Vintage of Secrets

“Some bottles contain more than wine. Some pour silence, some pour shame—and some, if you’re not careful, pour the truth.”

I followed my sister into the living room, my wine glass cradled in both hands like it was something delicate. Precious. Not just because it held alcohol—which, admittedly, had become a minor deity in this unfolding mess—but because it offered me something tangible to focus on. Something with edges. Something not shifting beneath my feet.

On impulse, I reached back into the kitchen and snatched up the almost empty bottle from the bench. The weight of it was oddly comforting. Cold glass and last sips of routine. It grounded me. Anchored me to something other than fractured realities, cryptic warnings, and a realm I wasn’t sure I believed in—let alone understood.

The living room was pristine. Predictably so. A magazine spread of symmetry and soft neutrals. We took our places at opposite ends of the plush, white leather couch—Gladys perched like she was preparing for surgery, me sinking deeper, wine glass steady in hand. The couch had once been a site of shared popcorn and mismatched socks. Now it felt like a diplomatic no man’s land, the space between us wide and heavy with all the words yet to come.

The silence, up until then cocooned in motion and ritual, finally cracked.

"So, tell me about Clivilius," I said, trying to keep my voice level, though it wavered—just a fraction. Curiosity had teeth, and it was chewing through my nerves. I needed to know what she knew. I needed to understand how this world—this name—had found its way into our perfectly ordinary family. Into her.

Gladys glanced at the wine bottle now resting at our feet like a mute witness. Her face was unreadable for a moment—tight-lipped, distant. Then she huffed a shallow breath, more sigh than laugh.

"I think we might need another bottle," she said, tone flat, the words reaching for humour but falling short, like a match striking damp wood.

Without another word, she got up and padded out of the room, her steps slower now. Dragged. As if each one cost her a little more than she’d anticipated. She moved like someone walking into a memory they’d rather forget.

I rolled my eyes, more out of habit than frustration, and shook my head. A wry smile tugged at the corner of my mouth, reluctant but real.

Of course she’d go for another bottle. So like Gladys. When confronted with the impossible, she’d organise it into categories, decant it into glass, and pair it with the appropriate level of Shiraz. Refuge in the predictable.

Oddly enough, that predictability soothed me. A sliver of normal in an evening tilting fast into the surreal.

The room, meanwhile, was no longer the serene, over-curated lounge she’d spent years perfecting. It had become something else. The air had weight now. The walls, smooth and off-white, felt closer than they should—like they were leaning in, listening. Waiting.

The couch beneath me shifted under its own meaning. Not a seat anymore. A stage. For truths. For things unburied. For whatever came next.

And yet, as I sat there, bracing myself with the bottle beside me and the glass warming slightly in my palm, I found a flicker of gratitude.

For the pause.

For the breath before descent.

Because whatever Gladys truly knew about Clivilius—myth, place, threat—it was no longer hypothetical.

It had entered her living room.

"So, tell me about Clivilius," I pressed, repeating the question with more weight this time, letting it anchor me as Gladys eased herself back onto the couch. Her movements were measured now—no longer hurried, but deliberate. Like someone preparing to unbox something fragile.

The new bottle of wine, now placed reverently on the coffee table between us, spoke volumes without saying a word. A peace offering. A bribe. A sedative. It sat there like a second participant in the conversation, glass dark and gleaming under the low light. The quiet clink of the cork against the table’s surface sounded almost ceremonial. We both knew what it meant: this was going to be a long night.

"Well…" Gladys began, her voice stretched thin by hesitation. The word hovered between us, shaky and uncertain, like a diver poised on the edge of a high ledge. She glanced at me once—just a flick of the eyes—before looking down into her glass, as though it might offer courage or clarity.

Then she began.

What followed wasn’t a tidy chronology, not at first. It spilled out unevenly, shaped by panic and half-understood memories—her interactions with Luke, the way Jamie had vanished, the Portal, the inexplicable way the air had felt around it, like pressure and static colliding. Her voice dipped and rose, occasionally stumbling into silence before pushing forward again, like a car driving through fog.

As she spoke, I found myself sipping more frequently than I realised. Each mouthful of wine gave my hands something to do, my mouth a pause button between questions. The flavour—dark, peppery, confident—was at odds with the disorientation curling in my gut. But it helped. A little.

Clivilius. The word alone felt too big, too mythic, to be spoken aloud in a living room decorated with dried eucalyptus and neutral-toned scatter cushions. It didn’t belong here. And yet, here it was. Seeping into the room. Into me.

I asked only what I had to. A nudge here, a redirect there—pulling her gently away from the more convoluted bits, the spirals of speculation or technicality she seemed to lose herself in. I didn’t need theory. I needed facts. Landmarks. Rules.

But mostly, I listened.

There was something sacred in bearing witness. A responsibility. And I took it seriously, even as part of me reeled quietly inside. I absorbed every detail she could give me—tone, texture, implication—my mind building a mosaic of something I barely understood. The wine slowed my heart just enough to keep the panic at bay, even as the picture formed in fragments I wasn’t ready to name.

This was more than just a story. It was a confession of sorts. And I was the one it had been waiting for.

Occasionally, Gladys would mention something—a phrase, a name, a seemingly throwaway detail—and it would lance through me like icewater.

A shiver would ripple down my spine, unbidden, unmistakable. The fine hairs on my arms prickled to attention, as though the air around me had shifted imperceptibly, charged with some invisible current. And each time, without thinking, I smoothed them down with the flat of my hand. A futile, mechanical gesture. A nervous tic masquerading as composure.

It wasn’t the detail itself that disturbed me—it was the resonance. These fragments, dropped so casually in Gladys’s recounting, rang with familiarity. Like echoes through a tunnel I’d once stood at the edge of but never dared enter.

Leigh.

His name surfaced with the clarity of a submerged truth, long kept quiet.

Leigh, the man who had once held my heart with the same precision he used to hold back truths. A Guardian, yes—but so much more than that. He had always been a fortress of secrets, a keeper of quiet burdens. I had accepted the danger of his position in the way one accepts the presence of the sea—distant, inevitable, beautiful, but never safe.

He’d let me glimpse it, occasionally—the weight he carried, the gravity of his world—but always there was a threshold I wasn’t permitted to cross. A door left pointedly ajar but never opened.

The Portal.

Even the word held weight in my mouth. Mythical. Reverent. A tear in the fabric of what I knew to be possible. Leigh had never described it in full, not really. But I had seen it in his eyes—how it haunted him, how it defined him.

"It’s not something to be played with," he’d said more than once, his voice low, clipped, full of unspoken warning. That particular line was always the full stop to our conversations. A wall I could press against but never pass through.

And I had wanted to. God, how I had wanted to.

To see it. To understand. To be trusted with the truth of it, whatever it was. But Leigh never budged. Not from a place of secrecy, but of protection. His silence had been a kind of love. And I had learned to live with it.

Now, sitting across from my sister—her wine glass trembling faintly between sips—those forbidden truths were unfurling. Not from Leigh, but from the last person I ever expected to become part of that world. Gladys, of all people. And the irony wasn’t lost on me.

As she spoke, the puzzle pieces began to slide into place. Slowly, hesitantly. An image forming from shadow and implication. But with each connection made, the picture didn’t become clearer. It became heavier. Darker.

This wasn’t wonder. This was warning.

There were things at play here—realities beyond comprehension—that had always existed just beyond the veil. And now that veil was thinning. Not just in theory. In my world. Around my people.

The realisation settled over me like a lead blanket. Suffocating. The stakes had shifted. This wasn’t a mystery I could catalogue, question, or deflect with wine and wit. This was something else.

I was caught in the crossfire of something ancient, something ongoing. A silent war fought in the gaps between lives, between glances, between realms.

And it had finally turned its gaze on me.

We sat there, suspended in a silence so dense it might as well have been sound. It pressed in around us, warping the space between our bodies, distorting time in that strange way only silence can when it’s thick with unspoken truths. No longer just a pause—it had become a presence. The room itself felt smaller, the corners darker, as though it, too, was trying to hold its breath.

The living room, with its soft lamplight casting long, buttery shadows across the walls and the faint, occasional creak of the white leather beneath us, had transformed. What had once been a curated sanctuary—neutral throws, scented candles, beige serenity—now resembled a cocoon. Insulated. Watchful. The outside world had no business here.

My mind refused to sit still. It tore through everything Gladys had told me—every revelation, every detail, each one a piece in a jigsaw I hadn’t realised I was already halfway through assembling. The picture emerging was a paradox: beautiful and terrible, magnetic and monstrous.

Gladys’s grasp of Clivilius and the Portals was clearly fresh, raw, stitched together from fragments of Luke’s hurried explanations and her own shocked observations. She’d seen the Portal. That much was clear. But witnessing was not understanding. And awe had a way of blurring danger, turning it into something seductive. The shimmer of power, the lure of wonder—it beckoned. That’s what it did best.

But it took, too. I knew that. Leigh had never needed to show me; I’d felt it in every unspoken thing between us.

I took another sip of wine, letting it slide down my throat like a sigh. It anchored me, if only for a second, a warm weight in the pit of my stomach that dulled the edges of fear.

Then, with a breath as deep as I could manage without visibly trembling, I braced myself.

"Well, I’m still not completely convinced," I said, tone flat, measured. The words came out like a bluff in a high-stakes game of cards—deliberate misdirection. A lie by omission. A mask stitched together from instinct and something deeper, older. Protection.

Gladys’s face twisted instantly. Her mouth dropped open as if she’d been slapped, eyes wide with disbelief. "Beatrix, how…?" she began, the sentence unravelling mid-flight. Her voice, that brittle strand of confusion, hung there between us.

"I’m kidding," I laughed, letting it burst out a little too fast, a little too forced. The sound rang hollow to my own ears—too light, too neat, like trying to mop up blood with a tissue.

But still, I leaned into it. The laugh. The line. The game. A breath of normality conjured like a magician’s sleight of hand—something bright and quick to distract from the darker thing crouching in the wings. It was easier, sometimes, to let the far-fetched masquerade as absurd than to face how close it had already crept.

Because we were inching towards the precipice now. Toes brushing the edge.

And something in me—something wary, weathered, a little burnt at the seams—wasn’t ready to let her tumble with me into the deep. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

"There’s no way that anyone but Jamie could have known what was written on that bottle," I said, steering us sideways, anchoring the conversation in something smaller. Something solvable. The bottle. Jamie’s message. The enigma wrapped in plastic that had pulled me into this room in the first place. "I'd be very surprised if even you knew it."

It was a truth framed as jest, a small breadcrumb of honesty laid gently at her feet. I could feel the gears shifting—our attention narrowing, just for a moment, from the mythic expanse of Clivilius to the concrete riddle that had landed in her kitchen.

Gladys exhaled, a soft puff of air that was more release than reply. A hint of relief passed over her face, but it was clouded—still tinted by unease.

"I had no idea at all," she admitted, her voice softer now, stripped of its earlier urgency. Vulnerable. "Why didn’t you tell me?"

The question landed not like an accusation, but like a quiet wound. A bruise forming between us. It echoed with things we’d never said aloud—about trust, about guilt, about the unspoken contract between sisters that we both kept breaking in different ways.

Why didn’t I tell her?

The question ricocheted around my skull, brushing against the jagged corners of memory. Of all the things I had buried. All the things I hadn’t yet dared to name.

The truth was: I’d been navigating this shadowland alone. Clinging to half-maps and coded whispers, drawn lines in sand that kept shifting beneath me. And to tell Gladys... to bring her into that world... it would mean saying the words aloud. Would mean admitting—to her, to myself—just how far I’d been drawn into the current that began long before the day Brody died.

It would mean acknowledging that I was no longer an innocent bystander.

I shrugged. Casual, performative, defensive. "It doesn’t matter," I said, brushing it away like dust. The words left my mouth with a practiced air, but inside, my chest tightened with the force of the lie. Of course it mattered. It all mattered.

I glanced at her, sharp-eyed, voice shifting into something more pointed. "Does anybody else know?"

It wasn’t a casual query. It was a test, veiled in sisterly banter. Beneath it, a quiet thrum of urgency. Not quite paranoia—but close. That finely tuned instinct you develop when you've been spoken around more often than to. When answers come in riddles and safety depends on what isn’t said as much as what is.

"About the bottle?" Gladys asked, her brow pulling together slightly. Genuine confusion. The kind that can’t be faked.

"No, about Clivilius, stupid," I replied, letting a dry edge of humour creep in to soften the accusation. Our old rhythm again. Jab and parry. A dance as familiar as breath, performed over decades of eye-rolls and not-so-passive aggression.

"Oh, no, I don't think so," she said, but there was hesitation—barely perceptible, but it was there. A tremor in her voice like a tightrope swaying underfoot. Then she leaned forward, all at once, and her tone snapped taut. "But Beatrix, you mustn't breathe a word of this to anyone."

The urgency in her voice struck like a slap. Her eyes locked onto mine, wide with sudden, startling intensity. "You must keep this a complete secret."

It caught me off guard—not the warning itself, but the vehemence behind it. Gladys, for all her panics and overreactions, rarely spoke in absolutes. This wasn’t theatre. This was fear. Raw, unfiltered, and very real.

"People have a right to know," I said, though the words came out flatter than I intended. A bit too clean. Too polished. They hung there, a line from a script I hadn’t quite decided whether I believed. I wasn’t sure if I meant it as defiance or as bait. Maybe both.

Because I needed to see what she truly understood. Whether she felt the weight of this thing. The Portal. Clivilius. The very idea of crossing thresholds not built for human minds. Leigh’s voice echoed again, not loud but insistent, repeating its litany of caution. A key to altering the course of human evolution, he’d said. Not lightly. Not without grief.

Gladys blinked once, then again—harder this time, like she could physically expel the suggestion from the air. "Escape?" she snapped, the word itself like poison on her tongue. "Absolutely not!"

Her disbelief was palpable. Not performative. Not confused. But convicted. As if I’d proposed detonating a bomb beneath our own feet.

I stared at her, trying to piece together what she truly believed. Was she frightened by the Portal’s power? Or did she simply not understand what it was capable of?

And worse—did I?

Because even now, with the shape of it beginning to emerge in my mind, I couldn’t say if Clivilius was salvation or a curse. It depended, perhaps, on who held the key. Or who dared to use it.

We were standing at the edge of something. Vast. Unknowable. The kind of thing that could tear the world open or stitch it into a new one entirely.

And the terrifying truth?

We were already falling.

"But Gladys…" I began, my voice softening—less argument, more entreaty. I wasn’t trying to win. I was trying to reach her. Past the surface, past the control, past the shrill shell she wore when threatened. I needed her to hear me. To understand that this wasn’t just another secret to squirrel away in the name of personal order or pride. This was something else entirely. Something bigger.

But she cut through me before I could build the bridge.

"There's more than one thing about you, Beatrix, that I could share with our parents if you open your mouth and you can kiss goodbye your free rent," she said, the words like a slap. Sharp. Measured. Clinical in its cruelty. She didn’t yell. She didn’t have to.

It landed with a thud between us—an invisible guillotine, its blade suspended by a fraying thread. A single tug, and everything would come down. She knew exactly how to weaponise the quiet. How to take a warning and turn it into a sentence. Her tone wasn’t rage; it was precision.

I recoiled, but only slightly. Enough to feel it. Not enough to let her see.

"Whatever. As if they’d believe you anyway," I snapped back, but the words came out brittle, barbed more with reflex than confidence. My voice betrayed me before my expression could catch up.

The truth was… she could. And we both knew it.

A knot began to coil tightly in my stomach, hot and nauseating. Beneath my forced nonchalance, a real fear was starting to stir. Not of punishment, but of exposure. Of the quiet, cumulative things I’d tucked away over the years, convinced they didn’t matter—or that I could explain them if pressed.

But I wasn’t naïve enough to think I was unblemished.

There had been incidents.

Things I had done in the fog of grief, or boredom, or simply to feel something sharp. Moments where impulse eclipsed consequence. Grey areas I’d coloured in with charisma and plausible deniability. But under scrutiny, they’d unravel fast.

That expensive silverware, for example—heavy and ornate, too lovely to leave behind—had somehow found its way into my handbag after dinner one night in Battery Point. A reflex more than a plan. And when the waiter noticed the absence, I’d been all wide eyes and indignation.

“Oh no, really? I had no idea that it was in there, officer, honest.”

The line had worked. That time. It always had. But even now, years later, it echoed in my head, mocking. A little too rehearsed. A little too close to the truth.

Gladys knew. Or enough of it. And she was reminding me that my sanctuary—the quiet compromise of moving back home, rent-free, guilt-muted—was conditional.

She could undo me if she wanted.

That was the unspoken part of the deal between us. Love laced with leverage.

And I hated that it still worked.

Gladys’s glare did not waver. Her eyes were sharp, deliberate, unflinching—cutting through me like glass through water. No flinch, no blink. Just pure, fixed scrutiny. She saw right through my performance, through the deflections and the half-lies I told myself to keep standing.

"And I’m not talking about the stolen silverware," she said, cool and precise, each word honed like a scalpel.

It landed hard—clean, clinical, impossible to refute.

She lifted the water bottle as if in slow motion. It wasn’t just a container now. It had become a totem, the weight of it no longer in plastic or liquid but in revelation. A vessel, yes—but not for hydration. For secrets. For guilt. For the parts of myself I’d refused to look at too closely.

The bottle hovered between us like a relic dug up from a crime scene. Its presence made something shift in the room. A reckoning, subtle and irreversible.

"Fine," I said, low and bitter. The word stuck in my throat on the way out. It tasted like ash, like everything I’d swallowed over the past few years had decided to claw its way up.

My face remained still, but it took effort. Too much. My jaw ached from the pressure. My neck stiff with the strain of staying upright while something in me threatened to buckle. I was holding on by posture alone.

This was the confirmation I hadn’t asked for—but had always half-suspected. Gladys wasn’t bluffing. She wasn’t ready to go further, and she wasn’t letting me out of this with clean hands. Not yet.

And maybe, if I was honest, neither was I.

With the slow, deliberate grace of someone trying not to let their hands shake, I reached for the wine. Poured myself another glass. The glug of the bottle was too loud in the silence, obscene in its mundanity.

The ruby-red swirl inside the glass looked like something out of a ritual—dark, rich, heavy with implication. It mirrored the knot of emotion curling in my gut: frustration, fear, guilt, exhaustion. Names didn’t really do it justice.

I sipped.

It didn’t help.

The wine coated my mouth but left my throat just as dry. It sat there, like a gloss over something cracked. There was no comfort in it—just distraction. A brief delay before thought returned, sharper than before.

The conversation with Gladys had pried open something dangerous. We’d torn the corner off a secret that wasn’t ours to keep or control, and the implications bled like ink across everything else.

We weren’t just tangled in a family drama anymore. We were caught in something older, larger, and far more treacherous. A web spun by hands we couldn’t see, with stakes far beyond any sibling rivalry or past mistake.

The silence stretched again—long, reflective, quietly damning.

The weight of what remained unspoken pressed down like atmosphere before a storm.

And the wine?

It tasted of surrender. And something else, too. Resolve.

A strange, bitter marriage of the two.

A fitting vintage, all things considered.