The Burden of Two Worlds

“It wasn’t silence that unnerved me—it was realising the silence had chosen them, and not me.”

The study reformed around me like a cage snapping shut.

After the vast openness of Clivilius—after that endless sky and the horizon that promised infinity—the walls of this room pressed in with suffocating familiarity. Four corners. A desk. Bookshelves sagging under the weight of accumulated years. The same space I had occupied a thousand times before, now feeling impossibly small, impossibly ordinary, impossibly wrong.

The air was stale, heavy with the scent of old paper and dust and faint traces of my own sweat. I stood motionless, listening to the silence, but it was not a peaceful quiet. It was the silence of something held back. Something waiting.

I waited too.

At any moment, I told myself, Paul would stumble through with his grin half-curdled by disbelief. Or Jamie would stride in, muttering about dust and madness, his anger already cooling into the grudging acceptance that usually followed his outbursts. The Portal shimmered behind me—I could feel its presence without turning, that faint electric hum against my skin—but the air remained unbroken.

No footsteps. No voices. Only me.

The seconds stretched. Then longer. Then longer still.

A slow unease wound its way up my spine, vertebra by vertebra, settling at the base of my skull with the particular weight of dawning comprehension. It wasn't the absence of their presence that unsettled me most. It was the realisation creeping over me with icy clarity: the Portal hadn't failed. It hadn't malfunctioned or shorted out or done whatever it was that impossible technology might do when pushed beyond its limits.

The silence wasn't the result of broken machinery.

Whatever had barred them from crossing—whatever had scorched Jamie's arm and resisted Paul's determined advance—it was something else entirely. Something deliberate.

My skin prickled, as though unseen eyes lingered in the corners of the room. Every shadow seemed sharper, darker. The familiar shapes of furniture took on new edges, new possibilities. The air thickened around me, heavy with questions that pressed against my chest until I could scarcely draw breath.

And then it came.

The voice. Soft, unbidden, slipping into my mind with the intimacy of breath against my ear.

You should not be surprised, Luke Smith.

It was both chastisement and comfort, calm and unnerving in equal measure. I had grown almost accustomed to its presence over the past days—that ethereal murmur threading through my thoughts at unexpected moments—but here, now, in the aftermath of what had just happened, its arrival struck differently. There was weight behind the words. Meaning I was meant to grasp but couldn't quite reach.

I have shown you the answers, if only you would see them.

Frustration clenched at me, a spark striking against the tinder of my confusion. What answers? What puzzle pieces were already before me, overlooked in my blind rush to prove myself right? My thoughts twisted and tangled, a knot of intrigue and doubt tightening as I stood there, wrestling with meaning just beyond my reach.

The voice offered no clarification. It never did. Clivilius spoke in riddles and half-truths, in invitations disguised as statements, and I had accepted every one of them. Followed them. Trusted them.

The strangeness of that struck me afresh, like waking from a dream only to find the dream still clinging to the air around me.

I had followed a disembodied voice. Trusted an unseen entity that whispered in my mind without permission or preamble. And I had done so without hesitation—eagerly, even. Hungrily. As though some part of me had been waiting my entire life for exactly this kind of impossible summons.

By any sensible measure, my actions teetered on the edge of madness. I could hear Jamie's voice in my head, sharp with the contempt he reserved for things he couldn't control: You followed a voice in your head, Luke. A voice. In your head. And he would be right. From the outside, from any rational vantage point, what I had done was inexplicable at best. Dangerous at worst.

And yet I had done it. And I had dragged them along with me.

The truth was inescapable, settling over me with the weight of something that couldn't be unfelt: I had led Paul and Jamie—my brother and my partner—into a world none of us understood. Not just led them, but persuaded myself that it was right. Necessary. Even noble.

And now, with Jamie scorched and furious, Paul bewildered, and both barred from passage while I stood here in the comfortable familiarity of my own study, the weight of that decision revealed itself in brutal detail.

It had not been a grand gesture of vision.

It had been reckless. Impulsive. Perhaps unforgivable.

Was this truly the soil upon which a new civilisation should take root? A foundation laid in haste, in half-blind faith, driven more by my own yearning for significance than by any measured wisdom? I had wanted so desperately to share what I'd found—to prove that the wonder was real, that the dreams of my childhood had finally coalesced into something tangible—that I hadn't stopped to consider the cost.

The thought cut deep, carving channels through whatever certainty remained.

I had wanted to be a guide. A harbinger of new beginnings. Instead, I might have become something else entirely: the architect of their imprisonment. The man who led them into a trap he didn't understand, because he was too blinded by his own excitement to see the danger until it was too late.

Guilt coiled in my chest, heavy and suffocating.

And yet.

Even in that pit of doubt, something in me refused to collapse.

The echo of Clivilius's voice lingered in my mind—resonant, unyielding, carrying the particular calm of something that had existed long before my fears and would continue long after they faded. Its presence wrapped around the raw edges of my uncertainty, not erasing them, but tempering them. Holding them in place so they couldn't consume me entirely.

Slowly, carefully, a resolve began to form in the cracks left behind by my fear.

Yes, the path was dangerous. Yes, it was uncertain, filled with obstacles I could neither predict nor yet comprehend. Jamie's scorched arm was proof of that—vivid, undeniable proof that Clivilius was not the benevolent playground I had imagined in my more optimistic moments.

But it was also a path toward something greater. Something beyond the boundaries of what we had known. A beginning. A chance to shape, to build, to discover anew.

The doubts and fears were not signs of failure. They were part of the journey itself—mile markers on a road that could not be straight or simple. Clivilius had shown me glimpses of what lay ahead, even if it spoke in puzzles and riddles that refused to yield their meaning. My task was not to understand everything now, but to keep walking. To trust that meaning would reveal itself in time.

And so, beneath the crushing weight of responsibility, a steadier flame began to burn.

Resolve. Fragile but enduring.

In that stillness, a kind of surrender came over me—not resignation, but a quiet acceptance that wrapped itself around my doubts like a second skin. The solitude sharpened the truth: there was no turning back. The path ahead would be neither simple nor merciful. It would be marked by obstacles I could not yet name, by trials that would test both my conviction and my courage.

And yet, the choice had already been made. The die already cast.

The vision I carried—of something new rising from the dust, of a civilisation shaped by fresh hands and fresh hope—was no longer an idle dream but a task set squarely before me. However daunting, however fraught with risk, it demanded to be attempted. The thought was sobering, heavy, yet not without a strange exhilaration stirring beneath the weight.

Clivilius was no longer simply a place.

With its whispered voice threading itself into my thoughts, with its unseen hand pressing against our choices, it had revealed itself as something far more. A partner, perhaps. Inscrutable and vast, its will entwined with my own in ways I was only beginning to glimpse. If I was to move forward, it would not be alone. Together—man and world—we would step into the uncharted, shaping its destiny even as it shaped ours.

The weight of it pressed on my chest, yet it was not only burden.

It was privilege.

To lead, to create, to risk everything for the possibility of something greater—this was not a call I could cast aside, nor one I wished to. The mantle of responsibility had settled upon me, heavy and unyielding, and for the first time I did not shrink from it.

Behind me, the Portal waited.

Beyond it, in the ochre dust of a world that had claimed them, Paul and Jamie waited too.

Whatever came next, I would have to face it. Face them. Find a way to bridge the divide that Clivilius itself had created—or discover why it had been created at all.