The Unburied

Joel Elijah Gibbons grew up folding origami cranes and studying star charts in a modest Glenorchy home, believing his father had died before he was born. A thoughtful nineteen-year-old courier driver who left school at seventeen to support his mother Kate, Joel's quiet life of filial devotion seemed mapped in comfortable certainty—until a passport application required his birth certificate.

In the cold pre-dawn darkness of their kitchen, Joel watches his mother's hands tremble over a yellow envelope. When they open it together, his world fractures around a single printed name: Jamie Nigel Greyson. Not deceased. Not unknown. Alive.

The revelation detonates nineteen years of careful lies. Within days, armed with suspicions that grow into certainty, Joel disappears—gone searching for the father his mother told him was dead. His quest leads him to a routine delivery at Luke Smith's residence in Berriedale, where mysterious boxes and a swirling inter-dimensional gate defy explanation. When violent Portal Pirates attack, a blade opens his throat in a spray of arterial blood.

Death should be the end. Instead, it becomes a doorway.

A voice claims him in the void: "You are mine, Joel Gibbons. Welcome to Clivilius." Joel awakens in an alien river, resurrected but transformed—his body functional yet impossible, bleeding despite having been drained, moving despite medical logic. He emerges into a world that shouldn't exist, encountering his father Jamie for the first time whilst trapped in flesh that no longer entirely belongs to him.

But resurrection is only the beginning. This archive chronicles not just Joel's Tasmanian life and violent death, but his ongoing existence in Clivilius—a world where the rules of mortality bend, where identity fractures and reforms, where the son who once folded paper cranes must navigate realities that defy human comprehension. From the Caves of Xylora to encounters with beings beyond Earth's understanding, Joel's story continues to unfold, documenting what it means to survive beyond death, to exist between worlds, to carry both human memory and something far stranger.

This is Joel's complete chronicle: from thoughtful courier to murdered son to resurrected being whose story extends far beyond that fatal morning in Berriedale. Every chapter captures his transformation—the ordinary life shattered by truth, the death that became a doorway, and the existence that continues in a realm where Joel Elijah Gibbons learns what he's become, and what he might yet become.