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July 10, 1873 AD
He arrived on foot, which was the first unusual thing. He left a card with no device on the seal and urgency in every word he did not say. And then Jameson walked into the library for the first time in three weeks and saw what his employer's son had made of the room — and of himself — and understood that the conversation he was about to have was not the conversation he had prepared for.
June 10, 1873 AD
A good butler notices everything and says almost nothing. It is, in its way, a form of devotion — the silent, watchful kind that asks nothing in return except the dignity of being trusted with what it sees. Jameson has served the Killerton household for decades and thought he understood its rhythms. Then Francis came home from Mesopotamia. The library door has been closed for three weeks. And what Jameson is hearing through it at five in the morning is not something he has a name for yet.
July 15, 1873 AD
An architect reads a building before he reads the man inside it. Theodore Cartwright has been forming his assessment of this visit since the elm trees closed over his carriage on the approach — the Georgian façade, the grounds, the quality of what someone chose to build and how. He has accepted an invitation whose full implications he has not yet worked out. By the time he leaves, he will have worked them out. The question is what, exactly, he saw on that wall that decided it.
July 10, 1873 AD
The candle has burned to nothing and the notebooks are full and the wall says everything he has not yet found words for, and Francis Killerton is standing at an open window at midnight listening to a city that does not know his name. In his hand, a letter from a man who has said he is glad to hear more. The solitary phase is over. What comes next requires other people.
July 10, 1873 AD
Every house has a keeper — someone who locks the doors at night and carries, in the locking of them, a knowledge of what is inside that no one else quite possesses. In all the years Jameson has been keeping Ashwood Manor, he has never before placed his palm flat against a door and simply stood there, listening to a silence that told him more than he was comfortable knowing.
July 25, 1873 AD
A man who has spent his career finding what is actually there, rather than what should be there, is a difficult man to impress. Samuel Holloway is on a riverbank inspection when Francis Killerton comes to find him — not in his office, not on neutral ground, but here, in the mud and noise of a half-built bridge over the Charles. One of them chose this location deliberately. The other recognised it as a deliberate choice and said nothing. The morning goes from there.
July 10, 1873 AD
Some mornings, a cold tray says more than any conversation. Ashwood Manor has been holding its breath for weeks, and the man who knows every creak of its floorboards and every habit of its occupants is beginning to understand that what returned from Mesopotamia with Francis Killerton is not simply a young man changed by travel. Something else came home.
July 23, 1873 AD
She arrived twenty minutes before him. This was not accidental. A meadow her mother painted a dozen times, a river that has no opinion about human decisions, and a conversation between cousins who have known each other long enough to know exactly where the other one is not telling the truth. Francis has come to ask something of Emily Stanton that the world of 1873 will only partially permit. She has a letter in her pocket she has read three times already and cannot quite put down.
July 10, 1873 AD
Every building has two architectures — the one that answers to the world and the one that answers to something older. Francis Killerton has spent his morning with a silver chalice in his hand and a pen in the other, and the floor plan taking shape beneath his fingers contains a room that will not appear in any official record. He is not certain whether he designed it or was told to. He is no longer certain the distinction matters.
July 10, 1873 AD
There is the ledger a rational man keeps, and then there is the other one — the column for things that cannot be entered under any heading his education provided. Francis Killerton has been keeping both for three weeks and the second column is growing.
July 10, 1873 AD
In the small hours of a Boston summer, a man stands before objects that have survived empires and asks himself whether he is equal to what they are asking of him. The answer is forming — not in words, not yet, but in the particular certainty of a mind that has found its true material and cannot now pretend otherwise. Some discoveries change what you know. These have changed what he is.
July 10, 1873 AD
There are conversations that happen through walls. A knock, a voice, a pause — and in the spaces between them, an entire accounting of what one man owes another and what neither will say directly. Jameson has managed this household through grief and celebration and the ordinary friction of difficult people doing difficult things. He has not managed anything quite like this before. He is managing it anyway.
July 30, 1873 AD
Miriam Ashcroft has attended dinners like this one before — in other cities, other decades, other candlelit rooms where carefully chosen people were about to discover that the world was considerably larger than they had been told. She has learned to read a table the way a good architect reads a building: structurally, from the foundation up, with professional respect for what will bear weight. These four, she decides by the soup course, will bear considerably more than they know.
End of list
Jamie Greyson was shoved through a Portal into a dimension that shouldn't exist, by a partner he no longer trusts. In the dust and desperation of Clivilius, the son he'd only just begun to know arrives with a slit throat and no heartbeat. The lagoon brings Joel back. But when Jamie begs for a second miracle, Clivilius answers with silence. Some debts, it seems, are only paid once.
Men are vanishing across Tasmania, and Detective Senior Constable Karl Jenkins is running out of time, patience, and sanity. Every lead points to Luke Smith—but proving it means crossing lines Karl can't uncross. He breaks into houses without warrants. He sees faces in windows that shouldn't be there. He chases the wine-soaked Gladys Cramer through high-speed pursuits only for her to slip away. His partner becomes collateral damage. His sergeant's warnings go ignored. Karl knows something monstrous is happening on this island, and he'll tear through every boundary to expose it. Even if it destroys him.
Thrown into an unfamiliar world with nothing but her medical kit and a backlog of questions, Dr. Glenda De Bruyn never asked to lead. But when strangers start arriving—wounded, lost, and dangerous—triage becomes survival. Each decision risks more than a life; it tests what remains of her logic, loyalty, and control. As the lines blur between science and myth, Glenda must confront not only the fractures in her patients—but the ones inside herself. In Clivilius, everyone bleeds. Not everyone gets patched up.
Joel Gibbons had never been anywhere. Hadn't finished school. Hadn't met his father. Hadn't done much except show up for his mum and hope that counted for something. A passport application changed everything—a name on a birth certificate, a coincidence that put him in the wrong place, and a death he didn't see coming. Joel should have stayed dead. Instead, he woke in glowing water—claimed before he even drew breath—gasping back to life with three words branded somewhere deeper than skin. You are mine.
Luke Smith's world transforms with the discovery of a cryptic device, thrusting him into the guardianship of destiny itself. His charismatic charm and unpredictable decisions now carry weight beyond imagination, balancing on the razor's edge between salvation and destruction. Embracing his role as a Guardian, Luke faces the paradox of power: the very force that defends also threatens to annihilate. As shadows gather and the fabric of reality strains, Luke must navigate the consequences of his actions, unaware that a looming challenge will test the very core of his resolve.
Gladys Cramer wasn’t looking for trouble—just a quiet glass of red and maybe a cat that actually came when called. But when a Portal opens, a body turns up, and a man with too many secrets begs her trust, Gladys is pulled into something vast, strange, and far too dangerous. She doesn’t know the rules. She doesn’t want the job. Dryly funny, quietly furious, and not at all qualified—Gladys is about to learn that staying out of it doesn’t mean staying safe.
When a series of disappearances grips Tasmania’s remote edges, Detective Sarah Lahey is drawn into a case that threatens to unravel her—professionally and personally. As tensions flare with fellow detective Karl Jenkins, trust becomes a gamble neither can afford. In the search for truth, they’ll find the shadows run deeper than they imagined. Into the Dark is a haunting thriller about loyalty, obsession, and the cost of stepping beyond the light.