Tag
July 26, 2018 AD
Sleep proves impossible when laughter around the campfire turns cruel, reducing Joel to a punchline that cuts deeper than any wound Clivilius has inflicted. Then Luke arrives whiskey-brave and looking for something Jamie can't give, and what follows is the kind of confrontation that strips away everything except the bitter arithmetic of two people who've been destroying each other for longer than either wants to admit.
July 25, 2018 AD
Morning reveals a world transformed: the dust storm has erased every footprint, buried the campfire, and left their tent in ruins—as though Clivilius itself has decided to pretend they were never there. With Paul waking confused and burned-footed with no memory of the night, Luke conspicuously absent despite his promise, and a coal-burn throbbing beneath his shirt, Jamie finds himself cast once again as the one who has to keep functioning when everyone else falls apart.
July 27, 2018 AD
Morning brings a parade of tent-flap intrusions: a medical examination revealing new injuries, camp logistics that need discussing, and well-meaning visitors with spectacularly poor timing. When Joel quietly asks if there's anyone here Jamie actually likes, the only honest answer is currently trotting beside him. Then small mercies arrive—bacon, Joel eating for the first time—before another scream announces fresh crisis.
July 26, 2018 AD
Paul's scream shatters the morning's tranquillity, and what Jamie finds at the lagoon's edge is a horror he couldn't have anticipated—a body he recognises, bearing wounds that shouldn't allow survival. Against all medical logic, there's still a sign of life, and Jamie finds himself carrying someone he's only just begun to know through dust and desperation toward whatever slim hope camp can offer.
July 26, 2018 AD
Paul's scream rewrites everything. What Jamie finds at the lagoon's edge defies comprehension—his son, the one he only just learned existed, lying motionless with a wound that shouldn't allow survival. Against all medical logic, Joel is still breathing. And Jamie will carry him through dust and desperation to whatever slim hope remains.
July 24, 2018 AD
A delayed flight strands Jamie in the fluorescent purgatory of Hobart Airport, where he passes the time with contraband chocolate cake and uncomfortable reflections on how far he and Luke have drifted. When Paul finally emerges from arrivals asking for Luke, the awkward forty-five-minute drive home promises to be the longest silence of Jamie's week.
July 25, 2018 AD
Jamie regains consciousness mid-surgery, pinned down and howling as a stranger he's never met extracts something horrifying from his chest. Between the agony and Duke's protective fury, gratitude is the last thing on his mind—but the grey mess on his ruined shirt tells a story his hostility can't argue with.
July 23, 2018 AD
What began as flirtation crosses into territory Jamie can never undo, leaving him to face the aftermath in a bathroom that smells of disinfectant and regret. As he returns to his desk and the mundane rhythms of Vaucluse, he's left with the impossible task of going home to Luke and pretending he's still the same person who left that morning.
July 28, 2018 AD
Jamie has held Duke's body through the long hours of darkness, legs numb in the river's cold embrace. Henri sits beside them—nudging his brother, placing gentle kisses on a head that won't respond. Dawn breaks in colours that have no right to be beautiful. And in the hollow where grief scraped Jamie clean, something harder begins to crystallise.
July 24, 2018 AD
The tent finally stands, Luke delivers a suitcase full of complicated memories including an item that stirs ghosts of their former intimacy, and news that Duke is missing his human cuts deeper than expected. But when Jamie's body makes demands that can no longer be ignored, he's forced to confront the most undignified reality of life in Clivilius—and the vast distance between who he was and who survival is making him become.
July 24, 2018 AD
Jamie returns home with Paul to find Luke inexplicably dressed for summer and full of cryptic excitement about something he needs to show them both. When the truth emerges that Paul isn't the one with a family crisis—and Luke produces a device that turns their study wall into something that defies every law of physics Jamie has ever known—domestic frustration gives way to something far more disorienting.
July 24, 2018 AD
The smell of bacon should mean safety. It should mean ritual, rhythm, the quiet language of a decade shared. But this morning, the kitchen becomes contested ground. Luke has invited Paul—and paid for it, again, despite the promise. Jamie's silence cuts deeper than any argument. The eggs split in the pan, golden yolks running into ruin. And yet, before the door clicks shut, there is a kiss. Fleeting. Tender. Unresolved.
July 27, 2018 AD
The morning descends further into chaos when Jamie's clumsy attempt to save breakfast results in airborne eggs and Henri's triumphant theft of the last bacon. New arrivals from Luke's mysterious web of connections include an enthusiastic entomologist who wants to paint their imprisonment as a "blank canvas"—a philosophy that clashes spectacularly with Jamie's firmly held view that optimism and reality have no business occupying the same sentence.
July 28, 2018 AD
Aged care nurse Jamie Greyson, thirty-four, stopped answering his sister's calls sometime in late July 2018. His partner Luke Smith claimed Jamie had gone to Melbourne. Jamie's car sat in the driveway of a house whose occupant said he was interstate. A large unexplained cash withdrawal marked his final days on record. His dogs vanished. His car vanished. The house burned down. The precise date he disappeared has never been established.
July 24, 2018 AD
When Luke returns with supplies, Jamie and Paul seize the chance to attempt escape once more—only to receive a chilling message from an entity called Clive that makes their imprisonment official and eternal. As the last fragments of hope shatter, Jamie's rage finds targets far closer than the barrier that condemned him, leaving him to wonder whether forgiveness is even possible in a place that has already declared their sentence.
July 25, 2018 AD
Movement is the only thing Jamie has left to control. So he moves—away from Luke's horror, away from Paul's concern, away from dogs who love him without understanding what's breaking. The river leads upstream. The horizon promises nothing. His body has promises of its own.
July 24, 2018 AD
Paul flew across the country for an emergency that doesn't exist. Jamie spent his morning collecting a brother-in-law he didn't want, only to discover he's been lied to. And Luke stands in the kitchen in boardshorts, grinning like a man about to detonate his own life. When words fail—when the truth is too impossible to speak aloud—Luke does the only thing left. He opens a door. And steps through a wall.
July 27, 2018 AD
The evening campfire brings takeaway curry and the kind of group dynamics that make Jamie want to eat alone in the tent—accusations of laziness, proposals for policies that smell suspiciously like work avoidance, and the infuriating moment when Luke nearly forgets to offer Joel any food at all. But when his son volunteers three raspy words that make Jamie's protective instincts scream, he faces the harder challenge of staying silent.
July 27, 2018 AD
The others have abandoned tent construction for something they insist Jamie needs to see, and what he witnesses in Chris's cupped hands shouldn't be possible—not here, not anywhere. While Glenda and Karen talk excitedly about masterpieces and ecosystems, Jamie finds himself backing away from a miracle that feels far more like a warning.
July 24, 2018 AD
Jamie follows Luke and Paul through the portal into Clivilius—an endless alien desert where a disembodied voice welcomes him by name and Luke speaks of building a new civilisation. When Jamie decides he's quite happy with the old civilisation and attempts to leave, the portal has other ideas, violently rejecting his exit and making one thing devastatingly clear: the door only opens one way.
July 25, 2018 AD
Duke growls. Henri destroys medical supplies. And somewhere between the chaos of dogs and the quiet ritual of wound care, a man who's spent all day being hostile finds two words he didn't know he had in him. The doctor who's endured his hostility hears them land—and something between enemy and ally shifts into unfamiliar territory.
July 24, 2018 AD
Jamie wakes to the crushing reality of yesterday's choices and attempts penance through the medium of a full fry-up, only for Luke to announce that his perpetually needy brother Paul is flying in and needs collecting from the airport. What begins as a guilt-driven gesture of reconciliation ends in petty bacon theft and an escape into the cold Tasmanian morning.
July 27, 2018 AD
Morning brings a parade of tent-flap intrusions: a medical examination that reveals new injuries, camp logistics that need discussing, and well-meaning visitors with spectacularly poor timing. By the time Joel quietly asks whether there's anyone here Jamie actually likes, the only honest answer is the one currently trotting beside him toward the lagoon, demanding nothing more complicated than a walk.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke finally arrives with a truck full of supplies and demands their wallets to liquidate assets, whilst the portal delivers Jamie its most personal warning yet when he attempts escape. But when guilt over Ben forces a confession Jamie never planned to make, the response he receives is nothing he expected—and leaves him more shaken than any rejection from Clive ever could.
July 26, 2018 AD
Back at camp, Glenda's examination reveals medical impossibilities that defy everything she knows, and Luke's attempt at explanation only unearths secrets that have been festering since yesterday—secrets involving burials, buried truths, and the people Jamie trusted most. Left alone with his son, Jamie makes a promise to someone who may or may not be able to hear it.
July 28, 2018 AD
The darkness brings something worse than a dust storm—screams that don't belong to anything human, chaos that scatters the camp, and Duke slipping from Jamie's grip to chase whatever his instincts demanded he face. When a stranger presses a warm, bleeding body into Jamie's arms and points him toward the river, he runs on nothing but desperate faith that Clivilius will perform the same miracle twice.
July 27, 2018 AD
The morning offers small mercies—the comforting smell of bacon, Joel managing to eat for the first time, and the entertainment of watching Henri's transformation from placid lapdog to food-seeking missile. But just as progress feels possible, another scream tears through the camp, and Jamie finds himself relegated to guard duty over a frying pan whilst Glenda rushes toward whatever fresh crisis Clivilius has decided to deliver.
July 25, 2018 AD
Returning from the lagoon strangely at peace, Jamie finds Paul hypnotised by a picture of a flat-pack shed and a Drop Zone transformed by Luke's deliveries into something resembling actual building supplies. When it becomes clear that neither of them has the faintest idea how to pour a foundation—let alone construct a civilisation—Jamie finds himself reluctantly taking charge of a project he's not sure he believes in.
July 24, 2018 AD
The first Clivilius night offers no mercy. Paul lies in darkness beside Jamie, memories of his children surfacing with the weight of everything he's lost—until a word tears itself from his throat like prophecy: Bixbus. Then the nightmare comes. Rose calling from the void. Paul chasing light through a dust storm that strips skin. Jamie pursuing with a burning chest. Two men breaking in different ways, holding each other through what remains.
July 24, 2018 AD
Their first Clivilius night shatters when a dust storm attacks the tent and Paul's grief-fuelled nightmares send him screaming into the darkness, chasing a daughter who exists only on the other side of an uncrossable barrier. Jamie pursues him through wind and flying embers, and in the aftermath of chaos and injury, finds himself holding another broken man in the dark—a role he knows too well.
July 24, 2018 AD
As Jamie and Paul wrestle with tent assembly and the humiliating realities of survival without plumbing, an uneasy truce begins to form from shared indignity. When Luke returns with garbage bags and casually carries their rubbish back through the portal, a single observation ignites something Jamie had nearly extinguished: if objects can cross, perhaps escape isn't as impossible as Clive declared.
July 23, 2018 AD
Jamie takes the scenic route home—through bottle shops, car parks, and hours of staring at the Derwent—desperately postponing the moment he'll have to walk through his own front door. When he finally arrives to find Luke asleep and only Duke waiting up, the spare room offers a cold refuge from a bed he can no longer bring himself to share.
July 26, 2018 AD
With Joel alive but barely functional, Jamie improvises care with cupped hands and a shoe full of lagoon water, racing against the setting sun to get his son back to camp before the Clivilius darkness descends. When Joel insists on trying to stand, what begins as a father carrying his son becomes something else entirely—two people learning to lean on each other, one treacherous step at a time.
July 23, 2018 AD
A bathroom break at Vaucluse turns into something far more complicated when a colleague's flirtation collides with Jamie's mounting frustration over Luke's emotional absence. With his phone buzzing at the worst possible moment, Jamie finds himself caught between the partner he's losing and the escape he never meant to take.
July 25, 2018 AD
While Luke ventures back for crucial supplies, Jamie lies in the tent with a woman he's insulted and a wound that won't let him forget its presence, too exhausted for pride but too stubborn for gratitude. When the promised medication finally arrives, the relief that spreads through his veins offers something he hasn't experienced since arriving in Clivilius: permission to stop fighting.
July 24, 2018 AD
Pizza and wine offer a surreal moment of comfort after Jamie's near-drowning, but Luke's departure through the portal leaves him and Paul to face their first Clivilius night alone—beneath a sky so completely empty of stars and moon that even the darkness feels wrong. As the fire dies and Jamie retreats to the tent, the sum total of their achievements reduces to one shelter, one meal, and the desperate hope of surviving until morning.
July 26, 2018 AD
Four people stand over a corpse that refuses to make sense. The doctor finds healed arteries and empty veins. The nephew watches his uncle's anger turn cold and sharp. The partner keeps his calm a little too well. And somewhere beneath grey skin and a ruined throat, a chest keeps rising and falling like the dead man hasn't quite finished dying. Everyone sees something different. No one sees the whole truth.
December 3, 2022 AD
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.
July 24, 2018 AD
The lagoon Paul promised proves impossibly beautiful—and impossibly strange, sending sensations through Jamie's body that force uncomfortable reflections on his failing relationship with Luke and his encounter with Ben. But when one careless step carries him from ankle-deep safety into churning depths, the river reveals that Clivilius can kill as easily as it can confuse.
July 26, 2018 AD
They carry Joel to the lagoon on nothing but desperate faith, and what rises from those crystal depths defies everything medical science can explain. In the water's strange embrace, Jamie finally hears the one word he'd feared might never come—spoken rough and croaky, but unmistakable.
July 25, 2018 AD
Jamie wakes draped over Luke's shoulders, rescued by a dog who doesn't understand he's now a prisoner too. A letter from Gladys arrives—pen and paper bridging dimensions where nothing else can—but its contents reveal that the world Jamie left behind is unravelling in ways he's powerless to prevent.
July 25, 2018 AD
The surgery is over but the silence that follows is its own ordeal. Jamie lies in the tent with a woman he's insulted and a wound that won't let him forget its presence, waiting for Luke to return with supplies. When the medication finally arrives, surrendering to it feels less like defeat and more like wisdom.
July 24, 2018 AD
Pizza and Chardonnay by a dying campfire. The absurd comfort of takeaway food in a dimension that shouldn't exist. Luke masks guilt with laughter, Jamie aches for a home he can't reach, and Paul remembers—suddenly, devastatingly—that he has children who don't know where their father has gone. Then Luke leaves. And Jamie points upward at a sky that offers nothing. No stars. No moon. Just void.
July 25, 2018 AD
Jamie wakes draped over Luke's shoulders—Duke found him collapsed in the dust and fetched help. A letter arrives from Gladys, pen and paper bridging dimensions where nothing else can. But its contents reveal a world unravelling: midnight break-ins, unexplained connections, a friend drowning in alcohol and grief. She needs him home. He can't even stand up.
July 28, 2018 AD
Duke's growl is wrong—primal, afraid, sensing something Jamie's human senses can't detect. Then screams split the night. Not human screams. The camp scatters into chaos, and Duke slips from Jamie's grip, vanishing into darkness after whatever called to him.
July 25, 2018 AD
Armed with pickaxes, shovels, and absolutely no expertise, Jamie and Paul attempt to pour their first concrete foundation—a gruelling ordeal made worse by the hidden burn that turns every swing into private agony. By the time they realise the concrete is clumping and seeping rather than setting, hunger has joined failure on the growing list of problems they can't solve without Luke.
July 25, 2018 AD
Paul unveils a vision that takes Jamie by surprise—not despair at their imprisonment, but excitement about building a new civilisation where they choose who belongs, leaving Earth's politics and toxic people behind. Despite his scepticism and his determination to escape at the first opportunity, Jamie finds himself drawn into their first collaborative project: marking out a delivery zone with rocks, and discovering that connection can form even when you're actively resisting it.
July 25, 2018 AD
A stranger arrives through the Portal—tall, blonde, professional. A doctor, Luke announces, as if that explains everything. But Jamie wakes mid-surgery, pinned down and screaming while hands he doesn't recognise extract something horrifying from his chest. Outside, Luke clutches the dogs and listens to every cry. Inside, Glenda works with a t-shirt for a cloth and no anaesthetic. Four people, one emergency, and the grey mess on a ruined shirt that proves how close death had come.
July 25, 2018 AD
Seeking solitude to process Luke's unexpected kiss and everything it didn't resolve, Jamie returns to the lagoon—only to find that Clivilius has been waiting for him with an offer he doesn't understand and lacks the will to refuse. By the time the water releases him, something fundamental has changed, sealed in glowing particles that drift through crystal depths like evidence of a bargain he can't undo.
July 27, 2018 AD
Another vehicle arrives in Clivilius only to immediately surrender to the dust, and Jamie finds himself digging uselessly at a wheel that won't be freed. But the afternoon's real challenge comes when Joel appears over the rise, croaking a single word that Jamie initially mistakes for a plea—until he realises his son isn't asking for help, he's offering it.
July 23, 2018 AD
When Luke doesn't answer his phone—again—Jamie buries his frustration in the familiar chaos of Vaucluse Nursing Home, where a cantankerous resident's complaint about "hanky-panky" leads to an unexpected moment of recognition with a colleague. As Tasmania's grey winter presses against the windows, Jamie finds himself navigating both the demands of the elderly and the growing distance in his own relationship.
Born into a family that never quite saw him, Jamie Greyson learned early that love meant being needed—and that being needed meant disappearing into someone else's crisis. He built a life around caring for others, around a childhood friend who became something more, around the quiet hope that stability might finally be his. Then Luke pushed him through a Portal, and everything Jamie thought he understood about love, loss, and himself shattered against red dust.
July 27, 2018 AD
Jamie retreats to the tent seeking quiet with Joel, only to be interrupted by a practical request: his son's address, so Luke can bring fresh clothes. Watching Joel struggle to grip a pen and form shaky letters becomes an unexpectedly profound reminder that despite everything, they're both still here. Still holding on.
July 26, 2018 AD
Jamie's son is alive—barely functional, throat too damaged for more than whispers, but alive. With cupped hands and a shoe full of lagoon water, Jamie improvises care while racing against the setting sun. When Joel insists on standing, what begins as a father carrying his son becomes something else: two strangers who share blood learning to lean on each other.
July 24, 2018 AD
Jamie didn't ask to spend his morning in airport purgatory, eating chocolate cake and watching delayed flights crawl across departure boards. Paul didn't expect to fly interstate for an emergency only to find his brother at home making breakfast. Yet here they are—two men whose only common ground is the person who isn't there—about to share the longest, quietest car ride of both their lives.
July 25, 2018 AD
Morning reveals the storm's cruelty: every footprint erased, the campfire buried, their presence wiped clean as if they'd never existed. Paul wakes confused with burned feet and no memory of chasing Rose. Luke is conspicuously absent. When he finally arrives with a truck full of supplies and demands their wallets, Jamie finds himself confessing something he never planned to speak aloud—and receiving a response that rewrites everything he thought he knew.
July 27, 2018 AD
The evening campfire brings takeaway curry and the kind of group dynamics that make Jamie want to eat alone. When Luke nearly forgets to offer Joel food, Jamie's protective fury erupts. Then his son volunteers for road construction—three raspy words that make every instinct scream. But the real test comes later, and Jamie's hand discovers something terrifying beneath Joel's skin.
July 24, 2018 AD
As the reality of their imprisonment crystallises, Paul and Jamie turn on Luke with questions he can't adequately answer—including why he can walk freely through the portal while they cannot. When Luke naively offers to bring Paul's children to join them in the wasteland, the confrontation reaches a breaking point that strips away any remaining pretence of family harmony.
July 28, 2018 AD
The camp stirs to life as if everything isn't ruined. Jamie holds Duke's body, Henri pressing gentle kisses to a brother who won't wake. Luke approaches—and is driven away by grief turned to fury. Beatrix arrives with an embrace that shatters Jamie's barriers. Then Charity delivers news that changes everything: Joel has been taken. The Portal pirate who killed Duke now has Jamie's son. And there's no time to mourn.
July 25, 2018 AD
Jamie wakes to find Henri has claimed a bandage as his personal trophy and shredded several dressings—because surviving in an alien dimension apparently wasn't challenging enough without canine sabotage. As Glenda redresses his wound despite everything he's put her through, Jamie finally manages to say the two words he's been choking on all day.
July 28, 2018 AD
The examination of Duke's wound reveals something far more disturbing than a creature attack, and before Jamie can process what that means, worse news arrives: Joel is missing. A stranger who appeared in the night offers to hunt down whoever took his son—but only if Jamie leaves immediately, forcing a choice between honouring the dead in his arms and saving the living who might still be reached.
July 23, 2018 AD
Jamie's shift ended hours ago. The lie he told Luke should have bought him time, but time is exactly what he doesn't want—hours alone with the memory of what he's done, the phantom weight of hands that weren't his partner's. So he drives. Bottle shops. Car parks. The long way around a bridge he's crossed a thousand times but never like this. Never carrying something this heavy home.
July 24, 2018 AD
When Luke reveals he needs Jamie's help convincing his best friend Gladys that their situation is real, Jamie reaches for the only proof powerful enough to work—a devastating secret scrawled on a water bottle that could shatter more than just disbelief. Meanwhile, his attempt at a dignified dive into the river ends in a spectacular dust-covered sprawl that reveals rather more of his wardrobe choices than intended.
July 26, 2018 AD
Duke discovers that alien lagoons are apparently nothing like the baths he's spent years treating as assassination attempts, launching himself into the water with a fearlessness that leaves Jamie laughing for the first time in what feels like forever. But when the shore crumbles and Jamie's feet slip beneath the surface, the lagoon reminds him that its gifts come with complications he'd rather not explain to his dog.
July 26, 2018 AD
Clean underwear. A wound that's actually healing. A doctor who catches him half-dressed. And a dog who treats baths like assassination attempts but launches himself into an alien lagoon like he's auditioning for the Olympics. Jamie's first real day of recovery brings something he hasn't felt in months: uncomplicated joy—and a reminder of what love looks like when it isn't broken.
July 26, 2018 AD
They finally reach camp, only for Joel's nose to start bleeding—proof that blood has somehow returned to veins that were empty hours ago, another impossibility Glenda can only call a medical anomaly. As night falls and Jamie helps his son prepare for sleep, he finds himself in a role he never imagined filling, and discovers that the convictions he'd carried for years crumble remarkably easily against the reality of holding someone else's vulnerability in his hands.
July 26, 2018 AD
Sleep shatters when laughter around the campfire turns cruel—"the zombie is sleeping"—reducing Joel to a punchline that cuts deeper than any wound Clivilius has inflicted. Then Luke arrives whiskey-brave and wanting something Jamie can't give. What follows strips away everything except the bitter arithmetic of two people who've been destroying each other for longer than either wants to admit.
July 26, 2018 AD
Jamie holds the tray while Glenda stitches his son's throat closed—every needle pierce a test of what he can witness without breaking. She's brilliant. The wound closes. And then Joel gasps, convulses, and goes still. Medicine has reached its limits. But a voice in Jamie's mind offers something that sounds like madness—and Glenda must choose between logic and compassion.
July 26, 2018 AD
Joel has never asked anyone for help. Jamie has spent years certain he doesn't want children. Now they're alone in a tent in another world, and everything they thought they knew about themselves is unravelling. Vulnerability doesn't come with instructions. Neither does fatherhood. But somewhere between the awkwardness and the exhaustion, something is taking root—fragile, uncertain, and more frightening than either of them expected.
July 24, 2018 AD
The portal doesn't just reject Jamie—it punishes him. Hair singed. Shirt melted. Body thrown backward like garbage. And through it all, Luke passes freely, coming and going while Jamie and Paul remain trapped in endless red dust. When a voice finally speaks—cold, vast, absolute—it delivers a sentence without trial: You will never leave Clivilius. What happens next isn't grief. It's something far uglier.
July 26, 2018 AD
Jamie knows what the lagoon does. Knows what's coming when he tells the others to stay on shore. What he doesn't know is whether Joel will wake up — or whether Kain will ever forgive him for what he's about to experience. The water glows. The dead man breathes. And somewhere between miracle and mortification, a nephew learns exactly how much Clivilius doesn't ask permission.
July 25, 2018 AD
Duke's barking drags Jamie back to consciousness, where a symphony of competing pains awaits—head pounding, chest burning, body staging a full mutiny. When news of groceries arrives and he tries to help, his attempt to rise delivers an immediate and unambiguous verdict: today, he stays down.
July 25, 2018 AD
Unable to face anyone after what's been revealed, Jamie walks away from camp, following the river upstream as if the horizon might hold answers the people behind him can't provide. But his body has been keeping its own accounts, and eventually it decides to collect.
July 24, 2018 AD
Jamie wages a futile war against the dormant portal—shouting commands, kicking dust, digging at its base—until Paul's excited shouts draw him over a nearby hill. A crystal-clear river with strangely revitalising water offers the first beautiful thing in Clivilius, though Jamie refuses to let one unexpected gift distract from his determination to find a way home.
July 25, 2018 AD
A frantic delivery and an unexpected arrival through the Portal bring Jamie a moment of pure joy—followed immediately by fury at Luke for what he's done. But when their confrontation turns physical, the secret Jamie's been hiding can't stay hidden any longer.
July 27, 2018 AD
Jamie retreats to the tent seeking a moment of quiet with Joel, only to be interrupted by a practical request that requires something unexpected: Joel's handwriting. Watching his son struggle to grip a pen and form shaky but legible letters becomes an unexpectedly profound reminder that despite everything Luke has done to them, they're both still here—still fighting, one trembling line at a time.
July 26, 2018 AD
Jamie wakes to find Henri raiding the supply bag, his wound healing faster than any infection should allow, and his body finally willing to cooperate with simple tasks like standing upright. After Glenda's blessing—and an awkward encounter involving fresh underwear—he heads for the lagoon with Duke, testing whether yesterday's surrender has actually bought him something worth having.
July 28, 2018 AD
Jamie has held Duke's body through the long hours of darkness, Henri pressing gentle kisses to a brother who won't wake. But as dawn breaks over Clivilius, the hollowness in Jamie's chest begins to fill with something far more dangerous than sorrow—and he makes a promise to the dead that he fully intends to keep.
July 27, 2018 AD
The tent collapses for the third time, but when Jamie storms over to confront the others, he finds them huddled around something impossible. The miracle feels more like a warning. Then another vehicle arrives and Joel appears over the rise. Not asking for help. Offering it.
July 24, 2018 AD
The tent rises. The truce holds—barely. Jamie and Paul wrestle with canvas and each other, building shelter from materials they can't open and cooperation neither wanted. When bodies make demands dignity can't accommodate, survival strips them to essentials. But watching Luke carry garbage bags back through the portal ignites something Jamie had nearly abandoned: if rubbish can cross between worlds, what else might follow?
July 27, 2018 AD
Joel begins to sing—impossible, haunting, beautiful—and Glenda somehow knows how to accompany him on violin despite never hearing the melody before. The others raise their cups in celebration, caught up in the moment's magic, whilst Jamie's hand on his son's knee discovers something that turns pride to ice: a vibration that human bodies simply don't produce.
July 26, 2018 AD
Jamie holds the tray while Glenda stitches his son's throat closed, every needle pierce testing the limits of what he can witness without breaking. The surgery succeeds—until it doesn't—and when medicine exhausts its options, a voice in Jamie's mind offers something that sounds like madness.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke needs proof for Gladys—something only Jamie could know. The secret Jamie writes on a water bottle could shatter a family, but desperate times demand desperate weapons. Then comes the lagoon: impossibly beautiful, strangely intimate, sending sensations through Jamie's body that force uncomfortable truths to the surface. One careless step later, the river reminds him that Clivilius seduces before it kills.
July 25, 2018 AD
Seeking solitude after Luke's unexpected kiss, Jamie returns to the lagoon—and finds Clivilius waiting with an offer he doesn't understand and lacks the will to refuse. By the time the water releases him, something fundamental has changed. He returns strangely at peace to find Paul hypnotised by a picture of a flat-pack shed, and together they attempt their first construction project. The concrete fails. So does hope.
July 25, 2018 AD
A frantic delivery—tents from a truck stolen while the driver uses the toilet—brings an unexpected arrival through the Portal. Henri. Jamie's joy is pure and immediate, the first uncomplicated happiness since imprisonment began. Then Luke steps through carrying Duke, and joy curdles into fury. The confrontation turns physical. Luke's shove lands directly on the wound Jamie's been hiding. What ruptures can't be unseen.
End of list
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
