Tag
July 28, 2018 AD
Joel wakes to a dawn that bleeds crimson and gold across the sky—beautiful, violent, and utterly wrong. As he forces his broken body upright and chokes down stolen rations, the voice from the lagoon echoes through his memory, and the guilt of what his mother must be suffering back on Earth cuts deeper than any blade.
July 26, 2018 AD
Joel claws his way back from nothing. First thought. Then sound. Then light. Then flesh—actual flesh, floating in water under an impossible sky. He has a body again. He just can't use it. His eyes won't close. His hands won't obey. His voice stays locked behind a throat that was slit open and somehow healed wrong. And the people standing over him? One of them is his father. Joel can't say a word.
July 29, 2018 AD
The stairs descend until even the light gives up, depositing Joel in a cell carved from solid rock where the only company is a thin pallet and an old bucket. Alone at last with nothing but the vial's faint glow, the silence brings back a voice he's been trying to forget—and a claim he never agreed to.
July 24, 2018 AD
After a day spent apart processing the morning's revelation, Joel comes home with groceries they can't afford. An attempt to patch silence with food, to rebuild normality through the ritual of a shared meal. But as they sit together in their small Glenorchy lounge, both know that love and lies sit in the same room, and some cracks run too deep to fill.
July 26, 2018 AD
Adrift in an endless void with nothing but his own thoughts for company, Joel clings to identity like a lifeline—until familiar sounds begin piercing the darkness, and a cacophony of voices threatens to tear apart whatever remains of him. When he cries out for mercy, something answers.
July 26, 2018 AD
Under an impossibly blue sky, Joel hears a word he's waited nineteen years to hear—and slowly, painfully, begins reclaiming a body that forgot how to obey. As sensation returns one nerve ending at a time, so does the ache of everything he's lost and the desperate need to get back to it.
July 26, 2018 AD
Joel finally reaches the camp, where familiar faces and new strangers alike grapple with an impossible discovery—the boy who arrived empty now bleeds red. As everyone debates the medical anomaly sitting by the fire, Joel makes a silent vow: this place may call itself home, but he has no intention of staying.
July 27, 2018 AD
Joel finally escapes the tent's stifling heat, trading canvas walls for sunlight and a borrowed shirt that fits like a hug he never knew he needed. But as he watches the camp struggle to free a luxury car from the alien sand, his thoughts drift to someone struggling alone on Earth—and the rent he can no longer help pay.
July 29, 2018 AD
Joel wakes to discover his body has finally called in the debt for everything he's demanded of it—and the price is steeper than he ever imagined. As Nelson disappears to scout ahead, Joel is left alone with a terrible question: when your captor decides you're no longer worth the trouble, what happens then?
July 29, 2018 AD
There's a special kind of dignity in being strapped to a mule because you're too broken to walk and too potentially valuable to leave behind. Joel learns the rules quickly: speak when spoken to, don't expect water, don't expect explanations. Behind him, Nelson stumbles on a rope. Ahead, the mountains grow closer with every step. Something waits at the end of this march. Something his captors call home.
July 25, 2018 AD
Suspended in an endless void where time and self have lost all meaning, Joel drifts on the edge of oblivion—until a voice that resonates through his very being calls him by name. What answers is no longer quite the courier driver who left Hobart that morning.
July 29, 2018 AD
Joel always thought resurrection was the hard part. Dying, coming back, clawing his way out of the void—that was supposed to be the worst of it. But the lagoon didn't give him a second life. It gave him borrowed time. And now, face-down in an overhang with legs that won't respond to any command, Joel is learning what happens when the loan comes due.
July 29, 2018 AD
Joel is carried into a hall of impossible scale, where murals made of living light tell stories in languages he can't read and architecture reveals layer upon layer of history he can't comprehend. But it's a single name—spoken to a cold-eyed official—that changes everything, and suddenly Joel realises he's delivered something far more valuable than himself.
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.
July 30, 2018 AD
Time loses its meaning in the cell beneath the mountain, measured only by water dripping beyond stone walls and a mind that keeps sliding between now and then. As Joel's thoughts fragment and the lagoon's voice echoes louder in the silence, the vial against his chest becomes the only anchor to a self that's slowly dissolving.
July 29, 2018 AD
Nelson returns with a warning: they're being hunted. But there's no time to run, nowhere to hide, and Joel can't even stand. When figures drop from the rocks above—pale-skinned, coordinated, speaking words he doesn't understand—all he can do is drag himself toward cover that won't save him. Two metres. That's as far as he gets before the violence begins.
July 26, 2018 AD
When Joel catches his first glimpse of 'home' in this strange new world, the barren landscape offers nothing but dust and a thin wisp of smoke on the horizon. Determined not to be carried forever, he insists on walking—only to discover that stubbornness and functional legs aren't quite the same thing.
July 24, 2018 AD
Late at night, Joel’s curiosity turns to obsession as a simple online search for his supposedly dead father spirals into something darker. A familiar face, two small dogs, and one too many coincidences lead him to suspect that the truth isn’t just out there — it’s been watching him all along.
July 26, 2018 AD
Trapped in a body that refuses to obey, Joel can only watch and listen as strangers who somehow know his name debate his impossible condition—including a voice he's waited nineteen years to hear. The father he came to find is finally within reach, and Joel can't say a single word.
July 27, 2018 AD
Dawn breaks on Joel's first full morning in this strange new world, and with it comes the crushing realisation that his resurrected body has the structural integrity of wet cardboard. When even sitting up feels like a victory and opening a water bottle becomes an impossible task, Joel confronts just how far he has to go to reclaim himself.
July 24, 2018 AD
Still reeling from the revelation of his father’s name, Joel drifts through a grey Tasmanian morning, late again and haunted by thoughts he can’t outrun. As the fog thickens on the Huonville road, the routine of deliveries blurs into something quieter and more dangerous — the first signs that the past he’s uncovered won’t stay neatly in the rear-view mirror.
July 24, 2018 AD
The fog lifts past Kingston. The Huon Valley opens up—green paddocks, hand-painted signs, a world so far from Glenorchy it feels fictional. Joel finds Nicholls Road, more suggestion than road, and at its end a two-storey farmhouse where goats named Lulu and Mexi greet him with enthusiastic harassment. The woman who appears wears a floral nightie and black gum boots. She adds a smiley face to her signature. Standard country-folk attire.
July 29, 2018 AD
The cell door screams open to deliver a new occupant—Nelson, beaten bloody and speaking in riddles about old histories and valuable connections. Two men who have every reason to hate each other now share a pallet, a bucket, and the uncomfortable mathematics of mutual survival.
July 28, 2018 AD
Dragged through a blinding dust storm by his would-be murderer, Joel watches the camp—and any hope of rescue—vanish into the darkness behind him. But exhaustion isn't the only thing hunting them through the night, and the growls echoing from the shadows suggest that being kidnapped might be the least of his problems.
July 27, 2018 AD
Joel's first dinner around the campfire brings Indian takeaway through a portal and a front-row seat to the settlement's simmering tensions. Before he can think better of it, he volunteers to help build a road—a small declaration that he's ready to be more than just the boy they pulled from the lagoon.
July 27, 2018 AD
The doctor says Joel shouldn't be alive. The broken finger says he hurt someone while they were trying to save him. The parade of visitors says this camp runs on tension and unspoken grievances. And the voice—the cold voice that claimed him in the void—says something else entirely.
July 28, 2018 AD
The vastness of Clivilius stretches before Joel in endless ochre and rust as Nelson sets a relentless pace toward the distant mountains. With every agonising step a negotiation between will and failing body, Joel reduces survival to its simplest form—lift foot, place foot, don't get left behind.
July 29, 2018 AD
In the aftermath of the ambush, Joel learns the rules of being a prisoner: speak only when spoken to, and don't expect explanations. Strapped to a pale-coated mule while Nelson is roped to walk behind another, they're carried toward the mountains—and whatever waits inside them.
July 30, 2018 AD
The cell door screams open and Joel is dragged back into the blinding chaos of light and sound—just in time to hear Nelson's sentence pronounced. But it's a voice cutting through the courtyard crowd that breaks something in him, a face he barely has time to recognise before stone walls swallow the sound of his own name.
July 29, 2018 AD
The streets of Xylora become a gauntlet of fury as word spreads that the Éclaireurs have brought pirates into the city. Pelted with stones and curses Joel can barely understand, he clings to the only light he has—until a child's quiet observation cuts through the hatred and reminds him what he's become.
July 28, 2018 AD
Joel's body finally fails him, face-down in the dirt with legs that refuse to obey—but Nelson's boots and cold pragmatism leave no room for surrender. Somewhere between the kicks and the crawling, Joel discovers a truth about himself: he's already died once, and he's not ready to make it permanent.
July 27, 2018 AD
The smell of breakfast proves more compelling than screams from outside, and Joel devours his first real meal since dying with an enthusiasm that startles everyone—including himself. As camp chaos swirls beyond the tent, a simple request for his home address offers an unexpected lifeline to the world he's left behind.
July 25, 2018 AD
Joel reaches toward the colours. The colours reach back. Something speaks his name—not the name on his work shirt, but his full name, as if it has been watching. Waiting. He should run. He doesn't. And before he can understand what has found him, something else finds him first. Strangers with questions he can't answer. A blade he never sees coming. A darkness that refuses to stay empty.
July 27, 2018 AD
Joel eats his first meal since dying. Two plates of eggs and beans, devoured like a man who's forgotten what food is. He writes his home address with shaking hands—a lifeline, a connection, proof that Earth still exists somewhere beyond the dust. He steps outside for the first time. Feels the sun. Insists on helping. But every small victory here is shadowed by the same thought: Mum doesn't know where he is.
July 29, 2018 AD
The descent through the terraces forces Joel to confront the true scale of the underground city—and the realisation that his captors have built something far more complex than he ever imagined. But among the hostile stares and unfamiliar wonders, an unexpected moment of connection offers something he desperately needs.
July 26, 2018 AD
As darkness falls over the camp, Joel's body finally reaches its limit—and accepting help with something as simple as undressing becomes the hardest thing he's done all day. But in the tender care of a father he's only just met, Joel discovers something he's never known: what it feels like to be safe.
July 27, 2018 AD
Glenda's medical examination delivers a sobering verdict—Joel's survival defies every principle she knows, and the lagoon's strange waters may hold answers worth studying. As tensions simmer beneath the surface of camp politics, Joel begins piecing together fragments of memory he's not sure he wants to remember.
July 27, 2018 AD
A song Joel has never learned spills from his damaged throat unbidden, weaving with Glenda's violin into something hauntingly beautiful—until the music triggers something far stranger. Pulled into a realm of blinding light and cryptic symbols, Joel receives a message from the voice that claimed him: he's becoming part of something greater, whether he likes it or not.
July 25, 2018 AD
When an ethereal voice calls Joel by name, curiosity overpowers caution—but he's not the only one interested in the swirling gate. A brutal encounter with strangers demanding answers Joel doesn't have forces him to confront the terrifying reality that some deliveries have no return journey.
July 24, 2018 AD
A delivery run into the Huon Valley offers Joel an unexpected reprieve from the heaviness of home — goats, gum boots, and all. But beneath the easy humour of rural hospitality, he can’t shake the sense that he’s glimpsing a life untouched by the kind of truths that have just torn his apart.
July 28, 2018 AD
A dust storm brings chaos to the camp—and something far worse slips in with it. When Joel comes face to face with the man who ordered his murder in Berriedale, he discovers that dying and coming back has made him valuable enough to keep alive, at least for now.
July 26, 2018 AD
As voices piece together the story of how a courier driver ended up bloodless and broken in another world, Joel's fragmented memories slowly resurface—dogs, portals, and the blade that ended everything. But before he can make sense of it all, violent motion tears him from whatever peace he'd found.
July 24, 2018 AD
Eight boxes of military-grade tent. The man who answers wears damp shorts and nothing else, juggling yapping Shih Tzus while chaos erupts around a delivery manifest. Joel sees wealth, order, a life he'll never have. Luke sees a young driver with unsettlingly familiar eyes. Neither knows that Jamie Greyson connects them both—father to one, partner to the other. The delivery takes five minutes. Its echo will last far longer.
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
A routine delivery in Berriedale turns unexpectedly personal as Joel meets a man whose messy normality hides behind a polished façade. Between damp shorts, yapping dogs, and boxes of mystery tents, Joel catches a glimpse of the kind of life he’s never had — and can’t help wondering if the man behind the door has more in common with him than he realises.
July 26, 2018 AD
Joel's eyes open to an impossibly blue sky and the startling realisation that he has a body once more—but Clivilius's voice reminds him that resurrection comes with strings attached. When a shadow looms overhead, Joel's survival instincts make a terrifying first impression on whoever's been watching over him.
July 29, 2018 AD
The march into the mountains becomes a study in endurance and observation as Joel sways on the grey mule's back, watching his captors communicate in gestures and glowing threads he can't decipher. Behind him, even Nelson is breaking—and when they stop for water, no one thinks to offer any to the cargo.
July 27, 2018 AD
As visitors cycle through the tent with questions and complications, Joel watches the camp's fractured relationships play out around him—and catches a glimpse of his father's temper that makes him wonder what else he doesn't know. When Glenda asks what he remembers, a cold voice in Joel's mind teaches him his first lesson about survival in Clivilius: some truths are better buried.
July 28, 2018 AD
Joel's body has opinions about walking across a desert. Strong opinions. Opinions that involve collapsing face-first into the dirt and refusing to get up no matter how much his mind screams at it. But Nelson's boots have opinions too, and they're more persuasive. Somewhere between the kicks and the crawling, Joel discovers something he didn't know about himself: he's already died once. He's not ready to make it permanent.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke needs three minutes. Three minutes while the courier uses the bathroom, three minutes to do something impossible and cover his tracks before anyone notices. Joel needs answers. About the name on his birth certificate, about the man who lives in this house, about why a simple delivery feels like walking into someone else's secret. Neither of them is going to get what they need.
July 29, 2018 AD
Joel thought he understood his captors. Knives and mules. Hand signals and luminescent thread. People who'd built something ancient in isolation, far from the technology he knew. Then the path crested, and the mountain opened, and every assumption crumbled. There's a door ahead. Ancient symbols frame it. But the metal reinforcing the stone isn't ancient at all. Neither is the voice crackling through the speaker.
July 28, 2018 AD
Joel's mother taught him how to get through impossible things. One bite at a time. One step at a time. He's trying. He's really trying. But his legs have stopped working, the camp has vanished into darkness, something called Panthers are hunting them through the dust, and the man dragging him toward shelter is the same man who ordered his throat cut. Some elephants bite back.
July 25, 2018 AD
Joel arrives at the depot early for once—a small act of penance after yesterday's lateness, yesterday's lies, yesterday's birth certificate. But Garry's car is already there. The truck is already loaded. And the manifest promises a quiet day. Six deliveries. Nothing complicated. So why does Joel's stomach clench when he reads the list? Some routes lead back to places you're not ready to go.
July 27, 2018 AD
Joel wants to belong. Wants to be the quiet bloke who shows up, does his share, earns his place. Wants to sit at a campfire and eat curry and argue about roads like everyone else. But something inside him has other ideas. Something that moves his throat without permission. Something that pulls him out of his body and into blinding light. Something that keeps reminding him: he's not his own anymore.
July 28, 2018 AD
Thrown into a makeshift hideout among the boulders, Joel finally learns the name of the man who ordered his death. But as the night stretches on and questions go unanswered, one thing becomes terrifyingly clear—Joel's survival depends entirely on remaining valuable, and he has no idea what that value is.
July 24, 2018 AD
July 24, 2018. Late evening. After Kate goes to bed, Joel finds his birth certificate on his desk—her silent offering. Alone with his laptop, he does what any nineteen-year-old would do: he searches. A name typed into Google. Then Facebook. And suddenly the delivery he made this morning—the house in Berriedale, the man in damp shorts, those two Shih Tzus—takes on a meaning that makes his hands shake.
July 25, 2018 AD
Joel's plan to impress his boss with an early arrival backfires spectacularly—and when the day's manifest reveals yet another delivery for Luke Smith, the man living with his supposedly dead father, a quiet workday takes an ominous turn toward Berriedale.
July 29, 2018 AD
The switchbacks carry Joel down into a world he has no framework to understand. A cavern so vast the far walls disappear in haze. A ceiling scattered with drifting lights that pulse like breathing. Rivers that glow as they thread between buildings carved from living rock. Everything about this place defies what he thought he knew about his captors. And somewhere in the descent, a stranger offers something he desperately needs.
July 24, 2018 AD
July 24, 2018. 5:30 AM. Joel Gibbons finds his mother crying in their Glenorchy kitchen, clutching an unopened yellow envelope. Inside is his birth certificate, requested for a passport application. Something so ordinary it should be meaningless. But Kate has been sitting in the dark for hours, terrified to break the seal. Some envelopes don't just contain information—they contain the end of everything you've built. Nineteen years of protection, undone by government paper.
July 27, 2018 AD
Joel knows how to run a pre-trip inspection. Check the tyres. Check the brakes. Check the lights. He's done it a thousand times without thinking. Now he's doing it on himself—and every system is failing. Arms that won't lift. Legs that won't hold. A throat that turns words into broken glass. He used to be capable. Competent. The man of the house. Now he can't even open a water bottle.
Joel Elijah Gibbons' story begins with nineteen years of quiet Tasmanian life built on a comfortable lie—until a birth certificate reveals his father isn't dead but alive. His quest for truth leads to a delivery route turned fatal, resurrection in Clivilius as something no longer entirely human, and an existence that continues far beyond his mortal death. This is the complete chronicle of transformation, survival, and identity reforged across worlds.
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
In the cold quiet before dawn, Joel wakes to find his mother crying in the kitchen, clutching a yellow envelope that shouldn’t exist. As the truth inside unfolds, the lines between what he’s known and what he’s inherited begin to blur — some things, once opened, can never be folded back again.
July 29, 2018 AD
The second dawn brings a body that's somehow worse than before and a landscape growing rougher with every step toward the mountains. When Joel spots strange tracks crossing their path—prints that are definitely not human—Nelson's reaction tells him everything he needs to know: something else lives in these foothills, and it's got his captor spooked.
July 29, 2018 AD
Nelson returns with a warning—they're being hunted—but there's no time to run and nowhere to hide. When pale figures drop from the rocks speaking words Joel can't understand, he watches helplessly as his captor fights like violence is his native tongue, only to discover that even Nelson has limits.
July 24, 2018 AD
Twenty minutes late. Again. Joel pulls into the car park at Southern Freight & Logistics with hands still shaking from the morning's revelation. Garry's voice booms across the warehouse. The manifest waits. The route makes no sense. And somewhere beneath the fog rolling down from the mountain, Joel is already lost in ways the GPS cannot fix.
July 24, 2018 AD
After a long day of deliveries and difficult truths, Joel returns home determined to patch the silence between himself and his mother with a simple, home-cooked meal. But as schnitzel and ice cream try to stand in for the things they can’t say, both realise that love and honesty aren’t always things you can afford at the same time.
July 25, 2018 AD
A routine bathroom break becomes anything but routine when Joel discovers a photograph that shatters everything he thought he knew about his mother's past. But the real shock comes in the backyard, where reality itself seems to have other plans.
July 29, 2018 AD
The journey ends at an entrance carved by ancient hands and reinforced by something far more recent—a contradiction that unravels everything Joel thought he understood. As gates grind open and the grey carries him through, the scope of where he's being taken begins to reveal itself.
End of list
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.