The Sky Was All Wrong

“You ever look up and realise the world’s still there — it just isn’t yours anymore?”

Disoriented, I stumbled forward, my body suddenly subject to gravity again after that impossible suspension in light and colour and space that defied description. The transition was violent, jarring—like being dropped rather than landing, like reality itself had hiccupped and spat me out into somewhere I didn't belong.

My legs, which moments ago had been weightless, now carried the full burden of my body again, but they'd forgotten how. I lurched forward, arms windmilling for balance, fighting to regain control of limbs that felt disconnected, foreign, as if they belonged to someone else and I'd just been given the instruction manual in a language I didn't speak.

I managed—barely—to prevent myself from crashing face-first onto the unfamiliar terrain beneath me, catching myself just moments before total collapse. My hands shot out instinctively, palms slamming into ground that was wrong, completely wrong, nothing like the polished floorboards of the Owens' hallway where I'd been standing seconds—minutes?—ago.

The surface beneath my palms was dusty and gritty, a mix of red and brown earth that felt uncomfortable against my skin. Not Tasmanian soil. Not the rich, dark loam I knew from countless job sites, not the clay-heavy earth that clung to boots and stained everything it touched. This was something else—drier, finer, with a texture that reminded me of the Australian mainland, of documentaries about the outback, of landscapes I'd seen in photographs but never experienced.

The impact sent up small clouds of dust that caught in my throat, making me cough—a raw, choking sound that seemed obscenely loud in the strange quiet surrounding me. The air tasted different too. Cleaner, somehow. Sharper. With an edge I couldn't identify, as if I were breathing atmosphere that had different proportions of oxygen or nitrogen or something my lungs didn't quite recognise.

The surreal nature of the experience left me reeling, my mind grappling with the impossible transition from the hallway of the cottage to this alien landscape. Was this a hallucination, a dream? The thought surfaced with desperate hope, clinging to any explanation that fit within the boundaries of reality I understood. Or had I somehow crossed into a reality far beyond the bounds of my understanding?

Even as I formed the question, I knew the answer. This wasn't a dream. Dreams didn't have this level of physical detail, didn't include the grit beneath your fingernails or the ache in your ribs where Luke had shoulder-checked you or the taste of dust on your tongue. Dreams were fluid, mutable, subject to sudden shifts and impossible transitions. This—whatever this was—felt brutally, undeniably real.

I remained frozen in place for several long seconds, crouched on hands and knees like some primitive creature, my breathing ragged and panicked. My gaze swept across the vast expanse of near-barren land that now surrounded me, and with each degree of vision my disbelief grew more profound, more total, more crushing.

There was nothing here. Nothing remotely familiar. Nothing that made sense.

Where is the house? The question screamed through my mind with such force I might have actually voiced it aloud, though I couldn't be sure over the roaring in my ears that might have been blood rushing or might have been the sound of my sanity fracturing.

The Owens' cottage—that solid stone and cedar structure that had stood for over a century, that had weathered countless Tasmanian winters, that had been right there, immediately behind me—was gone. Simply gone. As if it had never existed. As if I'd imagined the entire structure.

The trees? Gone as well. The dense Tasmanian forest that had pressed so close on either side of the dirt road, the eucalyptus and sassafras and tree ferns that had created that tunnel of green—vanished. All of it. Replaced by this open, desolate landscape that stretched in every direction under a sky that was too blue, too vast, too empty.

My ute? Panic spiked sharp and hot in my chest. My truck—my beautiful green Ranger, my mobile office, my livelihood, the vehicle that had been parked under that massive gum tree not fifty metres from where I'd been standing—nowhere to be seen.

The world I'd known had been erased, wiped clean like chalk from a blackboard, leaving only this strange, barren expanse that belonged in a different country, a different continent, maybe a different planet entirely.

I spun around, a full one-eighty, turning to face the direction I had come from—though how I knew which direction that was, I couldn't explain. Some residual sense of orientation, perhaps. Some last connection to the moment before everything changed.

Only to be met with a sight that defied all logic, all sense, all understanding of how the world was supposed to work.

A large, solid yet translucent screen stood imposingly before me, towering a good five metres high—maybe more, my sense of scale was completely shot—and stretching several metres in either direction. It rose from the dusty ground like some impossible monument, like a door carved from glass or crystal or something that didn't quite exist in three-dimensional space.

The surface shimmered with that same quality of light I'd experienced during the fall—if fall was the right word—fractals of colour swirling across its face in patterns that hurt to look at directly, that seemed to suggest depth and movement and possibilities my brain couldn't process. It was both barrier and window, both solid and ethereal, both present and not-quite-there.

What the— My thoughts fractured, unable to piece together a coherent understanding of this surreal landscape, this impossible situation, this complete divorce from everything I knew about how reality functioned.

The screen hummed—a low, subsonic vibration I felt in my bones more than heard with my ears. It emanated a sense of power, of permanence, of something fundamental and unchangeable. This wasn't decoration or illusion. This was structure. This was architecture on a scale and of a type I'd never encountered.

And it was the only familiar thing in sight—if you could call the portal you'd just been violently shoved through "familiar."

"You can't go back," a voice called from behind me, masculine and young, cutting through my stunned observation with casual certainty.

The words hit me like a physical blow. I whirled around to face the source of the voice, my heart hammering, every muscle tensed for fight or flight though I had no idea which would be more appropriate or more possible.

A young man stood there—maybe ten metres away, though distance felt uncertain here, as if space itself hadn't quite settled into proper dimensions. He was perhaps early twenties, tall and lean with the build of someone who did physical work for a living. Blonde hair caught the too-bright sunlight, messy in that way that suggested either he didn't care much about grooming or he'd been here long enough to stop bothering. He wore work clothes—jeans, a t-shirt, boots—all covered in the same red-brown dust that now coated my hands.

But it was his posture that struck me most. Relaxed. Casual. As if standing in this impossible landscape discussing impossible things was the most natural occurrence in the world. As if he'd been waiting here for me, expecting me, prepared for this exact conversation.

"What do you mean? Where am I?" My voice emerged as a mix of confusion and rising panic, the words coming out higher-pitched than normal, stretched thin by stress.

The young man regarded me with an expression that might have been sympathy or might have been amusement or might have been some combination of both. His blue eyes held a knowing quality that set my teeth on edge—the look of someone who'd been where I was now, who understood the terror and confusion and complete disorientation I was experiencing, and who'd moved beyond it to some kind of acceptance I couldn't imagine achieving.

"Didn't you hear the voice when you came through?" he inquired, his tone carrying a hint of sarcasm that seemed wildly inappropriate given the circumstances.

The voice. Yes. That impossible voice that had spoken directly into my consciousness, bypassing all normal sensory channels to plant words—a name—directly into my awareness.

I paused, my mind a whirlwind of thoughts and images, trying to latch onto something tangible, something that made sense, something I could use as an anchor to prevent myself from spinning completely out into panic and madness. "I think so," I managed to say, my voice barely above a whisper, as if speaking too loudly might shatter whatever fragile grip on sanity I still maintained.

The admission felt like defeat. Acknowledging the voice meant acknowledging that this was real, that whatever had happened had actually happened, that I wasn't hallucinating or dreaming but had somehow, impossibly, been transported to... where?

"Well, there you go. Welcome to Clivilius!" he declared, his arms sweeping wide in a mockingly grand gesture, as if presenting me with a prize I'd won rather than a prison I'd been thrown into.

The name struck me hard—Clivilius—the same word the voice had used, now confirmed by this stranger's casual pronunciation. It sounded foreign yet somehow familiar, as if it existed just beyond the edge of recognition, as if I'd heard it before in dreams or half-remembered stories.

My knees felt weak, a sense of panic washing over me in waves that threatened to pull me under entirely. The ground beneath me seemed to shift, though I knew intellectually it was perfectly solid. My vision swam at the edges, dark spots blooming and fading, my body's autonomic response to shock and stress.

This can't be real. The thought circled desperately, a mantra of denial. Who the hell is this guy? This has to be a hallucination, a product of a concussion. Maybe Luke had hit me harder than I'd thought. Maybe I was lying unconscious on the floor of the Owens' hallway, my brain constructing this elaborate fantasy whilst my body shut down from trauma.

But even as I formed these rationalisations, they felt hollow. This was too detailed, too consistent, too physically present to be a hallucination. The dust beneath my hands had texture. The sun overhead had heat. The stranger's voice had timbre and tone. Everything had weight and reality that dreams simply didn't possess.

I turned back to the large screen—the portal, I supposed, though the word felt inadequate—hoping desperately that it would vanish, that this whole experience would dissolve like morning mist, revealing the normal world beneath. But it stood there, as real and unyielding as before, its surface still swirling with those hypnotic patterns of light and colour.

Tentatively, driven by desperate hope more than rational thought, I reached out towards it. My hand extended slowly, trembling slightly, approaching the shimmering surface with the same caution you'd use approaching something that might bite or burn.

The moment my fingertips came within a few centimetres of the screen, I felt it—a strong magnetic force that repelled my hand with startling intensity. Not painful, exactly, but undeniable. An invisible barrier that pushed back against my attempt to touch it, to breach it, to pass back through to wherever I'd come from.

The sensation was deeply unsettling, fundamentally wrong in a way I couldn't articulate. Magnetic forces didn't work like this. You couldn't create a barrier in mid-air that repelled flesh and bone. The physics were impossible, the technology non-existent, the whole concept belonging to science fiction rather than reality.

And yet here it was, pushing back against my palm with patient, implacable force.

"I told you," the young man called out again, his voice carrying across the space between us with that same casual certainty that made me want to punch him. "You can't go back."

The words settled over me like a death sentence. Can't go back. Not shouldn't or don't try to but can't—absolute and final and allowing no room for negotiation or alternative interpretation.

Despair sank its claws into me with vicious efficiency, pulling my heart down to the depths of my churning stomach. I felt it physically—a weight in my chest, a hollowness in my gut, a sensation of falling that had nothing to do with gravity and everything to do with the sudden, crushing understanding of what this might mean.

"No," I said, my voice trembling, fracturing around the edges as emotion threatened to overwhelm the words. Tears burned behind my eyes, hot and shameful, the kind of tears that came when the world simply became too much, when hope died and despair rushed in to fill the vacuum. "There must be some mistake."

Jenny. The thought of her hit me like a freight train. Jenny at home, expecting me back in a couple of hours. Jenny who trusted me, who believed in me, who'd accepted my explanation without question because why would she doubt me? Why would she imagine that her husband was driving off to be pushed through an impossible portal into an impossible place?

And Sammy. God, Sammy. My little boy waving goodbye, chasing Buffy through the back door, secure in the absolute certainty that Daddy would come home. That Daddy always came home. That the world was safe and predictable and fathers didn't just disappear.

What would they think when I didn't return? When hours stretched into evening, evening into night, night into days? When my phone went unanswered—because of course my phone was in my ute, wherever the hell that was—and my business stood abandoned and the bills kept arriving with no one to pay them?

How long before Jenny called the police? Before they started searching? Before my face appeared on missing person posters with a phone number people could call if they'd seen me?

And what could they possibly find? What trail could they follow? I'd driven into isolated hills to meet a man at a remote property, and then I'd simply ceased to exist from their perspective, vanished as completely as if I'd been erased from reality.

The young man approached, his boots kicking up small puffs of dust with each step, covering the distance between us whilst I stood frozen in my spiral of panic and despair. He extended his hand in a gesture that seemed absurdly normal, absurdly civilised, given the circumstances.

"I'm Kain," he said, the introduction offered with an easy friendliness that suggested he'd forgotten—or never grasped—how utterly insane this situation was.

His hand, I noticed as I stared at it dumbly, was small but calloused—the hand of someone who worked with his hands, who knew labour and tools and the satisfaction of building things. There was dirt under his fingernails and a scar across his knuckles. Real details. Human details. Details that insisted this was a real person, not a figment of my imagination.

Hesitantly, operating more on autopilot than conscious decision, I shook it. His grip was firm and warm, his palm dry despite the heat. The sensation was unsettlingly real, achingly normal. Just two blokes shaking hands, as if we'd met at a barbecue or a job site, as if this were an ordinary introduction rather than a meeting in an impossible place.

"Nial," I heard myself say, though my voice sounded distant, as if someone else were speaking through me.

Kain released my hand, his expression shifting to something that might have been sympathy, though it was hard to read through the shock still clouding my perception. He looked young up close—early twenties at most, with the kind of face that probably got him carded at pubs. But his eyes held something older, something weathered, as if he'd seen things that aged you from the inside out.

"Umm, where's Luke?" I asked, clinging to the question like a lifeline, grasping at anything that might provide connection to the world I'd left behind, to circumstances I understood, to people I knew. Luke had pushed me. Luke had brought me here. Luke would have answers. Luke could explain. Luke could fix this.

The hope was desperate and probably unfounded, but it was all I had.

"I'm sure he'll be here very soon," Kain replied, his tone suggesting this was normal, expected, part of some process he understood and I didn't.

Before I could process that response, before I could formulate the dozen other questions crowding my mind, Kain suddenly grabbed my arm, his fingers closing around my bicep with surprising strength. There was urgency in his grasp that sent a fresh spike of adrenaline through my system.

"It's best we don't stand too close," he warned, already pulling me backwards, away from the portal, his body language suggesting imminent danger.

I allowed myself to be pulled, too overwhelmed to resist, too disoriented to know what was safe and what wasn't. We stumbled backwards together, Kain maintaining his grip on my arm whilst simultaneously watching the portal with intense focus.

And that's when I saw it.

The portal—the screen, the barrier, whatever it was—suddenly buzzed with increased intensity, the hum I'd felt earlier rising in pitch and volume until it was clearly audible, a sound like electricity arcing, like transformer stations, like power you could hear and feel and almost taste in the air.

Bright, vibrant colours erupted across its surface, more vivid than before, more violent. The swirls collided and sparked, sending actual sparks into the air—bright points of light that shouldn't exist, that defied every physical law I understood. They fountained outward like fireworks, cascading down to sizzle and die in the dusty earth.

"Shit," I whispered, my eyes widening in disbelief as I watched something impossible become even more impossible.

Because through that wall of magnificent colour, through that barrier that had repelled my hand with such force, something was emerging.

Something large.

Something that absolutely, definitively should not have been emerging through a portal.

My ute.

My beautiful green Ford Ranger, "Triffett Fencing Solutions" still emblazoned on the side, was pushing through the portal like a ship breaking through fog. Not quickly—the process seemed to take forever, each centimetre of emergence marked by increased sparking, increased buzzing, increased impossibility—but inexorably.

The front bumper came through first, then the bonnet, the windscreen catching that too-bright sunlight and throwing it back in blinding flashes. The cab emerged, then the tray, the whole vehicle sliding through that flat, two-dimensional surface as if physics were merely a suggestion rather than a law.

Where the fuck am I? The thought crystallised with perfect clarity as I watched my ute—my normal, ordinary, three-dimensional vehicle—complete its transition from one impossible place to another.

The reality, or rather the unreality, of the situation was overwhelming, each moment more bizarre and incomprehensible than the last. My mind raced, trying desperately to make sense of the impossible, whilst my heart pounded with a mix of fear and awe at the extraordinary world I had seemingly stumbled into.

A world called Clivilius.

A world I couldn't leave.

A world that had stolen my ute along with me, as if recognising I'd need it, as if someone on the other side had thought to send it through.

Which meant someone on the other side was still there. Still in control. Still orchestrating whatever this was.

The ute finished its emergence, all four tyres now resting on the alien red-brown earth, the engine still running with that familiar rumble that seemed obscene in its normality. Through the windscreen, I could see the interior—my coffee cup in the holder, still half-full. Papers scattered across the passenger seat. The St. Christopher medal Jenny had given me hanging from the rear-view mirror.

But something was different. Something that made my stomach drop even further.

There was a silhouette behind the wheel. A figure in the driver's seat, hands gripping the steering wheel, barely visible through the dust-hazed windscreen and the glare of that impossibly bright sun.

Someone had driven my ute through the portal.

Someone was here with me now.

All of it exactly as I'd left it—except that it wasn't. Except that someone else now sat where I should have been sitting, in control of the one familiar thing in this entire impossible landscape.

In this place called Clivilius.

Where, according to Kain, I couldn't go back.