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July 23, 2018 AD
Jamie came home. But not to him. The cold sheets tell their own story, and even Duke has chosen sides. So when sleep refuses to come, when the device pulses cool and certain beneath his pillow, Luke rises. He crosses again—this time into a Clivilius stripped of sun and stars, a void so complete it presses against his skin like presence. He leaves something behind. Proof. A hardcover spine standing against infinite dark.
July 28, 2018 AD
Returning to Earth devastated by Duke's death and Jamie's fury, Luke's grief quickly crystallises into something more dangerous. When he picks up the phone to call a fencer with a promise he can't keep, he takes his first deliberate step toward becoming the kind of man who wins at any cost.
July 28, 2018 AD
With dirt still under his fingernails from the burial, Luke sits at his dining table while Beatrix navigates construction supply websites. It's not much—temporary mesh fencing designed for festivals and building sites—but it's something. And right now, something is all they've got.
July 29, 2018 AD
Luke lands in Clivilius still buzzing from his theatrical exit, the laughter escaping before he can stop it. But the high fades quickly when he finds Paul and Beatrix locked in a dispute over vehicles and unhitching protocols—the kind of ordinary problem that reminds him a settlement runs on more than dramatic escapes.
July 19, 1984 AD
As Heather is rushed into emergency theatre, Noah and Margaret are left to reckon with the aftermath of her desperate act. Amid blood and silence, a pact is formed: the truth of Luke’s violent birth must be buried, sealed away as a secret too heavy for a child to bear.
July 31, 2018 AD
Adelaide Airport is just infrastructure. No memories worth dwelling on, no sentiment to cloud his judgment. Luke moves through arrivals with strategic eyes, scouting the overlooked spaces—maintenance corridors, staff-only doors, the invisible architecture that travellers walk past without seeing. He finds what he's looking for. But when a door opens at the wrong moment and options collapse to zero, instinct takes over. Some problems can't be talked through. Some evidence can only be disposed of.
July 29, 2018 AD
An unexpected visitor at the front door sends Beatrix fleeing through her Portal, leaving Luke to navigate his own house like a burglar while eavesdropping on a conversation he was never meant to hear. But when the dust settles and he reaches for his lifeline back to Clivilius, the device that's never failed him before offers nothing but silence.
July 19, 1984 AD
In a dim hospital ward, the fragile façade of safety fractures under unbearable tension. As Heather’s mind unravels, the line between past trauma and present crisis blurs, setting in motion a harrowing moment that will alter every life in the room.
July 23, 2018 AD
A pen. A drop of blood. A smear of ink. These are the fragile threads that separate dream from truth. When Luke steps through the kaleidoscopic veil, he finds no city waiting, no welcome—only an endless expanse of ochre and silence stretching to every horizon. And as the desert's heat presses down upon him, as his body begins to fail, a voice older than worlds delivers a warning he cannot ignore.
July 27, 2018 AD
Returning home with Karen and Chris's belongings, Luke adds their keys and wallets to a growing collection hidden beneath his wardrobe floor—and confronts the uncomfortable question of what kind of person keeps trophies from the lives they've taken.
June 18, 1992 AD
Home sick from school, Luke retreats into the orderly world of his Lego kingdom — until a violent incident shatters the afternoon quiet. As his mother calls the police to report an intruder, Luke finds himself bleeding on the hallway floor, unsure which version of events he's supposed to believe.
July 28, 2018 AD
Dawn breaks on borrowed time. Luke bolts through the Portal, racing to warn the camp that the Shadow Panther isn't contained—it followed Beatrix, it can follow anyone. Meanwhile, alone in his house, Beatrix locks herself in the bathroom and lets scalding water wash away blood she can see and terror she can't. The red dress pools at her feet. The mirror fogs. And for one fragile moment, survival feels like enough.
July 23, 2018 AD
Exhausted but unable to find rest, Luke wrestles with visions of impossible cities and the lingering reality of his journey. As Duke and Henri ground him in the ordinary, Luke realises the strange device in his hand is no longer just an object—it is the embodiment of choice, and his next step cannot be taken lightly.
July 25, 2018 AD
Returning to the driveway, Luke’s fragile relief at finding the truck intact quickly unravels when Joel vanishes. A search spirals into horror as he discovers Joel’s body sprawled in the truck’s shadowed interior—proof that the danger surrounding Clivilius has followed him home, and that their fragile secrecy has already drawn blood.
July 25, 2018 AD
With Joel’s body sprawled in the truck, Luke’s shock collides with the intrusion of Gladys and Beatrix, their reactions veering between accusation, curiosity, and drunken detachment. Forced to improvise, Luke spins his horror into performance—masking guilt with grief, defiance with desperation—while the unravelling of secrets, betrayals, and blood binds them all into a pact none of them can escape.
July 26, 2018 AD
When Joel impossibly rises again—this time with blood filling veins that were empty hours before—the camp reels at the medical anomaly, but Luke finds himself wounded by something quieter: watching Jamie show his son a tenderness he's never known himself.
July 24, 1992 AD
The police arrive first, then grandparents with fear in their eyes, and finally the one person Luke both dreads and longs to see. As accusations fill the air and adults try to hold the pieces together, something inside Luke finally shatters — and what comes out is a truth he's been carrying far too long to swallow back down.
July 27, 2018 AD
Minutes after disposing of evidence, Luke is confronted in his driveway by a worried mother searching for the son he kidnapped—forcing him to excavate childhood grief for a dead cat just to manufacture tears convincing enough to sell the lie.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke’s return from Clivilius collides with the chaos of everyday life: barking dogs, an unexpected delivery, and a deliveryman whose presence unsettles more than it should. Yet even amid the clutter and commotion, the pull of the device proves irresistible—opening once more the brilliant threshold between the ordinary and the impossible.
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 25, 2018 AD
Two brothers sit shoulder to shoulder, the silence between them thick with everything unsaid. One fears losing his last ally. The other chooses a side he cannot openly declare. When Luke races back through the Portal, Paul is left alone with dogs, tents, and a wounded man who's vanished into the landscape. Allegiances form in quiet moments. So do fractures. The mattress holds both.
July 26, 2018 AD
Forced to confess the identity of the drifting corpse, Luke watches thirty-four years of brotherhood reconfigure in Paul's eyes—but the current won't wait for them to finish unravelling what the truth has cost.
July 29, 2018 AD
Luke returns from proving the portal interference theory to find Gladys's panicked messages already too late — the police are at the door. What follows is a game of inches, a held breath, and a decision that's equal parts stupid and satisfying. He should slip away quietly. He really should. But Detective Jenkins has been making Luke's life difficult, and some opportunities are too delicious to waste. Besides, Gladys has the situation handled. Probably.
July 28, 2018 AD
Luke has the keys. He has the address. He has a plan to relocate an entire home office to another dimension. What he doesn't have is enough time, enough luck, or any idea that the man whose house he's burgling had a Dalmatian. When complications multiply faster than he can adjust — a growling dog, urgent messages he can't ignore, and footsteps at the front door — the plan contracts from ambitious heist to desperate grab-and-run. Some days you take everything. Some days you take what you can carry.
July 25, 2018 AD
Four people gather in candlelight to mourn a boy they never knew. Beatrix arrives wound tight from the gala, still in her cursed black dress. Gladys brings scented candles and questions. Luke wakes to uninvited company. Cody arrives early with whiskey and warnings. In the flicker of flames, they toast Joel—Jamie's son, nineteen, dead under tragic circumstances. But beneath the grief, secrets simmer. And Cody's final words linger: "Death is but a mere process."
July 24, 2018 AD
Two thousand dollars bought the tents. Sweat and stubbornness will carry them through. Box after box, Luke hauls his impulsive purchase across the threshold between worlds—cardboard edges biting into palms, muscles burning, the final box refusing to yield without a fight. But each load that lands in the ochre dust is more than cargo. It is declaration. It is foundation. The solitary wanderer is becoming something else entirely: a builder.
July 25, 2018 AD
When a delivery arrives at his door, Luke seizes the chance to push his desperate plan forward. With the driver oblivious inside his house, he, Paul, and Jamie wrestle boxes through the Portal in a blur of noise, urgency, and near-mistakes—each clatter and shout threatening to unravel the fragile secrecy he’s fighting to preserve.
July 26, 2018 AD
The body floats face-down in crystalline water, arms moving with the current in a rhythm that mimics life but isn't. Luke's first thought is Jamie—that somehow, impossibly, he's lost the man he loves whilst busy manipulating everyone else. His second thought, when the face turns upward, is worse. He knows who this is. He knows what this means. And the river flows in only one direction: toward the person who must never find out.
July 25, 2018 AD
Cody has vanished with Joel's body. The Portal shows nothing. Luke sits in his car, spiralling through the same question on endless repeat until a text from Gladys snaps him back. He makes strange requests—shelving, concrete instructions—then crosses the street to the bank with a green backpack. Inside, he'll withdraw cash, tell lies, and make choices that can't be undone. Some cover-ups require more than bleach and good intentions.
July 29, 2018 AD
With his Portal Key refusing to cooperate and his house no longer safe, Luke begins the process of dismantling the life he and Jamie built together. But grief doesn't wait for convenient moments—and sometimes it's the smallest things left behind that cut the deepest.
July 23, 2018 AD
Escaping the desolation of Clivilius’s desert, Luke stumbles back into the seeming safety of his study. But as a voice of impossible scale speaks directly into his soul, Luke begins to understand that his place in this story carries consequences far beyond himself.
August 7, 1992 AD
Luke wakes to glowing eyes beneath his brother's bed and the bad man emerging from the shadows. Desperate to escape, he runs for the front door — but what waits beyond the threshold isn't the familiar street. It's a swirling world of colour and light, and stepping through means leaving behind everything he knows. Including the boy he used to be.
July 28, 2018 AD
Grief doesn't wait for permission to transform. Seated at the kitchen table, laptop glow casting blue light across their exhausted faces, Beatrix and Luke searched for something—anything—that might keep the Bixbus settlers alive. The temporary fencing wasn't a solution. It was a wager. A click of a button against creatures already circling in the dark. Sometimes hope looks like next-day delivery.
July 26, 2018 AD
The most unsettling thing about being watched isn't knowing someone's there—it's discovering they were there all along, and you never noticed. Luke fell asleep on his couch in a house he thought was empty. He woke to find something on his kitchen bench that hadn't been there before: glossy paper, black felt-tip, five words that transformed his home from sanctuary to crime scene. Whoever left it had stood close enough to watch him breathe.
July 29, 2018 AD
Gladys returns to the house with unwanted company in tow, leaving Luke trapped in a room with a broken window and a door that's the only thing standing between him and discovery. Detective Jenkins is determined to search every corner—but he's about to learn that some suspects don't just slip away. They say farewell on their way out.
July 27, 2018 AD
Hangovers are honest—they tell you exactly what last night cost. It's the other debts that compound in silence. Luke wakes with the taste of Cody still haunting his memory and a ute sitting in his driveway like a beacon for anyone searching for the missing nephew. The keys are in another dimension. The breakfast invitation is in forty minutes. And the list of things he's failing to provide his settlers grows longer with every conversation.
July 29, 2018 AD
Luke returns to the house to begin the slow work of dismantling a life—dragging furniture through portals, emptying cupboards, erasing the evidence of everything he and Jamie built together. But as darkness falls, he realises he's not alone. Across the road, a familiar car sits motionless in the cold, and two men settle into a silent standoff neither is willing to break.
July 25, 2018 AD
Her father told stories about doorways made of colour. Glenda half-believed them—the way you half-believe anything beautiful and impossible. But now a patient is whispering words that should never be spoken aloud, and the wall is bleeding light, and her phone shows one word from the man she loves: Run. Some doors only open once. Some choices can't be unmade. She steps through. He follows. And neither world will be the same.
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 26, 2018 AD
When Jamie's nephew arrives seeking answers about his uncle's silence, Luke recognises an opportunity the settlement desperately needs—but convincing an unwitting visitor to cross a dimensional threshold requires a plan far darker than hospitality.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke can traverse dimensions with a thought, but he still can't outmanoeuvre rubbish collection day. Caught between suburban absurdity and settlement demands, he discovers that the mundane and the miraculous aren't as separate as he'd assumed—and that some fears follow you between worlds.
July 24, 2018 AD
A morning that begins with warmth and routine quickly unravels as Luke’s loyalty to his brother collides with Jamie’s simmering frustration. Between broken promises, broken eggs, and one fleeting gesture of tenderness, Luke is left questioning whether love can endure the fractures now widening between them.
October 11, 1990 AD
Back in his hospital bed, Luke faces his mother’s tightening grip—her rules, her fear, and her warnings about Dr Schofield. But beneath her watchful eyes, Luke makes a silent vow: to start unravelling the truth behind his illness, even if it means breaking the promises she demands.
October 13, 1990 AD
The Matron arrives, her calm authority cutting through Luke’s mother’s performance—but behind the curtain, the quiet war of whispers and hidden pain escalates. With Nurse Lola and the Matron beginning to piece things together, Luke realises hope might lie just beyond the stage his mother has built around him.
July 26, 2018 AD
Luke's desperate race to intercept the body before Jamie arrives at the lagoon fails spectacularly when the supposed corpse seizes Paul with impossible strength—and Jamie discovers his murdered son is somehow still breathing.
July 27, 2018 AD
A simple errand to collect Glenda's clothes turns violent when her husband Pierre answers the door—but the forearm crushing Luke's windpipe releases the moment he gasps out where Glenda actually is, replaced by a cooperation that suggests Pierre knows far more than Luke ever suspected.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke gathers supplies and steels himself before returning to Clivilius, where Paul and Jamie labour at the tent. A simple phone call confirms what he already suspected: they are cut off from their old lives, leaving only dust, silence, and fragile bonds to test whether they can survive together.
Luke’s fragile grip on secrecy shatters when Joel stumbles upon the shimmering Portal—and Henri bolts straight into it. With Duke in his arms and panic flooding through him, Luke has no choice but to follow, plunging himself and his unsuspecting companion deeper into a disaster that no lie can undo.
July 26, 2018 AD
With the settlement desperate for someone who can coax life from alien dust, Luke sets his sights on Karen—a bus-route friend whose horticultural expertise makes her invaluable, and whose warm invitation to breakfast makes her terrifyingly easy to approach.
July 25, 2018 AD
A reckless moment behind the wheel nearly shatters trust between Luke and Jamie, only for new fractures to surface in the form of Paul’s injuries and Jamie’s furious attempts to break free of Clivilius. As tempers flare and impossible choices about money and survival rise, the dust-choked air becomes charged with defiance, sacrifice, and the unravelling weight of responsibility.
July 26, 2018 AD
Some debts can only be paid in bruises. Luke pushed Kain through a Portal without consent, stole his life, delivered him to a world he never asked to see. Now Kain's fists want answers that words can't provide. The dust of Clivilius rises around them as they collide—two men working out the mathematics of betrayal through the only currency available. Violence has a strange honesty. It strips away the careful lies until nothing remains but what you actually owe.
July 23, 2018 AD
Luke reaches for Paul through the fragile lifeline of a phone call. What begins as a simple request becomes a tense dance of humour, desperation, and unspoken need, as both men test how far their bond can stretch across the distance.
July 19, 1992 AD
Luke's eighth birthday dawns with all the ingredients of a perfect morning — presents, family, the promise of cake before breakfast. But the warmth can't quite chase away the cold that lingers from the night before, and when it comes time to make his wish, Luke finds himself reaching for too many things at once. Then he closes his eyes, and something he didn't ask for answers instead.
July 30, 2018 AD
Jamie's hangers still sway when the wardrobe opens. Empty now. But Luke hasn't been dwelling on absence — he's been building something in its place. Hidden. Organised. The kind of system that makes sense to the person who created it and raises questions for anyone else. Beatrix sees enough to wonder. Not enough to understand. When she leaves with secrets of her own, Luke finds himself alone in the quiet house, surrounded by the careful architecture of control. Some people cope with chaos by surrendering to it. Luke has a different method entirely.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke abandons the back-breaking task of hauling supplies by hand when inspiration strikes: if the Portal can take objects, why not the truck itself? What follows is equal parts terror and exhilaration as he turns the ignition, guiding steel, timber, and concrete through a gate of living colour into the silence of Clivilius.
April 13, 2026 AD
A man stands at a stove in a kitchen in Berriedale, Tasmania, trying to fry an egg. His partner has just walked out the door. The bacon that was cooked for both of them left with the person who cooked it. The kitchen, which ten minutes ago smelled like a decade of shared mornings, now smells like a fight that never quite became a fight and a silence that said more than shouting would have. The egg cracks wrong. Shell shards splinter into the pan. The yolk ruptures on impact. Golden liquid spreads in thin streams, mixing with the white in ways that can't be undone. The whole thing congeals into something that looks less like breakfast and more like a verdict. He reaches for another egg.
July 29, 2018 AD
A car horn shatters the morning calm at Luke's house. Beatrix peers through the blinds and recognizes a face from her past—Detective Karl Jenkins. She flees through a Portal, leaving Luke behind. Trapped and unable to activate his malfunctioning Portal Key, Luke hides as Karl breaks in, overhearing a neighbour's damning observations. Two Guardians, one threat, two desperate strategies for survival when the past comes knocking.
July 28, 2018 AD
Luke steps through the mystery Portal destination and returns home to blood on the walls, scattered chaos, and a terrified woman who reveals he was never the only one given a key to other worlds—and that something has followed her back.
July 29, 2018 AD
What was supposed to be a quick reconnaissance trip becomes something Luke wasn't prepared for—a guided tour led by someone who pays far too much attention, asks questions Luke can't answer, and makes him feel almost normal for the first time in days. Between hand-feeding wallabies and learning about wombat defence tactics, Luke finds himself wondering what pieces of this place might fit into the world he's trying to build.
October 11, 1990 AD
Luke and Gloria’s laughter is cut short when Nurse Lola swoops in to check their bumps and bruises. But as Dr Schofield steps into the corridor, the childish mischief gives way to a subtler unease, as Luke glimpses how strange and complicated the world of adults can be.
July 27, 2018 AD
Luke's mother won't stop calling, and when she finally resorts to text to ask about Paul, the lies flow with a fluency that should probably alarm him more than it does—each response another thread in a web that's already reaching Queensland, where Claire is taking the children.
July 28, 2018 AD
Beatrix finds Luke in the dark, still holding Duke, and delivers news that changes his plans—Clivilius is no place for a burial. As they dig beneath the tree where Duke once taught his brother to be brave, Luke finally allows himself to break completely. But even at rock bottom, Beatrix arrives with a shovel in one hand and something that looks almost like hope in the other.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke’s return with supplies offers a fleeting chance at unity, but tensions quickly fracture as the Portal’s true limits are tested. When desperation erupts into violence, trust shatters along invisible lines, leaving Luke to face the cost of choices that can’t be undone.
July 26, 2018 AD
Luke's attempt to track down Cody through Gladys hits a dead end when she reveals their relationship runs on secrecy alone—but a far more disturbing mystery materialises on his kitchen bench: a camping brochure that wasn't there when he fell asleep.
July 30, 2018 AD
The fence is finished. The gate locks with a metallic clang that sounds less like safety than captivity. Around the campfire, the settlers who followed Luke into this dimension are starting to ask questions he can't answer — where are the people who haven't come back, and what exactly is the plan? Kain's accusation lands harder than a shove. But exhaustion has a way of clarifying priorities, and as the flames die down, Luke's thoughts turn toward Adelaide. Toward family. Toward a father whose word has always been law.
July 27, 2018 AD
Luke's break-in at Jeffries Manor spirals from tense to catastrophic as Louise hunts for an intruder—but salvation comes from the last person he'd expect, along with a silver key and cryptic instructions about someone who hasn't had a visitor in many years.
July 24, 2018 AD
Pizza boxes and wine become unlikely tokens of comfort as Luke shares a quiet meal with Paul and Jamie by the riverside fire. Yet beneath the warmth of food and laughter lies the ache of parting—Luke masking guilt with humour, Paul offering quiet steadiness, and Jamie pressing for more than Luke can give—as the night deepens and Clivilius reminds them how far from home they truly are.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke’s failed attempt at driving pushes him toward a desperate, absurd solution: bribing an Uber driver to ferry firewood home. As twilight deepens, the backyard becomes a stage for revelation, the Portal swelling to a new, impossible size—transforming ordinary tasks into extraordinary breakthroughs, even as Luke balances survival with the comedy of pizza deliveries and neighbourly secrecy.
October 13, 1990 AD
After another nightmare tears through the ward, Dr Schofield pushes for a private moment with Luke, sparking a battle of wills with his mother. In the fragile space between protection and control, Luke begins to understand that safety might mean something very different than going home.
July 26, 2018 AD
Emboldened by whiskey and starved of touch for six months, Luke slips into Jamie's tent seeking connection—only to find that bodies can respond whilst hearts refuse, and some patterns of rejection break something permanent when they repeat.
July 27, 2018 AD
Luke returns to Clivilius with another load of belongings only to find Paul's frustration has reached breaking point—and when his brother scoops up a handful of dust and hurls it skyward, the explosion that follows leaves Luke standing alone with suitcases nobody asked for and words he didn't expect.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke wrestles a mountain of tent boxes across the Portal, each load a labour that feels more like ritual than effort. As the structure takes shape in promise rather than form, he senses Clivilius shifting from a solitary refuge into the beginnings of community—an era he knows he can no longer face alone.
July 25, 2018 AD
Jamie's mask cracks. His eyes glisten. And before Luke can brace himself, the confession spills out—four words that shatter ten years of believing they were unshakable. What follows is not forgiveness, not resolution, but a collision. And when Luke crosses back to Earth alone, the study becomes a tomb where darker thoughts begin to surface.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke and Jamie’s fragile bond buckles under the weight of confession, erupting into a desperate kiss that blurs the line between forgiveness and fracture. When Paul’s sudden interruption shatters the moment, what remains is neither resolution nor comfort, but a charged silence that leaves Luke to carry betrayal, longing, and responsibility back through the Portal alone.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke collapses onto his leather couch, but comfort brings no peace—only guilt, exhaustion, and memories that refuse to release their grip. Surrounded by the ease of his home yet haunted by Clivilius’s scarcity, he whispers a desperate prayer for another path, clinging to the hope that survival might still hold a better way.
July 28, 2018 AD
Luke arrives at Beatrix's house to confront her about Duke's body, but Wendy's unexpected appearance forces them into an elaborate pretence of normality. When Brett drives off with Duke before they can stop him, Luke learns that even inter-dimensional shortcuts have their limitations.
July 23, 2018 AD
Some anchors are cosmic—voices that speak across dimensions, warnings that carry the gravity of millennia. Others are small, warm, and insistent. As Luke collapses into the sanctuary of his bed, visions of impossible cities flickering behind his eyes, it is not understanding that finds him first. It is Duke's wet tongue against his cheek. Henri's stubborn whine from the floor. And in his palm, a device that has become something far heavier than metal.
July 24, 2018 AD
Every object Luke carries through the Portal tells two stories—the practical need it fills, and the life it's being torn from. As the settlement's first tent rises against an alien sky, Luke finds himself caught between moments of fragile connection and the quiet calculations running beneath them.
July 26, 2018 AD
Back on Earth to hunt for answers, Luke is ambushed by a far more mundane crisis—his manager's persistent texts—and responds by torching his professional life with impulsive resignation and an elaborate fiction about Paris.
July 27, 2018 AD
Luke's mission to retrieve Kain's ute keys from Clivilius is derailed by Paul's criticism of his logistics—until Luke deflects by pointing out that Paul hasn't told his own family where he is either, leaving both brothers confronting the uncomfortable truth that they're equally complicit in disappearing without explanation.
July 27, 2018 AD
Joel, silent since his impossible return, starts humming into the flames—and when Glenda's violin joins a melody she's never heard, Luke watches strangers transform into something with a name and a song to call their own.
July 25, 2018 AD
As Glenda steadies Jamie with practised hands, Luke finds himself torn open by guilt, gratitude, and the crushing mantle of leadership. But her parting words—firm, unwavering—transform his doubt into resolve, sending him back into the dust-laden air not just as a man in love, but as a reluctant guardian stepping fully into his charge.
July 19, 1992 AD
Luke stands before a congregation in white, speaking words of faith he isn't sure he feels, performing certainty for a sea of expectant faces. But as the moment of submersion approaches, only one face matters — and when the chapel door finally opens to admit a dishevelled figure in borrowed clothes, Luke finds his courage in the last place anyone would think to look.
July 27, 2018 AD
Luke's arrival in Clivilius with Glenda's BMW barely registers before Lois launches herself across his lap toward freedom, Paul claims the driver's seat like a new toy, and a scrap of paper bearing Joel's address in handwriting that resembles ancient hieroglyphics becomes Luke's excuse to escape before anyone can ask him to help.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke juggles exhaustion, paranoia, and secrecy as grocery deliveries blur into a theatre of suspicion. Between the watchful eyes of a neighbour and the relentless demands of Clivilius, he pushes food through the Portal while contemplating a future uprooted entirely. But when a sudden jolt reminds him of an appointment with Dr. De Bruyn, survival shifts from bags and boxes to something far more fragile—hope for Jamie.
July 28, 2018 AD
There's a version of yourself waiting in the dark—sharper, colder, capable of things you never imagined. All it takes is one loss to shake hands with him. A fencer answers a phone call about an impossible job. A hundred thousand in cash. A remote property in the hills. He tells himself it's just a chat, just looking at plans. He doesn't know he's already been catalogued as a resource, that the man waiting at the cottage door has stopped listening to the voice that still thinks morality matters more than survival.
July 30, 2018 AD
Running late and running out of patience, Luke decides the builder waiting at the Owens' property might be receptive to a more direct approach than usual. After all, the man's already halfway to another dimension—how hard could it be to show him one for real? Luke is about to learn that some honesty comes with its own complications.
July 28, 2018 AD
Dawn breaks through the blinds like an accusation, and as Luke's sleep-deprived brain finally connects the pieces, horror crystallises—he spent the night cowering on his kitchen floor whilst his settlement faced whatever had been hunting in the dark.
July 25, 2018 AD
Some men collect stamps. Some collect coins. Luke collects the feeling that comes from pressing fifteen thousand dollars to his face and breathing deep. There's a safe beneath the carpet, a key behind the winter jumpers, a ritual older than the lies he tells himself about why he needs it. The money goes in. The carpet goes flat. And for one dangerous moment, chaos feels like something he can buy his way out of.
July 27, 2018 AD
The moment you start hiding evidence of the things you've done is the moment you admit you already know what they are. Luke returns home with Karen and Chris's belongings—keys, wallets, the portable fragments of lives he's just shattered. He adds them to the collection growing beneath his wardrobe floor. Jamie's wallet. Paul's keys. Glenda's purse. Kain's cards. The word that surfaces is mementos. The parallel that follows makes his stomach lurch.
July 26, 2018 AD
Returning home to a living room inexplicably full of kayaks, Luke confronts Cody about Joel—only to learn of 'Portal Pirates' who may have infiltrated his settlement, but it's the taste of blood from Cody's split lip that delivers the most devastating revelation: visions of a world he's never seen, flooding through a connection he never asked for.
July 26, 2018 AD
Luke finally reveals to Paul what he truly is—a Guardian, and not the only one—but a darker theory shadows the confession: whoever slit Joel's throat may have been hunting Luke instead.
July 27, 2018 AD
Karen's casual revelation that she and Jane spent years laughing at Luke's prophetic dreams lands like a blow—but before he can process the hurt, she's showing him seeds that grow to plants in minutes and extracting promises about livestock he doesn't have time to keep.
July 25, 2018 AD
On a quiet jetty in Glenelg, Cody Jennings reunites with his long-lost mentor Jeremiah, whose sudden return shatters three years of silence and peace. As news of Port Stower’s destruction ripples through both worlds, Cody is thrust back into impossible decisions — torn between loyalty to Clivilius, his dwindling settlement, and a revelation that could rewrite everything the Guardians believe.
July 25, 2018 AD
Fresh from the shower and haunted by blood-soaked clothes, Luke turns the Portal into a stage for control, dazzling Beatrix while masking darker intentions. But when Gladys presses a letter for Jamie into his hands, the kaleidoscope of light becomes more than spectacle—it becomes a courier of longing, regret, and responsibility Luke can no longer escape.
July 28, 2018 AD
Bleeding. Bound. Hunted. Beatrix crashes through Luke's sliding door with a Shadow Panther on her heels and truths spilling faster than blood. The creature followed her from Clivilius—black fur, dead eyes, claws that carved her flesh. It circles the house. It tests the light. Luke finds her trembling behind the kitchen bench, knife in hand, every bulb blazing. The Portal Key between them. Jarod still captive. And something inhuman clawing at the front door.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke returns to Clivilius with his hard-won shovel, only to find Paul and Jamie making progress on their tent. As he drags his tool across the ochre soil, the furrow it leaves behind sparks both pride and unease, pushing him to realise that survival will require more than strength—it will demand innovation, and the courage to shape permanence out of dust.
July 27, 2018 AD
Luke wakes to a hangover and the taste of Cody still haunting his memory, but his guilt spiral is interrupted by a far more urgent problem: Kain's ute sits in his driveway like a beacon for anyone searching for the missing nephew, and the keys to move it are in another dimension entirely.
July 23, 2018 AD
Luke calls Jamie hoping for connection, for the familiar warmth that once defined them. Instead he receives brevity. And when the line goes dead without an echo of love returned, Luke is left holding more than a phone. He is holding the mathematics of a relationship reduced to its sparest equation.
July 26, 2018 AD
There's something clarifying about burning bridges you never intended to cross again. Luke stepped through the Portal for answers about murdered sons and impossible resurrections. What ambushed him instead was his phone—buzzing with the particular insistence of a manager who doesn't know her employee has been building settlements in other dimensions. HR wants documentation. Luke wants silence. The lie he tells to get it tastes easier than anything true has tasted all day.
July 24, 1992 AD
A week after losing his best friend, Luke comes home from school to find the house quiet in ways that have become familiar. But when Paul suggests they claim the living room for themselves, what begins as distraction becomes something more — two brothers building a fortress against everything they can't control, finding laughter in the spaces where no one is watching.
July 27, 2018 AD
What begins as packing a suitcase and a golden retriever for transport becomes something far larger when Pierre casually mentions a contingency plan—one that reframes Luke's struggling settlement of seven as humanity's potential lifeboat.
July 28, 2018 AD
Luke beats Brett home, but winning the race means standing at his own front door pretending to be surprised when a well-meaning man delivers a body wrapped in bloody sheets. When the door finally closes and the house falls silent, there's no one left to perform for—and nowhere left to hide.
July 24, 2018 AD
Gladys arrives with a truck full of supplies and a head full of questions. The bedroom is empty. The wardrobe stripped bare. Jamie and Paul have vanished, and Luke's excuses are crumbling faster than he can invent them. When fury meets impossibility in a Berriedale study, the truth doesn't wait for permission—it tears through walls in swirling colour and demands to be seen. Some revelations cannot be unsaid.
July 25, 2018 AD
The leather couch remembers a different life—lazy Sundays, coffee and newspapers, Jamie laughing at Luke's attempts to fit furniture through doorways. Now Luke lies on it like a man who's forgotten how rest works. The refrigerator hums. A car passes outside. Everything is so unbearably normal. And somewhere across dimensions, in a tent made of canvas and desperation, the people he loves are still fighting. His body won't move. His guilt won't stop.
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.
July 24, 2018 AD
Gladys promises silence between hiccups, her words slurred and careless, the weight of the secret sliding off her like water. Luke watches her drink. Watches her shrug. And in the quiet of his living room, a thought surfaces—cold, logical, monstrous. One push through the Portal. One more body in Clivilius. Problem solved. The man who could make that choice would not be building something beautiful. He would be building something else entirely.
July 25, 2018 AD
One. Two. Three. Roll. Four words that separate before from after. Before, the manifest was just missing paperwork. After, it's the thing Luke pulled from a dead boy's pocket while Beatrix gagged and Gladys shattered her wine glass across concrete. Paper doesn't care what you did to get it. Paper just sits there, crumpled and warm, waiting to be useful. And useful, right now, is the only thing keeping any of them out of prison.
July 25, 2018 AD
Tension with Paul leaves Luke raw and uncertain, but his brother’s quiet loyalty steadies him—for the moment. Yet as Luke races toward the Portal, a wave of dread crashes over him: in his desperation, he left it wide open, and Joel may have already crossed the line between worlds.
July 28, 2018 AD
A nursing home visit turns violent when Luke crosses paths with a face from Jamie's past, but the real confrontation waits in a small room where two elderly women hold secrets about a stolen key, a forbidden trapdoor, and decades-old revenge. They'll tell him everything—but only on their terms.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke prepares for the inevitable by packing Jamie’s belongings into a suitcase, each folded shirt and pair of shoes carrying more weight than fabric alone. With Duke hovering loyally and guilt gnawing at him, Luke shoulders the bags toward the Portal, knowing every object he carries across deepens both the deception and his commitment to a life divided between worlds.
July 26, 2018 AD
When a body surfaces in the crystalline waters of Clivilius, Luke's initial terror gives way to a more complex dread—the corpse holds secrets that must never reach Jamie, and the current has its own plans for delivery.
June 10, 1992 AD
A schoolyard game of chase becomes something more when Luke spots an opportunity to finally corner Jamie and hear his unfinished confession — only for interruption to scatter the moment yet again. But when chasers close in, Luke makes a choice that speaks louder than any words Jamie hasn't managed to say.
July 25, 2018 AD
A letter is such a fragile thing. Paper and ink, easily torn, easily lost. Gladys hands it over like it weighs more than it should, and maybe it does—maybe words you can't say aloud become heavier once you write them down. The Portal swallows it along with the dog beds, delivering both to a world that breaks everything eventually. Luke follows. What he finds in the dust isn't a letter. It's the man he was ready to hate this morning, collapsed and barely breathing. Suddenly paper seems like the strongest thing left.
July 27, 2018 AD
Post-dinner logistics dissolve into open hostility when Paul demands accountability and Jamie tells him to fuck off—but before Luke can intervene, the settlers somehow pivot from conflict to collaboration, assigning roles and planning roads whilst he wonders if peace this quick is peace at all.
January 3, 2023 AD
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.
July 30, 2018 AD
The Owens' property is the last place either of them should be right now. Police are bagging evidence. Officers are in every room. And yet Luke and Beatrix have both decided — independently, for entirely different reasons — that this is exactly where they need to be. They don't know the other is there. Not at first. But in a house full of people who'd arrest them on sight, two Guardians operating blind is dangerous. Two Guardians who suddenly discover they're on opposite sides of the same wall is something else entirely.
July 30, 2018 AD
The chase for Adrian takes a sharp turn when Gladys decides to help in her own inimitable fashion. With sirens closing in and their original escape route compromised, Luke's options narrow to one desperate gamble.
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.
October 13, 1990 AD
In the brutal aftermath of his mother's violence, Luke glimpses something impossible through the bathroom steam — a radiant, winged figure who confirms a truth he's been refusing to accept. As blood and bathwater mingle on hospital tiles, a doctor draws battle lines, a nurse stands guard, and a mother's carefully rehearsed story begins to crack.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke scrambles to steady the fallout with Gladys, their clash over trust and proof interrupted by the knock of a pizza delivery. Balancing cardboard boxes, chardonnay, and the weight of impossible truths, he slips once more into Clivilius—where even small comforts carry the tang of danger and the promise of fire on the horizon.
July 24, 2018 AD
After a brutal confrontation, Luke returns to Earth, where the ordinary act of ordering groceries feels surreal against the backdrop of inter-dimensional exile. As he shoulders the weight of providing for survival, small comforts—from Duke’s tail-wagging loyalty to the steam of a hot shower—momentarily anchor him in humanity, even as the demands of Clivilius press ever heavier on his shoulders.
July 26, 2018 AD
Kain's fury over his forced crossing erupts into a brutal confrontation in the Clivilius dust, but when fists finally still and hands extend, Luke discovers that some debts can only be acknowledged through pain.
July 27, 2018 AD
There's something cruel about relief when it arrives by text—too quiet for the panic it replaces. Greta has been pacing her Adelaide lounge room for an hour, each unanswered call jabbing like a needle. Luke won't pick up. When he finally responds to her text, the words are simple, reassuring, exactly what a worried mother needs to hear. And something about them feels deeply, inexplicably wrong. The compass she uses to understand her family has started pointing somewhere unfamiliar.
July 30, 2018 AD
Luke's chaotic arrival in Clivilius is only the beginning of his problems. Adrian isn't adjusting well, Beatrix has some choice words—and a gesture—about her sister's current situation, and of course someone Luke brought through recognises someone already here. Because Hobart is exactly that small.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke brings the simplest of supplies to Clivilius: garbage bags. What begins as menial labour—clearing plastic and rubbish—becomes an unlikely act of unity, revealing fragile shifts in trust and a flicker of cooperation between the three men. With Paul’s quiet list pressed into his hand, Luke carries back more than waste: he carries the first fragile threads of purpose.
July 30, 2018 AD
Luke's wardrobe holds more than clothes. Behind the empty hangers where Jamie's things once hung, beneath carpet and floorboard, he's built something orderly. Something useful. When Beatrix asks about the driver's licenses kept separate from everything else, he doesn't answer. Some organisational choices don't require explanation. But after she leaves—vanishing through the portal with plans she won't share—Luke finds himself alone with his collections, his lists, and a vision for something grander. Something that will outlast them all.
July 24, 2018 AD
Armed with scissors, a kitchen knife, and his father's dusty toolkit, Luke steps back through the Portal. The mundane meets the impossible. Jamie and Paul have been busy—tent boxes reorganised, the skeleton of shelter rising against ochre sky. For one breath, it looks like progress. Then someone tests the Portal again. Then someone pushes too hard. And Clivilius answers in fire and fury, revealing exactly how deep the fractures run.
July 25, 2018 AD
Inside Glenda’s deserted practice, Luke sifts through cupboards and drawers, turning a burdensome list into a mission of quiet triumph. With each vial, bandage, and stolen scrap of identity, he finds clarity in chaos—naming the process selective evolution, a fragile philosophy to steady his hand as he risks everything for Jamie’s survival.
July 24, 2018 AD
Returning to the riverside camp, Luke finds the quiet unnerving, his panic quickly defused by Jamie’s teasing but leaving behind raw edges of mistrust. What follows is a clash of humour, longing, and challenge—Jamie unearthing Luke’s mischievous sabotage, then pushing him toward the one fear he cannot escape. Between levity and tension, Luke is forced to admit that survival here will test more than just their strength—it will test their fractures.
July 29, 2018 AD
When Luke's Portal Key finally flickers back to life, relief quickly gives way to suspicion. Paul's excited chatter about wifi experiments and open portals triggers a connection Luke can't ignore—and if he's right, the Guardians have just discovered a vulnerability none of them knew existed.
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 23, 2018 AD
After the turmoil of his call with Paul, Luke seeks solace in small rituals—only to fixate on a sudden vision of sanctuary. A reckless purchase becomes more than retail therapy: it’s a declaration of intent, absurd yet profound, as he steels himself for the world he’s chosen to face.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke drives the truck through the Portal, its cargo stacked high with Gladys’s latest contribution: shelving. To Paul, the boxes seem premature in a world with no finished foundations, but to Luke they are a fragile monument to order amid chaos—a symbol of the future they are struggling to build, even as doubt shadows every promise.
July 29, 2018 AD
Luke returns to the house bracing for confrontation, only to find Gladys lounging on the couch with a near-empty glass and the satisfied air of someone who's just pulled off something improbable. Turns out, her approach to handling police scrutiny involves shiraz and finding common ground.
July 28, 2018 AD
Some farewells require shovels. Beatrix found Luke in the darkness, Duke's body cradled in his arms, grief cracking him open in ways she had never witnessed. They dug together beneath the apricot tree—the same tree where Duke once chased fallen fruit and coaxed Henri down the steps. The earth was cold. The silence was heavy. And when it was done, something else began to take root.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke dials a number he already knows won't connect. The silence that answers is confirmation, not surprise—the old world cannot reach them here. Phones become relics. Credit cards fund a future their owners will never see. But somewhere between dead signals and black plastic bags, something unexpected stirs. Three men who could barely look at each other begin working side by side. Small things, it turns out, can cross impossible thresholds.
July 30, 2018 AD
Luke returns to the Owens' property knowing it's crawling with police, counting on a winter storm to provide cover. The fence delivery arrives at precisely the wrong moment—or perhaps the right one, depending on how comfortable you are with crawling through mud and improvising in total darkness.
July 25, 2018 AD
Glenda presses a list into Luke's hands—antibiotics, syringes, suture kits, things he can barely pronounce. The paper feels heavier than it should. Back in Hobart, her examination room waits: six cupboards, a locked door, and a practice full of people who have no idea their doctor just vanished into another dimension. Luke calls it selective evolution. Taking what you need. Leaving what you can't carry. Hoping the math works out.
October 13, 1990 AD
Drowning in a haze of medication, Luke drifts between fractured memories and surreal dreams, haunted by questions about his sickness and his mother’s role in it. As reality slips through his fingers, he begins to glimpse a truth too terrifying for a child to name.
July 27, 2018 AD
Luke's carefully planned recruitment of Karen derails the instant he decides to show rather than tell—and what was meant to be a gentle introduction to impossibility becomes a catastrophe that swallows two people before he can even begin his pitch.
July 24, 2018 AD
He's lied to his best friend's face. He's managing a crisis that spans dimensions. But right now, Luke's enemy is a palm-sized spider in a shed and his only ally is an overly enthusiastic Shih Tzu. Sometimes survival isn't about facing impossible odds—it's about convincing yourself to walk through a doorway when every instinct screams retreat. One man. One shovel. One very patient arachnid.
July 24, 1992 AD
The brothers return from their outing to find the house transformed — filled with smoke and a presence that barely acknowledges their arrival. As they retreat to their blanket fort with plates balanced on their laps, the evening becomes a study in contrasts: bright colours on the television, grey haze in the air, and a question from Paul that Luke doesn't know how to answer.
July 28, 2018 AD
With his latest recruit secured, Luke shifts seamlessly into operational mode—loading stolen supplies, cataloguing assets, and delegating the messy work of emotional adjustment to others. As his settlement grows and resistance begins to soften, Luke allows himself a moment of satisfaction before turning his attention to the next phase.
July 25, 2018 AD
Joel Gibbons lies dead in a delivery truck outside Luke's Berriedale home. Gladys and Beatrix Cramer are covered in blood, clutching a manifest and unravelling explanations. Then a man appears in the driveway—someone who knows Luke's name without introduction, who examines the body with unsettling calm, who says he's been "waiting." Four people stand around Joel's corpse. Someone knows what happened. Someone knows too much. Someone isn't telling the truth.
July 28, 2018 AD
Hours after the campfire singing, a growl drags Luke from sleep into absolute darkness—and when the Portal activates without him, painting the horizon in colours that shouldn't exist, a human scream sends the settlement scattering into the night toward something none of them can see.
July 28, 2018 AD
A return trip to retrieve the correct laptop goes sideways when a phone call forces Luke to navigate a sleeping household, a curious toddler, and a very territorial Dalmatian. His escape through the Portal doesn't go as planned—and he's not the only one who makes it through.
July 28, 2018 AD
Waiting in at the Owen’s cottage with a Portal primed and a lie ready, Luke lures an unsuspecting tradesman with promises of extraordinary payment. When doubt threatens to derail his plan at the final moment, Luke discovers just how far he's willing to reach—and push—to protect what remains of his family.
July 25, 2018 AD
The back of the truck yawns open, crammed with concrete mix and timber and the bones of something not yet built. Luke stares at it, then at the gate, then at the Portal Key in his hand. Why haul supplies one armload at a time when the whole vehicle could cross? The engine roars to life. The gate becomes a threshold. And somewhere in the dust on the other side, Jamie is waving—but not in welcome.
July 29, 2018 AD
Luke arrives in Clivilius with two excited conservationists who are already scooping dust and assessing terrain for their temporary assignment. The problem is Paul, whose expression makes clear he's going to want answers—answers that involve stolen identities, a Guardian named Melanie Bandy, and the small detail that "two weeks" doesn't mean what the Ironbachs think it means.
July 28, 2018 AD
Paul has spent the afternoon finding something unexpected: calm. Sorting supplies beside Nial, falling into the rhythm of practical work, the kind that occupies your hands and quiets everything else. Then the Portal flares. Barking. His brother in the dust with a limping Dalmatian — another dog in Clivilius, less than a day after Duke. The confrontation that follows leaves both of them bleeding from wounds that aren't physical. Luke disappears before anything gets resolved. Paul is left with a laptop, an injured animal, and the growing list of things his brother never has time to explain.
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 25, 2018 AD
Reeling from Jamie’s confession, Luke collapses in his study, grief consuming him in a storm of sobs and whispered vows. Caught between anger, love, and the cruel logic of survival, he wrestles with unthinkable impulses before steeling himself to protect both Paul and Jamie, no matter how fractured their bonds have become.
July 23, 2018 AD
A man who has walked between worlds, who has heard the voice of Clivilius echo through his very bones, is reduced to this: a phone pressed cold against his palm, a brother's laughter crackling through the speaker, and the bitter taste of manipulation on his tongue. Luke has faced the infinite. But asking for help—truly asking—may be the hardest crossing of all. Some distances cannot be measured in dimensions.
June 4, 1992 AD
While his mother sleeps off her afternoon pills, Luke follows his brother on a rare, unsanctioned escape through the grey winter streets of Elizabeth Downs to visit a school friend's home for the very first time. Behind an un-mown lawn and a crooked front gate, Luke discovers something he's never encountered before — a house where nobody is performing.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke wrestles with the absurdity of waste management between worlds, realising even cosmic exile can’t free him from the tyranny of overflowing bins. From garbage bags to textbooks, candles, and a fire lighter, he assembles a mismatched arsenal—part survival kit, part confession—that reflects both the weight of his responsibility and the stubborn humour that keeps him moving forward.
LockedJuly 27, 2018 AD
You can spend all day solving problems for people and still manage to miss the one that's been growing right in front of you. Luke returns to Clivilius with another load of belongings—suitcases, bags, supplies. He's being thorough. Organised. Helpful. Paul scoops up a handful of rust-coloured dust and hurls it skyward. This fucking dust is everywhere and it is driving me fucking nuts! Then: Just fuck off, Luke. His voice softens for the dog. The contrast cuts deeper than the words.
July 24, 2018 AD
Back in the confines of his study, Luke is left alone with the crushing weight of doubt. As Clivilius’s voice presses into his mind, he wrestles with guilt over dragging Paul and Jamie into peril, while a fragile but fierce resolve begins to take root: this path, however reckless, can no longer be abandoned.
June 4, 1992 AD
A late afternoon drive spirals into terror as Luke’s mother pushes the Datsun beyond its limits, her calm voice masking a reckless plunge toward disaster. In the near miss that follows, Luke glimpses a vision of catastrophe—and the lingering presence of Gloria—leaving him to wonder whether survival was luck, madness, or something more.
October 13, 1990 AD
When his mother insists on bathing him despite the protests of a watchful nurse, Luke finds himself trapped in a steam-filled hospital bathroom where maternal care curdles into something far more sinister. A door closes, a lifeline is severed, and obedience becomes the only language left to speak.
July 31, 2018 AD
Marco knows every corner of this airport that offers privacy. He's mapped them the way other people map escape routes — instinctively, compulsively, the architecture of a double life he's been maintaining since he was sixteen. Luke knows how to walk like he belongs somewhere he doesn't. Both skills converge in a janitor's closet with no camera coverage, where a collision becomes something neither of them planned for.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke’s mission to secure medicine spirals into a deadly gamble as suspicion hardens around him. Hunted by uniforms and whispers alike, he must navigate sterile corridors that close in like jaws—balancing deception, desperation, and the weight of Jamie’s survival with every step.
July 23, 2018 AD
Luke stands under an alien sun, tethered to reality by the smallest of proofs, only to find himself swallowed by a vast and silent desert. As awe turns to exhaustion, he realises survival in this world will demand more than curiosity.
July 25, 2018 AD
A doctor steps into a world she's only heard stories about. A brother waits with news he'd rather not deliver. And a man who brought them all together is about to learn whether his desperate plan was worth the cost. Three perspectives. One destination. The tent isn't far—but what waits inside will determine whether any of this mattered at all.
July 25, 2018 AD
In the confines of Dr. De Bruyn’s office, Luke’s desperation collides with paranoia as he dares to speak of The Testing. Her fearful reaction confirms more than he expected, drawing them into an uneasy alliance sealed not by medicine, but by secrets. When the Portal blooms to life between the sterile walls, trust, danger, and destiny entwine—pulling both doctor and patient into a reality that neither can retreat from.
July 25, 2018 AD
As Glenda begins the urgent work of treating Jamie’s wound, Luke is forced from the tent, clutching Duke and Henri while his own fear mirrors their frantic cries. Each scream from within cuts deeper than any blade, leaving him swaying in the dust, whispering prayers to hold on, torn between obedience and the desperate need to rush back inside.
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.
From a violent birth in 1984 Adelaide to the discovery of an inter-dimensional Portal in 2018 Tasmania, Luke Nathaniel Smith's archive chronicles a life where reality and nightmare blur. Through childhood trauma, hospital secrets, first love, and family breakdown, Luke's journey culminates in becoming the reluctant keeper of a threshold between Earth and Clivilius—transforming from haunted survivor to guide of impossible worlds.
July 19, 1992 AD
Luke emerges from celebration, searching for the one person whose face told a different story than the rest of the congregation. What he finds there will transform a day meant for new beginnings into something he never saw coming — even though, looking back, the signs had been there all along.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke presses the button. The study wall blooms into impossible colour—crimson, indigo, gold—and for one breathless moment, Jamie and Paul see what he has seen. They follow him through. They stand in the ochre dust of another world, beneath a sky too blue to be Earth's. And then Jamie tries to leave. The Portal does not let him. It burns. It refuses. Clivilius, it seems, has opinions about who belongs.
July 19, 1984 AD
There is warmth. There has always been warmth. The drumbeat above never stops—thum-thump, thum-thump—the only song Luke knows whilst floating in thick, sweet darkness. Sometimes he swallows and it tastes like the feeling when the drumbeat is slow. Safe. That's not a word he knows, but it's what the taste means. Until the taste changes. Sharp. Wrong. Like metal in his mouth. And the drumbeat races too fast, too hard. The warmth around him turns sour. Something is happening. Something bad.
July 24, 2018 AD
As Paul and Jamie take their first steps into Clivilius, awe gives way to fear, anger, and fracture. Luke struggles to hold his vision together while the world itself proves it has a will of its own, testing not only their faith in him—but their place in this new reality.
July 26, 2018 AD
As Glenda examines Joel's inexplicably healing wounds, Luke's careful deceptions unravel thread by thread—each admission stoking Jamie's fury until the tent becomes an arena for truths Luke never intended to speak.
October 12, 1990 AD
Half-asleep, Luke drifts between dreams of golden fields with Gloria and the cold reality of her sudden absence. As footsteps fade down the corridor, he senses a change he cannot name—only that something precious has slipped away in the night.
July 23, 2018 AD
Luke believes he's awoken into a silent, oppressive night—but the world around him is not what it seems. As he explores the uncanny stillness of his home, he descends deeper into a nightmarish hallucination where something ancient and watching awaits… and waking up may not be an option.
July 26, 2018 AD
Kain came to check on his uncle. Twenty minutes, tops—confirm Jamie was fine, grab pastries for Brianne, smooth things over at home. Simple. Except Jamie's partner answered the door looking like he'd crawled out of a nightmare. Except the dogs were silent. Except the lies didn't quite add up. And except that when Luke asked for help moving a TV cabinet, Kain said yes—because he'd never learned how to say no to family.
Chaos with the dogs explodes into violence when Jamie shoves Luke in fury, only for the clash to reveal something far worse: a festering wound hidden beneath denial. With every word sharpened by pain and accusation, Jamie delivers a chilling verdict—one that forces Luke to face the reality that Clivilius itself may be killing them.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke brings Glenda into Clivilius, presenting her to Paul as both ally and lifeline. But their tentative introductions dissolve the instant Jamie’s name is spoken—his fever pulling Luke into a storm of fear, guilt, and unyielding devotion, as Glenda steps into the role she was brought here to fulfil.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke returns to a silent camp, only to find Jamie collapsed and bleeding in the desert. Dragging him back from the edge, Luke clings to the frail promise of Gladys’s letter—a thread of hope as delicate as Jamie’s breath, and just as easily lost.
July 24, 2018 AD
After restoring order to the small rituals of his morning, Luke finds himself drawn once more to the device—and to the absence of a book that confirms his journey was no dream. With his dogs occupied outside and awe in his chest, he chooses again to step into Clivilius, unable to resist the call of a world that demands to be entered.
July 25, 2018 AD
Planning doesn't always follow practical sequence. Sometimes hope looks like stacking metal shelving units in empty corners where no buildings stand yet, daring the future to catch up with your optimism. Paul's scepticism lands sharp—why shelves when concrete foundations remain unfinished? But desperate circumstances breed absurd symbols. Seventeen hundred dollars already spent. Boxes become monuments to belief that progress exists somewhere beneath the chaos.
July 25, 2018 AD
Back home from the bank, Luke wrestles with paranoia as he unearths his hidden safe, the ritual both damning and intoxicating. With each bundle of notes stacked neatly into the dark vault of stolen identities and forgotten lives, he feels the flicker of control return—fragile, clandestine, and balanced on the edge of collapse.
July 28, 2018 AD
Grief is a luxury that belongs to people who aren't responsible for what they're grieving. The rest of us have to keep moving. Luke races back to Clivilius expecting catastrophe. What he finds is stranger—a native hunter in leather armour, a shadow panther's corpse beside the cold campfire, and Paul's face doing something it shouldn't. The settlement survived the night. But survival and safety aren't the same thing, and some losses don't announce themselves until you see the blood on someone's hands.
October 11, 1990 AD
Tension ignites in the hospital corridor when Luke’s mother confronts Dr Schofield and Nurse Lola, her fury spilling into accusations and control. As Luke is pulled back under her watchful grasp, an unspoken promise flickers between him and the doctor—proof that someone else sees what lies beneath.
July 30, 2018 AD
Luke is running late, running on no sleep, and running out of patience. The builder waiting at the Owens' property is already halfway to another dimension chemically — how much harder could it be to show him one for real? Turns out cannabis doesn't work the way Luke hoped. And neither does anything else that follows.
July 25, 2018 AD
Sitting in his car across from the bank, Luke spirals into a storm of doubt and dread, haunted by Cody’s absence and the chaos left behind. A message from Gladys throws him a lifeline, dragging him back into motion as he grasps for control—but every step forward feels like another turn deeper into a maze of consequence he cannot escape.
July 27, 2018 AD
Armed with containers of Indian takeaway, Luke distributes dinner around the campfire with the careful attention of someone cataloguing his settlers—learning who likes what, watching alliances form, and ending up with the vindaloo nobody else wanted because someone has to eat it.
July 24, 2018 AD
A visit from Gladys brings warmth, laughter, and the comfort of familiarity—but also forces Luke deeper into a web of lies he can no longer control. As trust is quietly tested and suspicions stirred, he realises that even the smallest falsehood may unravel everything he’s struggling to hold together.
July 25, 2018 AD
As Jamie reels in fevered anger and Glenda holds the line between care and control, Luke is pulled between loyalty to his dog, his lover, and the doctor now stranded in their midst. But when Glenda presses a long, uncompromising list into his hands, Luke is forced into a new role: smuggler, thief, and reluctant provider, carrying the weight of choices that could doom them all.
July 29, 2018 AD
Luke has hours before anyone in Bixbus will miss him. Hours to strip the Berriedale house of everything useful, to erase the evidence of a life that no longer exists. But some things refuse to stay buried — memories surfacing with every piece of furniture moved, questions multiplying about Guardians he never knew existed, and the growing sense that he's not as alone as he should be.
October 13, 1990 AD
Drugged and helpless, Luke tumbles into a nightmare that feels more like memory than dream. In the dark hallways of his childhood home, glowing eyes and reaching hands force him to confront a terror that may be waiting in both worlds.
October 11, 1990 AD
Luke plummets through a nightmare void, haunted by distorted reflections of the people closest to him—and a stranger’s piercing eyes that seem to follow him even when awake. When dream and reality collide in a fall that leaves him injured, suspicion begins to stir in the shadows of the hospital ward.
July 25, 2018 AD
In the aftermath of blood and chaos, Luke corrals Beatrix and Gladys into shifting cargo, his mind fixed on a single, damning absence: the missing delivery manifest. What begins as a desperate search spirals into horror when necessity forces them to roll Joel’s body, a grotesque gamble that yields the paper he craves—proof enough to stave off suspicion, but at a price none of them will ever wash away.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke is crouched in a delivery truck, hands sticky with a dead boy's blood, and someone is calling his name. What follows isn't grief—it's theatre. Every word a calculation. Every tremor reframed. Because the women now standing in his driveway know about the Portal, and the body cooling beside him is Jamie's son. The shower is the only place left where masks can fall. Where water might wash away enough to think again.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke races breathless across Clivilius, desperate to secure Jamie’s help in convincing Gladys of the truth. What he receives instead is not reassurance but a blunt token of proof—an empty water bottle marked with Jamie’s hand, carrying a message that cuts deeper than ink and leaves Luke questioning his place in both worlds.
July 25, 2018 AD
In the midst of covering up Joel’s death, Luke, Gladys, and Beatrix are thrown into chaos when a man named Cody suddenly appears in the driveway. As Gladys masks panic with false cheer and Beatrix hints that Cody may be more than he seems, Luke wrestles with suspicion, fury, and a dangerous intrigue that could reshape everything.
July 27, 2018 AD
You can feed people and shelter them and keep them alive—but they don't become a community until they have a reason to lift their glasses together. The evening begins with Indian takeaway and ends with a song that's never existed before tonight. Somewhere in between, strangers learn each other's preferences, nearly fracture over who should walk to the Drop Zone, discover that seeds grow to plants in minutes here, and watch a boy who came back from death find his voice in the firelight. They're Clivilians now.
July 26, 2018 AD
The worst kind of manipulation isn't when they don't trust you—it's when they do, and you know exactly how you're going to use it. Karen picks up on the second ring. Her voice carries the warmth of years of shared bus rides, morning greetings, bags of home-grown vegetables pressed into reluctant hands. She doesn't ask why Luke's calling. She just invites him for breakfast. Duck egg omelette. Nine o'clock. Chris will cook. The trap doesn't need bait when trust does all the work.
October 12, 1990 AD
In the shared room, Gloria’s warmth pulls Luke back from fear and shame into laughter, biscuits, and music. As secrets pass between them, their bond deepens—anchoring Luke in a fragile world where friendship becomes the only medicine strong enough to keep the shadows at bay.
October 13, 1990 AD
As Nurse Lola enters, Luke’s mother performs her role of the concerned parent to perfection—yet cracks begin to show. Between whispered warnings, a suspicious fever, and the mention of Gloria, Luke realises that someone else is finally starting to see the truth behind the act.
October 12, 1990 AD
Alone in the gleaming sterility of the hospital bathroom, Luke stumbles into a messy accident that leaves its mark across pristine tiles. Caught between panic and strange pride, he realises that not everything about his body has to be an illness—sometimes, it’s just life spilling out in unexpected ways.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke’s attempt to mask guilt behind normality falters as Gladys arrives with truck keys, papers on pouring concrete, and a bill that forces him to bleed out his dwindling reserves. Between talk of memorials, missing trucks, and unspoken suspicions, the exchange leaves Luke balancing politeness against paranoia, his wallet lighter and his secrets heavier.
July 24, 2018 AD
Gladys storms into Luke’s world demanding answers, her fire unrelenting until she stumbles upon the one truth he can no longer conceal. The confrontation escalates into revelation as the Portal unfurls before her eyes, forcing Luke to risk everything—his secrets, his safety, and her trust—at the edge of two realities.
July 25, 2018 AD
Shaken by Joel’s death and the impossible choices ahead, Luke seeks refuge beneath the hiss of a shower. What begins as cleansing spirals into ritual, his body grounding him where his mind falters, until release delivers the clarity he needs: control must be reclaimed, and decisions must be made, no matter the cost.
July 30, 2018 AD
The fence is finished. Inside its perimeter, the settlers gather around the campfire like animals in a cage of their own making. Accusations fly. Tempers fray. And when the question of missing people meets only silence, the cracks in Luke's authority begin to show. But exhaustion has a way of clarifying priorities—and as the flames die down, Luke's thoughts turn toward Adelaide, toward family, toward a father whose word has always been law.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke is drawn deeper into Clivilius, where silence yields to the discovery of a shimmering river that feels as alive as it does beautiful. Immersed in its crystalline waters, he experiences revelation and release—but the encounter culminates in a threshold that suggests the world itself is listening to him, offering choice as much as discovery.
October 13, 1990 AD
Under harsh lights, Dr Schofield and Nurse Lola press gently for the truth, but Luke clings to his mother’s demand for silence. Between whispered promises of safety and the doctor’s quiet warning, a fragile seed of doubt is planted—one that will change everything, even if Luke can’t yet speak it aloud.
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 24, 2018 AD
When politeness becomes complicity, and kindness makes you an accomplice. Gladys returns a cake container and leaves with someone else's credit card, a bizarre shopping list, and the growing certainty that her best friend isn't really sick in bed. Luke smiles, explains, deflects—each word a careful brick in a wall he's building between truth and discovery. In the space between what's said and what's suspected, trust fractures one polite lie at a time.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke’s search for the simplest of tools becomes a trial of nerves as he ventures into the shed with Duke at his side. What should have been a mundane task turns into a test of fear, absurdity, and resilience—leaving him clutching a shovel not just as equipment, but as a symbol of small victories against the shadows that haunt him.
June 4, 1992 AD
Luke’s fragile taste of freedom shatters when his mother arrives early, her calm voice hiding the storm still to come. On the drive home, silence and cigarette smoke fill the car, leaving Luke and Paul braced for retribution that lingers like a shadow over every turn of the wheel.
July 23, 2018 AD
Luke’s fragile hope for connection with Jamie falters under the weight of short answers and unspoken distance. Left in the silence of a call ended too soon, he clings to symbols of protection while wrestling with the question of whether his greatest truth might heal—or shatter—the bond he fears is slipping away.
July 24, 2018 AD
Tensions in Clivilius fracture beyond repair as Paul’s faith collapses and Jamie’s fury hardens into dismissal. Left with only guilt and the weight of choices he cannot undo, Luke returns through the Portal to face the silence of a world that suddenly feels smaller, emptier, and far less forgiving.
July 23, 2018 AD
Awakened in the dead of night, Luke follows the pull of the device once more—this time stepping into a reality that confirms his deepest suspicions. Amid the wonder and the terror of a starless expanse, he leaves behind proof of his passage, only to return home with a conviction that Clivilius is real—and that it has claimed him.
July 25, 2018 AD
A confrontation with Cody leaves Luke shaken, as recognition collides with suspicion in the shadow of the truck. Faced with unsettling questions and a display of power he thought was his alone, Luke is forced to wonder whether Cody has come to help—or to take control.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke orchestrates a high-stakes truck swap, corralling Gladys and Beatrix into his plan with clipped precision and ruthless urgency. As he drives through Clivilius with the borrowed vehicle, every turn of the wheel becomes a gamble—trusting Beatrix to play her part, trusting the Portal to hold, and trusting his fragile control not to collapse under the weight of chance.
July 24, 2018 AD
In the dimness of his living room, Luke presses Gladys to keep Clivilius a secret, but her careless indifference leaves him shaken. As the night deepens, darker thoughts creep in—whispers of sacrifice and control—forcing Luke to confront the chilling temptation of binding someone to silence forever.
July 26, 2018 AD
Whiskey's honest about what it offers—warmth that fades, comfort that doesn't care. At least it never pretends to be more than it is. Luke returns to camp carrying supplies and a bottle already half-empty. Joel has died again. Then Joel rises again, blood filling veins that were empty hours before. But the medical anomaly isn't what carves Luke open. It's watching Jamie kneel beside his son, radiating a tenderness Luke has never once felt directed at himself.
July 24, 2018 AD
Paul’s arrival sparks warmth, banter, and unspoken tensions—but also corners Luke into the moment he has dreaded and anticipated in equal measure. With Jamie’s suspicion rising and Paul’s curiosity piqued, Luke realises words will never be enough; the only way forward is to open the door and lead them both toward the impossible.
July 26, 2018 AD
The lies are collapsing faster than Luke can rebuild them. Joel is breathing when he shouldn't be. Jamie is asking questions Luke can't answer. And Paul—who watched a dead man's hand seize his arm with impossible strength—deserves more than silence. So Luke stops walking toward the Portal and turns to his brother. What he says changes everything. What he suspects is worse.
October 11, 1990 AD
In the hush of the hospital’s corridors, Luke walks beside Dr Schofield, carrying more than just a broken wheel. Their quiet exchange peels back layers of silence, hinting at pain, memory, and truths too heavy for a six-year-old to voice aloud.
July 24, 2018 AD
Back in the stillness of his study, Luke scrambles to arm himself for what lies ahead in Clivilius. Rummaging through the debris of domestic life, he gathers a makeshift arsenal—tools that are laughably mundane, yet heavy with the burden of responsibility—as the shimmering Portal waits to test what resolve he has left.
June 4, 1992 AD
On a cold winter afternoon, Luke discovers the exhilarating freedom of a trampoline — and the even more terrifying sensation of being truly seen by someone his own age. But when Jamie's unfinished sentence hangs between them like something about to take flight, an older brother's oblivious arrival scatters whatever was forming before either boy can name it.
July 25, 2018 AD
The first run was careful. The second run is desperate. Jamie's grip on Luke's hand says everything his fever-cracked voice can't: don't leave me. But the asterisked items won't fetch themselves, and Glenda needs what only the shared supply room holds. Luke steps back through the Portal—into a corridor that's already closing around him. Someone made a phone call. Someone is waiting. And someone else is whispering about foxes behind the bathroom door.
July 26, 2018 AD
For thirty-four years, something has been listening. Through childhood nightmares and adult uncertainties, through the discovery of Portal Keys and the weight of impossible choices—Clivilius has always answered. A whisper in the dark. A presence that made the loneliness bearable. This time, Luke calls out from the void and nothing answers. The silence isn't empty. It's full of everything that used to be there and isn't anymore.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke hauls suitcases across the Clivilian dust, their weight tethering him to Earth even as the tent’s rising form offers a fragile spark of belonging. Yet beneath the pride and progress, Paul’s quiet faith and Jamie’s quiet ache remind Luke that every object carried through the Portal is more than survival—it’s memory, leverage, and a burden he alone must balance.
July 30, 2018 AD
Escaping through an inter-dimensional portal should feel like an ending. Instead, Luke finds himself at the beginning of several new problems — most of them standing right in front of him, and none of them interested in his explanations. The man he just dragged through isn't adjusting well. The people already here have questions he can't answer. And someone wants to know exactly where he left her sister. The sirens may have stopped, but the reckoning is just getting started.
July 25, 2018 AD
Gladys and Beatrix’s arrival transforms Luke’s uneasy night with Cody into something larger: a candlelit ritual of remembrance. As whiskey is raised and Joel’s name spoken, sorrow binds them together—but Cody’s words twist the moment, turning grief into doctrine and leaving Luke unsettled by the possibility that this farewell may also be the beginning of something far more dangerous.
June 18, 1992 AD
As police flood the house and a kind officer coaxes Luke from his bedroom, his only anchor is the stuffed bear who has watched everything since infancy. In the chaos of statements and sirens, Luke clings to the story he's been given — while knowing with terrible certainty that the phantom van will never be found, and the bad man will never be caught.
July 29, 2018 AD
Luke arrives at Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary planning simple reconnaissance — register a portal location, gather information about conservation operations, disappear before anyone notices anything unusual. What he doesn't plan for is a charming tour guide who pays too much attention, a case of mistaken identity that spirals beyond correction, and the discovery that another Guardian has already been cultivating exactly the opportunity he's been imagining.
June 4, 1992 AD
When Paul unveils a forbidden book from their mother's shelf, Luke finds himself drawn to something in the illustrations that his brother isn't noticing — a difference he can't name but can't ignore. A tug-of-war leaves the evidence torn, but the questions it awakens won't be so easily hidden.
October 13, 1990 AD
Luke awakens to find Gloria gone and his mother’s presence filling the void with suffocating control. Behind her careful smiles and gentle touches, he begins to glimpse something darker—proof that even care can be weaponised.
July 31, 2018 AD
No luggage. No laptop. Just a boarding pass and an object in his pocket that airport scanners will never detect. The security officer notices the anomaly — a man with nothing to check, nothing to carry, nothing to declare. Luke offers the right smile, the right story, the right amount of sheepish honesty about his mother's habit of keeping his childhood bedroom exactly as he left it. Tasmania disappears beneath the clouds. Adelaide waits. And somewhere between takeoff and landing, in a space no larger than a phone booth, Luke sees an opportunity that most travellers would never think to look for.
July 24, 1992 AD
The screaming tears Luke from sleep, and suddenly the blanket fort that felt so safe hours ago offers no protection at all. Frozen beside his brother in the darkness, Luke witnesses something cross a line that can never be uncrossed — and by the time the front door slams and the phone is lifted from its cradle, the family he knew has already become something else.
July 27, 2018 AD
Luke's triumphant delivery of Kain's ute through the Portal ends in humiliating mechanical failure and an audience of witnesses, but the real blow lands when Paul's growing list of demands forces him to confront how quickly he's falling behind on keeping his settlers alive.
June 10, 1992 AD
A bathroom break from German class becomes the unexpected setting for the confession Luke has been chasing since the trampoline. In three seconds, every scattered piece — the images in his mother's book, the flutter when Jamie touched his arm, the difference between where his eyes went and where Paul's went — finally falls into place.
July 23, 2018 AD
Shaken from a nightmare into his study, Luke discovers a strange device that defies explanation. What begins as curiosity soon becomes a crossing point—where the ordinary world gives way to something impossibly vast.
August 7, 1992 AD
For three weeks, the birthday gift has sat untouched on Luke's desk — a piece of Jamie he wasn't ready to unwrap. But in a house gone quiet in all the wrong ways, Luke finally breaks the seal. What waits inside is more than a present. It's a promise, a lifeline, and proof that someone far away still believes in him.
July 28, 2018 AD
Luke races back to Clivilius expecting catastrophe and finds a native hunter standing over the corpse of something that shouldn't exist—but the real blow lands at the riverbank, where Jamie sits cradling a loss that he's certain is entirely Luke's fault.
July 31, 2018 AD
No luggage. No laptop. Just a boarding pass and an object in his pocket that airport scanners will never detect. Luke navigates Hobart Airport's early morning rituals—a suspicious security officer, the anonymity of the departure lounge, the particular solitude of a window seat. Tasmania disappears beneath the clouds. Adelaide waits. And somewhere between takeoff and landing, in a space most travellers never think twice about, Luke finds an opportunity too good to waste.
July 25, 2018 AD
Dawn light seeps through the curtains. Jamie's side of the bed lies empty. And Luke opens the banking app, knowing exactly what the numbers will tell him. Twenty-five thousand dollars. Years of careful saving. The emergency fund built together, dollar by dollar. All of it about to be converted into concrete mix and camping supplies, withdrawn in careful chunks to avoid suspicion. Building a world costs everything. The spreadsheet doesn't lie—it just sits there, reminding him.
July 25, 2018 AD
Exhaustion is a luxury. So is sleep. So is the ordinary act of signing for groceries without wondering if your name on that screen is another thread in a net slowly tightening. Luke knows how to move bodies, swap trucks, hide cash beneath floorboards. What he doesn't know is how to stop feeling watched. The neighbour across the street waters his lawn every afternoon. Today, that feels like a threat. Tomorrow, it might be proof.
July 23, 2018 AD
He has walked through portals. He has heard the voice of a world speak his name. And now Luke Smith sits before a glowing screen, fighting with browser pop-ups, watching a spinning icon mock his impatience. The purchase is absurd. But absurdity, it turns out, is just another word for hope when you're preparing to shelter someone in a desert that shouldn't exist.
July 29, 2018 AD
Luke's borrowed identity gains him access to a room of packed bags and two eager conservationists ready to begin what they believe is a temporary assignment. But the name Melanie Bandy raises questions he can't answer, and the arrival of someone who actually belongs here means Luke's window for escape is closing fast—along with any chance of explaining himself to the one person who deserves the truth.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke stands alone in his study. The Portal shimmers behind him, but no footsteps follow. No voices. Just silence—and the slow, terrible understanding that the barrier was not malfunction but intention. When he returns to Clivilius, he carries guilt like a stone in his chest. Paul's laughter turns manic. Jamie's fury collapses into something worse: exhaustion. Two words end it. Just go. And Luke does.
July 25, 2018 AD
Dragged from uneasy sleep by a knock, Luke finds Cody at his door, inserting himself into a night he wasn't invited into. What begins as an intrusion slowly reshapes into an uneasy gathering, the air thick with suspicion and unsaid truths, as Luke struggles to gauge whether this new presence will unravel everything—or become part of the plan.
July 27, 2018 AD
Breaking into Joel's home to collect clothes, Luke becomes an unwilling witness to a mother's private grief and stumbles across a document she clearly never meant for anyone to see—then a sneeze betrays his presence, and a deadbolted door forces an escape more dramatic than he'd planned.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke runs. Through ochre dust, through shimmering light, through the wreckage of trust on both sides of the Portal. He needs Jamie's help—what he gets is a water bottle and a warning. He needs Gladys to believe—what he gets is silence and a shrug. Pizza boxes stack on alien sand. Wine disappears into the wrong glass. And somewhere between errands and impossibility, Luke realises: he is the only bridge, and bridges get walked on.
July 25, 2018 AD
Seventeen hundred dollars changes hands in driveways whilst secrets hide in bedroom wardrobes. Gladys returns truck keys and concrete diagrams, discusses memorial services for bodies that don't exist, discovers phone numbers on wine bottles. Luke shoves backpacks deep into corners, counts diminishing cash reserves, watches money bleed away faster than answers arrive. Some exchanges involve payment for shelving. Others involve the slow realisation that everything costs more than anticipated.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke bursts into the tent to find Jamie writhing, his strength reduced to trembling hands and ragged pleas not to be left alone. While Glenda commands order and Paul obeys, Luke clings to Jamie’s touch, torn between the desperate instinct to remain and the brutal necessity of leaving to fetch what might save him.
July 25, 2018 AD
The dogs are gone. The driver is missing. The truck sits abandoned in the driveway, keys swinging in the ignition like a pendulum counting down. Luke searches the empty house, calling a name that doesn't answer. Then the wind catches the truck's back door—slams it, slams it again, slams it against something in the shadows. What's gone is in Clivilius. What's found is worse.
July 28, 2018 AD
When Luke's burglary of a kidnapped man's home goes sideways—first a territorial Dalmatian, then an unexpected arrival—he's forced to abandon his ambitious plans and flee with whatever he can grab. Some escapes leave you with exactly what you need; others leave you with only questions you've created for someone else to answer.
October 11, 1990 AD
Amid the sterile corridors of the Adelaide Children’s Hospital, Luke and Gloria escape into reckless play that blurs danger with delight. But when laughter collides with collapse, the fragile boundary between childhood freedom and harsh reality is shaken.
July 23, 2018 AD
The nightmare is always the same. Red eyes beneath the bed. A shadow man rising from darkness. Technicolour lights beyond the front door where suburban streets should be. But this time when Luke wakes, he's not in his bedroom. He's in his study. With something cold and metallic in his hand. A device he's never seen before. And when his blood touches it, when that spark leaps toward the wall, the nightmare doesn't end. It transforms into something far more impossible than mere dreams.
July 18, 1992 AD
Something wakes Luke in the darkness — something with yellow eyes that multiplies in the shadows, pouring through the gap beneath his door in a tide of fur and hunger. His parents won't stir no matter how hard he shakes them, and the horde is closing in. Alone and cornered, Luke discovers what he's capable of when no one is coming to save him — and what might be waiting once the swarm retreats.
July 24, 2018 AD
The gap on the shelf does not lie. The book is gone— carried into a world and left standing on sand as proof against madness. So Luke crosses again, drawn by the absence, by the need to know. And this time, Clivilius offers more than barren dunes. A sound rises from beyond the horizon. A shimmer that is not mirage. Water that does not merely refresh—it reveals. It awakens. It answers.
July 26, 2018 AD
A routine nightmare takes a terrifying turn when Luke finds himself pursued by a faceless shadow and swallowed by liquefying streets—only to discover that the voice which has guided him for thirty-four years has fallen silent..
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke finally reveals the Portal to Jamie and Paul, the familiar walls of the study dissolving into a spectacle of colour. With disbelief giving way to awe, he takes the first step, inviting them to follow him.
"I'll be home late. Don't wait up for me." Nine words from Nial's phone. The message arrived at the worst possible moment, undermining everything Jenny was trying to tell the officers. Police stopped searching. The case closed. Everyone assumed they knew what it meant—a husband avoiding his wife, a marriage in trouble, nothing sinister. But who actually sent it? And why? The answer changes everything.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke steps into the bank with the calm of an actor and the paranoia of a hunted man, every glance and cough magnified into a threat. As he pushes for cash beyond the machine’s polite limits, each word, gesture, and lie carries the weight of exposure—until survival itself feels like a transaction balanced on the edge of discovery.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
