door. He hadn't moved. His face was pale in the moonlight, and there was something on it I hadn't seen before — not relief exactly. Something rawer. Like he'd been holding his breath the entire time I was gone and had only just remembered how to use his lungs.

"How long was I gone?" My voice was a croak.

"About ten minutes."

Ten minutes. It had felt like hours. It had felt like a lifetime in a place where time might not work the way I was used to.

I looked down at my feet. They were red and white in patches — the mottled look of skin that's been too cold for too long. Wet, dirty, the thin snow melted into muddy water between my toes. The cut on my right sole was still bleeding — a thin line of red against the pale skin. Blood from another world, drying in the warmth of this one.

"I need to go to bed," I said. It was the most mundane sentence I'd ever spoken, and it was the truest thing I had.

Jeremiah nodded. He didn't ask what I'd seen. Didn't ask how I felt. Didn't give a speech about the journey ahead or the burden of being chosen. He just stood there, a young bloke with tired eyes in someone else's bedroom at one in the morning, and let me go.

I walked to the door. He stepped aside. I reached for the handle.

"Cody."

I stopped. Didn't turn around.

"You came back," he said. Quietly. Like it mattered.

"Yeah," I said. "I did."

I opened the door. The hinge groaned — the real groan, the familiar one, the sound the house made when it was being itself. I stepped into the hallway. The air was cool and still. Dad's breathing came from the far end, slow and steady. One of the girls murmured something in her sleep — just a sound, no words.

I reached back to pull Kenneth's door shut behind me. My fingers closed around the edge of it, and I was already thinking about my bed, about the pillow, about lying down and closing my eyes and not opening them again until something forced me to.

The light caught my hand.

Warm. Gold. Spilling across my fingers and the back of my wrist as I held the door. Not my portal. This was amber and copper and deep red, and it was blooming behind me, filling the room I'd just left.

I stopped. Held the door where it was — half-closed, half-open. Through the gap, the light was intensifying, the colours moving across the ceiling in slow, fluid patterns.

I pushed the door back open.

Jeremiah was standing in the middle of the room with his own Portal Key raised, his portal already formed against the far wall. The colours were warmer than mine — golds, deep reds, amber — the movement slower, more fluid, like honey poured through light. It cast his face in shifting bronze.

He saw the door move and turned. Not startled — not exactly. But caught. The look of a man who'd been doing something quietly and hadn't expected to be seen.

I didn't shout. Didn't demand. I was past all of that. Whatever reserves of anger and outrage I'd been running on all night had finally emptied out, and what was left was something quieter. Flatter. The dull, resigned clarity of a person who has stopped being surprised by things that should be surprising.

"You're leaving," I said.

He lowered the key a fraction. The portal stayed open, humming softly behind him.

"I have a settlement," he said. "In Clivilius. A place called Strechna. It's where I stay."

I leaned against the doorframe. My cut foot throbbed. My hands hung at my sides. I didn't have the energy to fold my arms or clench my fists or do any of the things your body does when it's gearing up for a fight. There was no fight left.

"You have a home," I said. "In Clivilius. You've had one this whole time."

"Yes."

The word sat there. Small and honest and quiet.

Part of me had already known. Not consciously — not in any way I could have put into words an hour ago. But somewhere underneath the shock and the anger and the impossible reality of portals and keys and other worlds, some quiet part of my brain had been keeping count. The evasions. The vague answers. The way he'd let me offer a bed without ever asking for one. The way he'd accepted it like a gift, when really it was just a door.

And now here he was, leaving through a different one.

But underneath the resignation — underneath the dull, unsurprised ache of watching another piece of the evening's fiction peel away — something else moved. Something sharper. A tightness in my chest that had nothing to do with betrayal and everything to do with fear.

Because if he left — if he stepped through that portal and didn't come back — I was alone with this. Completely, totally alone. A nineteen-year-old with a piece of metal that drank blood and opened holes in reality, living in a house full of people he could never tell. No guide. No answers. No one who knew what he knew.

"Are you coming back?" The words came out before I could stop them. Smaller than I wanted them to be. Younger.

Jeremiah's face changed. The caught-out tension softened into something else — not pity, not quite. Something closer to recognition. Like he remembered what this part felt like.

"I'll be back before sunrise," he said. "Before your family wakes. Before your father checks the kitchen. As far as anyone knows, I slept in this bed, used that towel, and I'll be sitting at the table when your mother puts the kettle on."

I looked at the bed. The turned-back sheets. The towel Mum had folded on the chair. The room she'd prepared for a man who was about to sleep in another world.

"So this is how it works," I said. Not angry. Just tired. Just stating what I now understood to be the shape of things. "You come and go. Sleep in your world. Come back in the morning and we all pretend you've been here all night."

"For now. Yes. There's a lot I need to teach you, Cody. I meant what I said — we'll talk properly tomorrow. During the day, when we're both rested." He glanced at the portal, then back at me. "But tonight is done. For both of us."

I nodded. Not because I was satisfied. Not because the quiet, sick feeling of watching my family's hospitality be used as a prop had gone away. Just because my body had made the decision for me. I was finished. Whatever was left to feel about this — all of it — would still be there in the morning. It could wait. It would have to, because I had nothing left to process it with.

"Go on, then," I said. "Go home."

Jeremiah held my gaze for a moment longer. Then he turned, stepped toward the portal, and the colours folded around him like a closing hand. One moment he was there — leather jacket, tired eyes, the man who'd turned my life inside out over the course of a single evening — and the next he was gone. The portal collapsed inward, the light shrank to a point, and then there was nothing.

Kenneth's room. Just Kenneth's room. Dark. Empty. The bed with its turned-back sheets. The desk with the clean towel Mum had put out. The model plane, still swinging gently on its string from the disturbance in the air.

I stood in the doorway for a long time. Not thinking. Not feeling. Just standing there, looking at a room that had been prepared for a guest who was sleeping in another world, and letting the fact of it exist without trying to make it make sense.

I pulled the door shut. The hinge groaned. I walked down the hallway to my room. The floorboards complained under my wet, dirty, bleeding feet.

I went into my room. Closed the door. Sat on the edge of the bed.

The Portal Key sat in my palm — heavy, cold, and stained with the dried blood it had drawn from me when it made itself mine.