The Starless Threshold

“The silence in Clivilius isn’t emptiness—it’s presence. It listens, it waits, and it asks what you’re willing to risk to be heard.”

I woke like a man surfacing from water he hadn't known he was drowning in.

The darkness of the bedroom pressed close, that particular quality of night that exists only in the small hours when the world has forgotten you're in it. I lay still, blinking at the ceiling I couldn't see, my body buzzing with the strange alertness that comes when sleep abandons you mid-sentence. Something had pulled me back—not a sound, not a dream, but something deeper. A summons written in frequencies my conscious mind couldn't name.

The house held its breath around me. Every creak of timber settling, every whisper of wind against the windows, seemed amplified by the stillness. These were familiar sounds—the language of a home I'd lived in for years—but tonight they felt different. Tonight they felt like they were waiting for something.

I reached across the bed before I was fully awake, that unconscious seeking of another body that becomes reflex when you've shared sheets with someone long enough. My hand found nothing but cold fabric, the sheets smoothed flat on Jamie's side with that particular coolness that said no one had been there for hours. Maybe not at all.

The absence registered slowly, then all at once.

He was home. I could hear it now—the soft rhythm of his breathing from somewhere deeper in the house. The spare room, probably, or maybe the couch in the lounge. Close enough that I should have felt comforted by his presence. Far enough that I understood, with a clarity that hurt more than it should have, that he'd chosen not to come to me.

He'd returned, but not to me. The distinction sat in my chest like a splinter working its way toward my heart.

I thought about getting up, going to find him, asking why he'd slept elsewhere. But I already knew the shape of the conversation that would follow—the tired explanations, the half-truths dressed up as consideration. Didn't want to wake you. Got in late. Thought you needed rest. All the reasonable excuses that would sound perfectly sensible and leave everything that actually mattered unaddressed.

Then I heard it. The soft shuffle of paws on blankets, the particular sound of Duke resettling himself. Coming from the same direction as Jamie's breathing.

Even the dog had chosen sides.

"Traitor," I muttered into the darkness, the word barely more than a breath.

I'd meant it to be funny—that self-deprecating humour that turns pain into something you can hold at arm's length. But the joke collapsed as soon as it left my mouth, swallowed by the heaviness that had taken up residence in my ribs. Duke had always been more Jamie's dog than mine, really. He'd just been diplomatic enough to pretend otherwise when both of us were in the room. Tonight, with Jamie alone somewhere in the house, the pretence wasn't necessary.

I lay there in the dark, listening to the two of them breathe, and felt the full weight of being awake when the rest of the world had no use for me.

Sleep wasn't coming back. I knew that with the certainty of someone who'd spent too many nights fighting insomnia to mistake this particular brand of wakefulness for anything temporary. My thoughts were already circling, picking up speed, refusing to settle on anything long enough for rest to take hold. The day's events kept surfacing in fragments—the portal, the desert, the voice, Paul's reluctant agreement, Jamie's okay, gotta run, bye—each memory jostling for attention like children demanding to be heard.

Had it really happened? The question surfaced unbidden, trailing doubt behind it like smoke. The rational part of my brain, that voice I'd cultivated through years of self-examination, insisted on scrutiny. People didn't find inter-dimensional portals in their studies. Voices didn't speak directly into consciousness with the intimacy of a lover whispering secrets. The human mind, stressed and lonely and searching for meaning, was perfectly capable of manufacturing experiences that felt real without being true.

I'd read the books. I knew how perception could deceive.

But even as the doubt circled, something deeper pushed back. The memory of Clivilius wasn't fragile the way dreams become fragile in the morning light. It wasn't fading at the edges or rearranging itself into something that made more sense. The orange sand, the crushing heat, the colours in the sky that my brain had no names for—they sat in my memory with the solidity of yesterday's breakfast or last week's argument. Real in a way that refused to be reasoned away.

And then there was the voice. Dr Glenda De Bruyn's words drifted up from some buried place in my memory, her measured tone cutting through the noise. She'd been my doctor during the worst of the more recent nightmares—those nights when sleep had become enemy territory, when closing my eyes meant facing things I couldn't escape. She'd taught me about lucid dreaming, about astral projection, about the ways the mind could be trained to navigate its own landscapes rather than being dragged through them helpless.

The boundary between sleeping and waking consciousness is more permeable than most people realise, she'd said once, in that calm Swiss accent that made everything sound like established fact. Learning to move deliberately across that boundary—that's where the power lies.

I'd used her techniques for several years now, turning them into tools for surviving the nights when the red eyes came hunting beneath hospital bunks. They'd helped. They'd given me agency in spaces where I'd had none. But now, lying in the dark with Clivilius burning in my memory, I wondered if I'd been training for something larger than I'd understood. If the boundary she'd talked about wasn't just between sleep and waking, but between worlds entirely.

The line between what was dream and what was real had never felt so thin. So dangerously crossable.

My hand moved before I made the decision to move it, sliding beneath my pillow with the certainty of reaching for something I already knew was there. My fingertips brushed cool metal—that distinctive chill that no amount of body heat seemed to warm—and doubt scattered like startled birds.

The device. Solid. Present. Undeniably real.

I drew it out slowly, cradling it in my palm, feeling its weight settle against my skin. In the darkness of the bedroom, it was barely visible—just a shape, a density, a presence. But I could feel its potential thrumming beneath the surface, that contained energy that had already torn holes in reality twice today. Once to show me the desert. Once to show me what I'd nearly lost.

This was no phantom conjured by a lonely mind. This was an object, an artefact, a key to somewhere else. And it was mine.

My heart had begun to hammer against my ribs, each beat a collision of excitement and dread. The two emotions tangled together until I couldn't separate them, couldn't tell where the thrill ended and the terror began. This was real. Whatever else I didn't understand, whatever questions still circled without answers, this much was certain: I held proof in my hands that the world was larger than I'd been taught to believe.

I slipped out of bed without making a conscious choice to do so. My body was already moving, responding to some imperative that operated beneath the level of thought. The floor was cold against my bare feet—that particular Tasmanian winter chill that seeped through floorboards no matter how much you heated the house—but I barely registered it. I was already somewhere else in my mind, already crossing thresholds.

The hallway stretched before me, familiar and strange simultaneously. I'd walked this path thousands of times—to the bathroom at midnight, to check on the dogs, to fetch water from the kitchen. But tonight the same journey felt charged with significance, each step carrying me toward something I couldn't turn back from. I moved carefully, placing my feet to avoid the boards that creaked, making myself small and quiet in my own home.

From the spare room came the soft sounds of Jamie's breathing, steady and slow, the rhythm of genuine sleep. Duke shifted somewhere nearby, probably curled at Jamie's feet the way he always did when given the chance. The door was closed. The two of them existed in their own small world behind it, and I was out here in the hallway, walking toward a different world entirely.

The study door stood open, darkness pooling behind it like something waiting to be disturbed.

I stepped inside, and the air felt different immediately. Thicker, somehow. More aware. The room remembered what had happened here—the portal, the colours, the doorway that had opened in the wall where there should have been nothing but plaster and paint. I could almost feel the memory of it in the atmosphere, an echo of impossible things that hadn't quite faded.

The wall waited. Just a wall, by any sensible measure. Painted cream, slightly scuffed where I'd knocked the desk against it once while rearranging. There was no sign of what it had become, no hint that it had ever been anything other than what it appeared. And yet I knew—knew with a conviction that went deeper than logic—that the door was still there. Hidden, perhaps. Dormant, maybe. But present.

Waiting for me to ask it to open.

I stood before the wall, and déjà vu crawled up my spine with cold fingers. I'd been here before—not just earlier today, but somehow always. As if every moment of my thirty-four years had been moving me toward this spot, this wall, this choice. The sensation was disorienting, a sense of cycles completing that I couldn't quite grasp.

The device sat cool and heavy in my palm. The button waited beneath my thumb, patient as a held breath.

I thought about the blood. The first time I'd used the device, it had demanded something from me—a sharp pain, a crimson payment for passage. My finger still bore the mark, a tiny wound that had stopped bleeding but hadn't yet begun to heal. The memory of that sting lingered, a reminder that this technology—if technology was even the right word—operated according to rules I didn't understand. Rules that might require more than I was prepared to give.

But beneath the wariness, something else pulled stronger. The need to know. The hunger for certainty that had been building all day, demanding proof I could hold in my hands. If I went through again, if I brought something back, then doubt would lose its grip entirely. Then I would know, beyond any possibility of self-deception, that what I'd experienced was real.

I pressed the button.

The response came immediately this time—no hesitation, no blood-toll extracted. Instead, the device answered with a burst of brilliance that made me catch my breath. A tiny sphere of light erupted from somewhere within its surface, no larger than a marble but impossibly bright, impossibly present. It shot forward like a living thing, crossing the space between my hand and the wall in less than a heartbeat.

When it struck the surface, the world changed.

Colours I'd seen before—colours I'd tried and failed to name—bloomed outward from the point of impact. They unfurled like flowers opening in time-lapse, spiralling and weaving through each other in patterns that seemed to obey laws I couldn't comprehend. The display was different from this morning, gentler somehow, less violent in its beauty. But it was no less overwhelming. My eyes stung with the effort of taking it all in, my brain scrambling to process input it had no categories for.

The portal opened.

Not gradually, not reluctantly, but with the confidence of something that had always been there, waiting for the right moment to reveal itself. The colours folded and parted, creating a doorway in the wall that shouldn't have been possible, that violated everything I'd been taught about the nature of solid matter and the limits of reality.

Through it, I could see—

Nothing.

But it is real.

The thought blazed through me with the force of revelation, burning away the last residue of doubt. Whatever else I didn't understand, whatever questions remained unanswered, this much was certain: the portal existed. Clivilius existed. And I was standing at the intersection of two worlds, holding a key that worked.

The certainty was intoxicating. I felt it spread through my chest, warm and fierce, pushing out the cold distance of Jamie's absence and the accumulated weight of a day spent questioning my own sanity. This was real. I was real. And whatever I was being called to do, I wasn't inventing it in the desperate reaches of a lonely mind.

I needed proof. Something tangible I could hold, something that would exist in this world as evidence of where I'd been. My gaze swept the study, landing on the bookcase against the far wall. Without thinking too carefully about the choice, I reached for a book—a textbook I'd owned for years, familiar weight, familiar cover. The title didn't matter. What mattered was that I would know it when I saw it again, would recognise it as something that belonged here, in this house, in this life.

I clutched it to my chest and approached the churning colours.

Stepping through was like being born and dying simultaneously. The transition happened in a moment that lasted forever and no time at all—one instant I was standing in my study, surrounded by books and desk and the faint smell of old paper, and the next I was elsewhere. The shift was total, absolute, a complete exchange of one reality for another.

Behind me, the portal blazed. Its kaleidoscopic light spilled across the ground like something liquid, casting shadows that writhed and danced in the strange radiance. The colours painted everything they touched with hues that had no names in any earthly language, transforming the darkness immediately around me into a fever dream of impossible beauty.

But beyond that circle of light, there was only the void.

I'd been to Clivilius before—had walked on its ochre sands beneath a sun that burned with colours no earthly star had ever worn. That landscape had been alien, yes, but it had been a landscape. It had possessed features, horizons, the comforting architecture of a world that operated according to recognisable principles even if those principles weren't Earth's.

This was different.

The darkness stretched in every direction, absolute and total. Not the darkness of a cloudy night, not the darkness of a room with the lights off. This was darkness as substance, as presence, as something that existed rather than merely being the absence of something else. It pressed against the edges of the portal's light like water against a dam, patient and immense.

I strained my eyes, searching for anything—a landmark, a horizon, the faintest suggestion of shape or form. Nothing answered. The blackness simply was, stretching on forever or not existing at all, impossible to measure because there was nothing to measure against.

And above me—

I looked up, and my stomach dropped into a place that no longer had anything to do with physical anatomy.

The sky was empty.

Not dark. Not clouded. Empty. A vast bowl of absolute nothing, scrubbed clean of stars, of moons, of any light source that might have offered orientation or comfort. It stretched overhead in an infinite sweep of negation, and looking at it produced a vertigo that had nothing to do with height. I felt I might fall upward into that void, might tumble into the nothing and keep falling forever, unanchored by gravity or reference point or any of the familiar forces that kept human beings tethered to the surfaces they walked on.

There were no stars. In all that immensity, not a single point of light.

The silence was worse.

On Earth, silence is a lie we tell ourselves. Even in the quietest room, there's always something—the hum of blood in your ears, the whisper of your own breathing, the subliminal drone of electricity in the walls. We learn to tune it out, to call it silence, but it's never truly empty. There's always a floor beneath the quiet, something to rest your awareness on.

Here, there was nothing.

The absence of sound pressed against me from all directions, a pressure I could feel in my chest and my skull and the hollow places behind my eyes. My own heartbeat seemed impossibly loud in the void, each thump echoing through chambers that had no business carrying sound. My breathing scraped against the stillness like something shameful, an intrusion into a silence that had existed for millennia before I'd stumbled into it.

I stood alone, clutching a book I'd brought from another universe, illuminated by the defiant glow of a portal that had no business existing.

The weight of Clivilius pressed down on me—not physically, but in some other way. The darkness had a quality to it, a sense of being observed by something too vast to comprehend. I was a trespasser here, an uninvited guest in a place that operated according to rules older than humanity. The awe that had flooded me at the portal's opening began to curdle, mixing with something more primal. Fear, yes. But not the sharp fear of immediate danger—something slower, deeper, more existential. The fear of scale. Of insignificance. Of standing at the edge of something so large that my entire existence was barely a footnote in its story.

I wanted to run. Every animal instinct I possessed screamed at me to turn around, to flee through the portal, to return to the world of streetlights and birdsong and Jamie's breathing in the spare room. This place was too much, too empty, too other. I wasn't equipped to be here. I was soft and small and terrifyingly mortal, and the void could swallow me without noticing.

But I had come for proof, and I would not leave without it.

With trembling hands, I crouched and set the book upon the ground. The book landed with a soft thud. The portal's light caught the cover, illuminating the title I couldn't quite read through the blur of my own terror. It looked absurd there, an ordinary object from an ordinary life sitting on ground that shouldn't exist beneath a sky that had forgotten what stars were.

But that was exactly why it mattered. If I came back—when I came back—that book would still be here. Physical evidence that I had crossed between worlds, that the portal was real, that my life had taken a turn into territory no map could describe.

Instinct seized me then, and I ran.

I didn't make a decision to run—my body simply moved, hurling itself toward the portal with a desperation that bypassed thought entirely. The darkness seemed to reach for me as I fled, seemed to lean in closer as if curious about the small creature scrambling for the exit. My chest burned with breath I couldn't properly draw. My legs pumped against ground I couldn't see properly. And then the colours rose around me, swallowing me, folding me back into the transition between worlds.

The return hit like a slap.

One moment I was running through impossible colours, and the next I was standing in my study, gasping, shaking, surrounded by the aggressive normality of books and furniture and walls that were just walls. The transformation was so complete it felt violent—the sudden presence of things, of shapes and surfaces and all the mundane architecture of a human life, after the vast emptiness of what I'd left behind.

The wall before me was just a wall again. Cream-painted, slightly scuffed. No trace of the portal remained, no hint that moments ago it had been a doorway to elsewhere. I might have imagined the whole thing, except that my lungs were still heaving with exertion and my hands were still trembling and my heart was trying to batter its way out of my chest.

And somewhere, in another world, a book sat alone in the darkness, waiting for no one.

From down the hallway, I heard Jamie shift in his sleep. A soft sound, innocent, the ordinary movement of someone lost in dreams. Duke made a small noise, probably adjusting his position. The house settled around me, timbers creaking their familiar complaints. Normal sounds. Safe sounds. The soundtrack of a life that, hours ago, had been the only reality I knew.

I made my way back to bed with exaggerated care, placing each foot deliberately, holding my breath at every creak of the floorboards. The hallway seemed longer than it had before, stretched by the contrast between where I'd been and where I was going. Two worlds, pressing against each other, and I was the seam between them.

The bedroom welcomed me with its ordinary darkness. I slipped beneath the covers, feeling the mattress accept my weight, hearing the familiar squeak of springs that needed replacing. The sheets were cold—I'd been gone long enough for whatever warmth I'd left to dissipate—but I barely noticed. My body was present, but my mind was still standing beneath that empty sky, still grappling with the scale of what I'd witnessed.

Clivilius was real. Not a dream, not a hallucination, not the desperate invention of a mind cracking under the strain of a failing relationship and too many childhood nightmares. Real in the way that mattered—physical, tangible, visitable. I could go there whenever I chose. I could bring things back, leave things behind, walk on ground that existed in a dimension no earthly compass could point toward.

The voice had called me by name. Had spoken of convergences spanning millennia. And now I lay in my bed in Berriedale, Tasmania, with a device beneath my pillow that could tear holes in reality, understanding for the first time that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

The certainty settled into me like warmth spreading through cold limbs. Whatever Clivilius was, whatever it wanted from me, I wasn't stumbling blindly anymore. I was being led. Summoned. Drawn toward something larger than the cramped confines of my ordinary fears and ordinary failures.

I thought about the tent I'd bought. Two thousand dollars on canvas and poles, an absurd gesture that suddenly felt less absurd. I was going to bring people through. Paul. Jamie. I was going to show them what I'd found and watch their faces as they grappled with the same impossible truth that had reshaped my understanding of everything.

And I was going to build something there. I didn't know what yet—the shape of it was still vague, more feeling than plan—but the conviction was solid. Clivilius had reached across the void between worlds to find me, and I would answer that reaching with something more than just arrival. I would create. I would provide. I would leave more than a book behind.