Tag
July 28, 2018 AD
Paul claims leadership of the camp before understanding what that means, answering Charity's question with confidence he doesn't feel whilst Kain's blood dries on his bare skin. The relief of reaching firelight evaporates when she dismisses a wound Paul can see bleeding. Her warning, delivered in an accent older than any Scotland Paul knows, introduces a threat that turns survival into something far more complicated than simply staying alive until dawn.
July 24, 2018 AD
Armed with Luke's shovel, Paul ventures into the wasteland on a mission he never imagined undertaking—only to discover that his earlier humiliation has vanished, triggering paranoid visions of scavengers in a world that shows no sign of life. When he finally locates his quarry and breaks through Clivilius's deceptive crust to bury it properly, Paul drives the shovel upright into the ground as both marker and monument, a small rebellion against the vastness that's stripped away every competence he ever possessed.
July 26, 2018 AD
The lagoon has already proven itself dangerous in ways Paul doesn't fully understand, so when Glenda announces they're taking Joel back to the water, every instinct screams this is wrong. But Jamie wades in anyway. From the shore, Paul watches a father's tears transform whilst his own wounds pulse beneath his sleeve, wondering if miracles and curses might be the same thing.
July 25, 2018 AD
With his feet still throbbing from chasing Rose's phantom voice, Paul attempts to convince Jamie that exile could be opportunity—a chance to build something new, free from Earth's obligations, where they could bring only the family they wanted. But Jamie's question cuts through the vision like a blade: after last night's terror, do you really believe any of that is true?
July 27, 2018 AD
Paul's morning at the Drop Zone oscillates between small victories and mounting frustrations—a single pillow feels like treasure until Luke casually mentions he's late for breakfast on Earth. The confrontation that follows exposes uncomfortable parallels about secrets and silence, about which families deserve to know the truth. When Luke reveals their money is already running out and more strangers are coming whether Paul approves or not, the fragile control Paul thought he had over building this settlement begins to crumble.
July 28, 2018 AD
Blood droplets on Jamie's tent floor suggest Joel's disappearance wasn't voluntary, but Paul barely has time to process this before his camp fractures in every direction at once. Paul feels something burning in his chest as Clivilius itself speaks, demanding he become the leader nobody asked him to be.
July 24, 2018 AD
Following the river downstream to escape Jamie's presence, Paul discovers a hidden lagoon that promises more than just cleansing. As he slips into water that seems almost sentient, something cracks open inside him—layers of carefully constructed restraint dissolving until he's floating naked and gasping, finally surrendering to sensations he's spent a lifetime suppressing, while a voice whispers invitation he can't refuse.
July 26, 2018 AD
Whiskey loosens the knot of fear that's been tightening around camp for days, creating the illusion that survival might become bearable. But illusions shatter when voices rise from the tent where the resurrected sleep, and Luke emerges running. As Portal colours paint the darkness and Paul's brother vanishes again, Kain voices the question everyone's been avoiding: if Luke didn't bring Joel here, who did? And are they still watching from beyond the firelight?
July 26, 2018 AD
Luke's secrets don't stay buried any longer than the body did. When the truth finally spills — about the delivery driver, the blood in the truck, the burial no one mentioned — Kain's body decides it's heard enough. But somewhere between vomiting in the dust and finding Henri curled up safe, there's a handshake waiting. A name. A question that sounds almost like hope: What can I do to help?
July 24, 2018 AD
When Paul wakes to absolute darkness and Rose's voice calling from the void, terror dissolves the boundary between dream and reality. He tears through the tent into a dust storm that strips skin, chasing a light he mistakes for his daughter until Jamie tackles him away from the coals. Naked and broken, Paul rocks in Jamie's arms whilst Rose keeps calling from somewhere he can never reach.
July 26, 2018 AD
Darkness approaches and Paul climbs the hill to check on Jamie and Joel, bracing himself for whatever horror might await at the lagoon. What he finds shouldn't be standing, shouldn't be walking, shouldn't be looking back at him with those impossibly aware eyes. The struggle to get Joel back to camp before nightfall becomes secondary to a more unsettling question—when Glenda examines what the lagoon has rebuilt, she discovers that miracles might be far stranger and more complete than anyone imagined.
July 26, 2018 AD
Paul finds himself sketching bridges in his mind — turrets where Rose might play, railings Mack could defend like a fortress. Dreams of construction feel safer than confronting the mysteries accumulating around him: Glenda's suspicious calm, her stories deflected to future campfires, the way she sends Kain elsewhere at precisely the moment he needs space. Then darkness approaches and Paul climbs the hill to check on the lagoon. Joel is walking. Joel, whose veins were empty this morning.
July 24, 2018 AD
Clivilius has already taken Paul's freedom, his phone, and his children. Now it takes his dignity. When nature makes demands the landscape cannot accommodate, Paul discovers that survival strips away every pretence civilisation ever taught him to maintain.
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 28, 2018 AD
The Drop Zone becomes something unexpected — a place where two men find common ground over tarp folds and storage logistics. But the quiet doesn't last. A bark from the Portal, a limping Dalmatian, and suddenly Paul is chest-to-chest with his own brother, shouting about a dead dog that neither of them has finished grieving. Luke leaves with secrets. Paul is left holding a laptop bag he didn't ask for, an injured animal he wasn't expecting, and a question he can't stop asking — how many more will his brother drag through?
July 27, 2018 AD
The dust hasn't settled on the ute before two strangers are waiting with unsettling calm and talk of masterpieces. An entomologist who corrects your vocabulary. A yard worker who sees potential in endless dust. And a speech about blank canvases that lands differently depending on how much you've already lost. While Kain escapes to the solitude of concrete and hard work, Paul stays behind to witness something unexpected — a father learning tenderness, one shaky letter at a time.
July 28, 2018 AD
Dawn reveals what darkness concealed — not just the dead, but the scope of what Paul doesn't understand about this world. A woman born in Clivilius speaks of founding mothers and centuries-old wars whilst Paul waits for his brother to return, dreading the conversation he knows is coming. Some truths can't be softened. Some news can only be delivered like a blade. And some mornings break more than they illuminate.
July 25, 2018 AD
Exhausted from hauling tent boxes through dust that fights every step, Paul watches Luke emerge through the portal with another truck and feels hope rise—maybe the handyman, maybe the doctor Jamie desperately needs. Instead, Luke opens the back to reveal shelving. For sheds they haven't built. On concrete they can't pour. Luke hands over instructions like an afterthought, then vanishes again, leaving Paul alone with cardboard monuments to a future that feels impossibly distant.
July 26, 2018 AD
The lagoon's strange effects have never felt more wrong than when Paul wades toward the body that needs to disappear before Jamie sees it. Five metres of water separate him from a task no man should ever face, and as his hands close around cold shoulders to push the corpse downstream, Paul discovers something that will haunt him far longer than any night terror.
July 24, 2018 AD
Seeking escape from Jamie's toxic presence, Paul retreats to the riverbank to write Luke's list of essentials—only to discover that Clivilius has one more indignity waiting for him. When nature makes demands that can't be delayed and the landscape offers no privacy, no leaves, and no dignity, Paul learns that survival strips away more than just hope—it strips away every pretence civilisation ever taught him to maintain.
July 27, 2018 AD
The fourth morning brings relief Paul wasn't expecting — the grey hasn't returned, the wound is healing, the river's strange properties have done their work. But healing comes with complications. Joel is awake now. Aware. Watching from the tent with eyes that might remember the snap of bone when Paul panicked and broke his finger. Claiming a corner of the third tent, Paul forces himself to say the words aloud: this is home now. Acceptance has a price.
July 25, 2018 AD
Paul and Jamie begin their first construction project with optimism that curdles as quickly as their concrete mix. The cement clumps where it should be smooth, seeps where it should stay bounded, and transforms perfectly good building materials into a lumpy grey embarrassment. As Paul's stomach growls and reality erodes Jamie's lagoon-born calm, one truth crystallises: determination can't substitute for actually knowing what you're doing.
July 24, 2018 AD
As Paul fumbles with tent poles and earns Jamie's nickname "clumsy," Luke's casual mention that Duke misses Jamie triggers Paul's thoughts of Charlie waiting at home for a master who'll never return. When they finally finish the tent and unpack their belongings inside canvas walls that suddenly feel like they're closing in, Paul realises that shelter and prison can be the same thing—and escapes back into the vast emptiness where at least he can breathe.
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 24, 2018 AD
The river has been calling Paul's name since he arrived—a whisper curling around his thoughts like fingers through hair. When he follows it downstream and discovers a hidden lagoon, the water offers something he didn't know he needed: permission. Permission to feel. Permission to surrender. Permission to become someone other than the man he's been performing for thirty-five years. The return to reality will be considerably less graceful.
July 26, 2018 AD
The first slab is a disaster. The second might actually hold weight. And somewhere between assessing the damage and setting up forms for a third, two men discover they're building more than shelters. Paul's been here seventy-two hours and already looks like he's aged a decade. Kain's been here less than one and already knows what keeps them both working: the terror of becoming a story their families tell sometimes, about the ones who disappeared.
July 24, 2018 AD
When Paul arrives in Hobart expecting his brother at the gate, he finds only Jamie and a casual explanation that Luke is at home cooking eggs. As they drive through unfamiliar streets in uncomfortable silence, Paul's frustration mounts alongside a creeping suspicion that the crisis he's flown interstate to solve might not be the crisis Luke described at all.
July 24, 2018 AD
When Paul discovers a river of impossible clarity flowing through the wasteland, he calls Jamie away from the portal to share the first piece of hope they've found in Clivilius. As they kneel at the water's edge, marvelling at its contradictory temperatures and debating the logistics of swimming without towels, Paul realises that survival might mean accepting the absurd.
July 26, 2018 AD
Paul surfaces from the lagoon gasping whilst Jamie's voice tears through the air with recognition and disbelief. As everyone gathers around what should be a corpse, Glenda's assessment defies everything medical science should allow. Paul sits apart, trembling, unable to look away from where the fingernails broke his skin, watching as the flesh around the wounds changes colour.
July 26, 2018 AD
Henri doesn't bark at nothing. When Paul follows the sound to the river's edge, he finds something floating that transforms the morning from embarrassment over a failed watch into a horror that rewrites everything he thought he knew about his brother. Luke's face tells the story before his mouth does — recognition where there should be confusion, secrets spilling out in the space between one heartbeat and the next. Some bodies don't stay still.
July 24, 2018 AD
As Paul struggles futilely against plastic strapping he can't open, the crushing realisation hits that he may never hold his children again—Mack waiting for his chemistry set, Rose planning fairy gardens, both certain that Daddy will come home. When Jamie's fury at the useless portal mirrors Paul's own helplessness, Paul offers the only thing he can: a shared task and the fragile beginning of alliance between two who need each other to survive.
July 24, 2018 AD
As Paul and Jamie work in hostile silence to assemble a tent neither of them knows how to build, Luke returns with a request that crystallises their new reality—give up your phones, give up your passcodes, surrender the last illusion of connection to the world you've lost. When Paul tries to call Claire and hears only absolute nothingness, he hurls the useless device at Luke's feet and finally explodes at Jamie with a question he can no longer contain: why do you have to be so bloody nasty all the time?
July 24, 2018 AD
As Luke casually offers to bring Paul's children through the portal, the full horror of their situation crystallises—Paul erupts with fury at his brother's complete disconnect from reality, whilst Jamie's futile attempts to escape become a rhythm of despair. When hysteria finally cracks Paul's composure and he drags boxes across the wasteland in numb determination, a discovery beyond the rise offers the first whisper that survival might be possible after all.
July 25, 2018 AD
With Jamie at the river nursing his wound and Luke visibly shaken by accusations of sentencing them all to death, Paul sits between brother and partner trying to hold together loyalties that pull in opposite directions. As Duke maps his new territory and Henri sleeps in oblivious contentment, Paul makes a confession to Luke that requires one critical condition: Jamie can never know.
July 25, 2018 AD
When Jamie vanishes, Paul races downstream calling his name whilst panic builds with every unanswered echo. Climbing a hill that nearly kills him, Paul discovers cliffs he never knew existed—one more step would have been the end. Defeated, he returns to find Jamie on the mattress, unable to move without bleeding. Duke had fetched Luke. A dog succeeded where Paul failed.
July 25, 2018 AD
Paul stands back to admire the tent he's half-built when Luke's voice carries across the dust with a single word that makes everything else irrelevant: food. As shopping bags materialise through the portal and Duke triumphantly emerges with a packet of treats in his jaws, something shifts in the tent behind them—Jamie sitting up for the first time, awake and hungry and possibly healing.
July 24, 2018 AD
Paul emerges into an alien wasteland of rust-coloured dust and impossible silence, where a telepathic voice welcomes him to Clivilius and Luke announces plans for a new civilisation. When Jamie tries to leave and the portal violently throws him back, Paul realises with mounting horror that his brother hasn't brought them here for a visit—he's brought them here to stay.
Paul Smith could play almost anything by ear. Hymns for the ward. Love songs for his wife. The pieces his children asked for at bedtime. The hymns at his mother's funeral, chosen by people who had known her better than he had. He was the man who knew how a song was supposed to go and could give it to you exact. What he could not do — had never been able to do, not even on the piano bench alone at midnight with nobody listening — was play anything that was simply his own.
July 25, 2018 AD
The reversing truck brings cement and hope in equal measure — the first real evidence that building something here might be possible. Then Luke extends his hand and asks for everything. Paul's instinct is to comply. Then he thinks of Claire counting coins, of Mack needing new boots, of Rose's dance lessons. His hand pulls back. Some surrenders cost more than survival.
July 25, 2018 AD
As darkness descends absolute and starless, Paul and Glenda share tinned beans by the campfire whilst something unspoken builds between them. Her fingers tap nervous rhythms against her knee. Her questions probe for others who might be here. Her urgency about building security suggests knowledge she won't share. When she assigns Paul first watch and disappears into the tent, he feeds wood to flames that must burn until dawn—alone with firelight and whatever secrets Glenda brought through the portal.
July 24, 2018 AD
A piece of plastic strapping defeats him. A voice inside his skull condemns him. And when Paul tries to call Claire, the silence that answers isn't just absence. It's annihilation. Trapped in Clivilius with a man who shoves him into portals and answers kindness with cruelty, Paul must surrender his phone, his passcode, and the last illusion that he might ever hear his children's voices again.
July 28, 2018 AD
Paul's camp is haemorrhaging people, and the ones who stayed are bleeding. Walking to the Portal with a mental spreadsheet of disasters, he does what any desperate man would — he stops managing the crisis and starts weaponising it. A woman with a Portal and a taste for action just needs the right word. Not errand. Not favour. Mission. But the moment you start treating moral compromise as logistics, the questions you should be asking have a way of going unanswered.
July 25, 2018 AD
Paul stares at a picture of a garden shed with impossibly green grass, searching for instructions that aren't there, when Jamie returns carrying an unfamiliar serenity. As they confront supplies neither knows how to use, Paul suggests digging a foundation hole with the pickaxe and Jamie laughs. They start building anyway, hauling cement toward a future only one of them believes in.
July 24, 2018 AD
When Luke returns wearing actual clothes and bearing industrial garbage bags, Paul endures an awkward moment about going shirtless before a revelation shifts everything—items can pass through the portal even though people cannot. As Luke disappears through the shimmer carrying rubbish and Paul's water-stained list, Jamie turns with unguarded hope in his eyes and speaks words Paul never expected to hear: there may be hope for us yet.
July 26, 2018 AD
Glenda interrupts the fragile peace around the fire with a proposal that seems absurd given everything they've survived—gratitude, a ritual her father taught her before something happened she won't explain. What begins as uncomfortable quickly becomes unbearable when the exercise forces everyone to confront what they're actually feeling about this place. By the time Glenda whispers her final confession through tears, Paul realises her relationship with Clivilius runs deeper and stranger than anyone could have guessed.
July 26, 2018 AD
Whiskey makes survival feel almost bearable — until voices rise from the tent where the resurrected sleep and Luke emerges running. Portal colours paint the darkness, and Paul's brother vanishes again without explanation. The night grows heavier with questions no one can answer: if Luke didn't bring Joel here, who did? Around the dying fire, Glenda proposes something unexpected. Gratitude. Finding one thing — just one thing — worth being thankful for in this nightmare.
July 27, 2018 AD
Around the campfire with butter chicken and shared frustration, Paul proposes shared responsibility for checking the Drop Zone. The conversation spirals into confrontation — Jamie's casual dismissal, Karen's objections, Kain's muttered observation that Paul is shit at building things. When Glenda suggests he simply become the Drop Zone's dedicated manager, the title lands somewhere between purpose and consolation prize. Then evening brings something unexpected: a raspy voice rising from a throat that was cut open days ago.
July 25, 2018 AD
Paul has spent three days learning what he cannot do. Cannot leave. Cannot build proper foundations. Cannot keep anyone safe. Cannot even fetch water without someone nearly dying in his absence. Standing at the river's edge measuring distances feels like the only honest assessment left — until Glenda appears beside him and starts talking about bridges. The woman who just performed surgery with a t-shirt apparently didn't get the memo about what's impossible here.
July 27, 2018 AD
For the first time since arriving, Paul experiences something that feels like joy—wind and speed and the vast beauty of an alien world without terror attached to it. Kain's impromptu detour becomes rebellion against caution, a brief escape from survival's grind. But when the engine dies and they're stranded with dust choking every component, the price of freedom becomes clear.
July 24, 2018 AD
In absolute darkness, sharing a single blanket with Jamie, Paul's exhausted mind drifts between the green grass of Zinc Lakes and Claire's fury when he'd chosen Luke's call over finishing their fight. As guilt and memory blur into something approaching resolve, Paul realises their nameless settlement needs what everything needs to become real—and a word tears itself from his throat like prophecy: Bixbus.
July 28, 2018 AD
The Portal ignites whilst Luke stands beside Paul — someone else can use it. Someone else is here. Then Kain screams, his leg torn open by something with teeth. A woman emerges from the darkness with a bloody arrow and an accent older than modern Scotland, claiming she means no harm. Following her feels like madness. Staying means facing whatever's circling beyond the light. And the creature she killed? That's not what murdered one of their own.
July 25, 2018 AD
Alone by the fire in a world without clocks or stars, Paul counts his own breaths to mark time whilst his thoughts spiral toward Claire and children who don't know where Daddy went. He checks on Jamie—sedated and guarded by loyal dogs—then returns to feed the flames with chunks of wood thrown in defiance against encroaching darkness. Lying on his back beneath a lifeless sky, exhaustion becomes a physical opponent he's losing against, his mantra fragmenting: I... must... stay...
July 28, 2018 AD
Dawn should mean safety, but Charity's calm recitation of centuries-old wars and Scottish founding mothers only deepens the strangeness of their situation. When Luke appears—wild-eyed, exhausted, his questions growing more frantic—Paul feels the weight of what he's been holding back. As Luke's trembling hands reach for answers and his voice cracks with vulnerability, Paul faces the terrible responsibility of choosing which words will shatter his brother first.
July 24, 2018 AD
The first Clivilius night offers no mercy. Paul lies in darkness beside Jamie, memories of his children surfacing with the weight of everything he's lost—until a word tears itself from his throat like prophecy: Bixbus. Then the nightmare comes. Rose calling from the void. Paul chasing light through a dust storm that strips skin. Jamie pursuing with a burning chest. Two men breaking in different ways, holding each other through what remains.
July 27, 2018 AD
After a day that ended with Paul screaming at his brother and throwing dust into the air, evening brings something unexpected around the campfire—a sound that shouldn't be possible from a throat that was cut open days ago. As Joel's voice rises into the twilight with lyrics about unwritten stories and fighting to make worlds right, Paul's hands begin to move of their own accord, searching for keys that don't exist, longing to join something he can only witness.
July 25, 2018 AD
Morning arrives with burns Paul doesn't remember earning and a voice he swears was real. Jamie says the blackness does that — makes the mind invent what it needs most. But if Paul's sanity is already bending, if the void can conjure his daughter's voice so perfectly he'd run through fire to reach her, then the question isn't whether he's losing his mind. The question is how to bring her here before it happens again.
July 26, 2018 AD
Paul suggests heading back to camp with deliberate casualness, hoping Glenda won't notice what he's been hiding beneath his sleeve. But the grey has spread since the river, and when she catches sight of his arm, her professional concern shifts into something harder to read.
July 24, 2018 AD
In the early morning quiet of Adelaide Airport, Paul boards his flight to Hobart with mounting unease as Luke's messages go unanswered. When mechanical delays stretch the wait and his brother's silence continues, Paul finds himself suspended between two cities and two fears—that he's overreacting to nothing, or that he's already too late to help.
July 25, 2018 AD
When Jamie sits down beside Paul with nothing else to do, Paul seizes the fragile opening to suggest they mark a delivery area near the portal—absurd and random, but something. As they drag rocks and draw lines in the dust, creating the first deliberately made mark on Clivilius, something shifts between them. They're not just surviving anymore. They're building. Together.
July 25, 2018 AD
Paul has failed at concrete. Failed at first aid. Failed at keeping anyone safe. Now Jamie is missing and Paul's voice echoes off empty water, unanswered. He climbs higher, searching, and nearly walks off a cliff he didn't see. When he finally staggers back to camp — sunburned, gasping, certain he's lost the only other person in this world — he discovers that rescue doesn't always require opposable thumbs. Sometimes it just requires knowing who to fetch.
July 27, 2018 AD
Around the campfire with butter chicken and shared space, Paul attempts to instil shared responsibility for checking the Drop Zone, only to watch the conversation spiral into confrontation and Jamie's casual dismissal. When Glenda suggests that perhaps Paul should simply become the Drop Zone's dedicated manager, the title hangs in the air like a sentence—not quite honour, not quite punishment.
July 26, 2018 AD
Paul finds himself designing bridges in his mind—structures with turrets where his children might someday play, spans that could transform survival into something resembling home. But as he works alongside Glenda, her calm competence in this impossible place begins to feel less like adaptation and more like familiarity. Medical tents in Borneo. Stories deflected to future campfires. The perfectly timed distraction when Kain needs space. Paul adds Glenda to his growing list of things about Clivilius he doesn't fully understand.
July 26, 2018 AD
Jamie wades into the lagoon carrying his son's body, and Paul watches from shore because he cannot bring himself to enter that water again. When the gasp comes — violent, impossible, unmistakably alive — tears transform Jamie's face whilst Paul's own secret throbs beneath his sleeve. The grey has been spreading since the river. Glenda notices. And whatever cure she has in mind involves holding Paul's arm underwater whilst he screams.
July 28, 2018 AD
Half the camp has vanished into the wilderness. The other half is bleeding. Paul walks to the Portal with a list of problems and no solutions — until a single word reshapes everything. Missions. Beatrix has a Portal, a talent for creative morality, and the kind of restless energy that just needs direction. But giving orders is one thing. Living with what you've asked someone to do is another — especially when the question you should have pressed harder on goes unanswered.
July 26, 2018 AD
Paul intercepts Luke rushing toward the Portal with a name he's never heard and a mission he doesn't understand. What follows is a conversation that transforms everything Paul thought he knew about his brother into something far stranger and more dangerous. As Luke vanishes into swirling colours despite warnings about safety, Paul glances down at his wounded arm and discovers the grey hasn't stopped spreading.
July 24, 2018 AD
Paul goes hunting for evidence he'd rather forget existed—armed with a shovel and the growing paranoia that something in this lifeless world might have stolen it. What he finds instead is silence so complete it has weight, and ground that fights back before finally yielding. But the real discovery waits back at camp, where Luke is hauling a king-size mattress through an inter-dimensional portal like it's the most normal thing in the world.
July 25, 2018 AD
The sky offers nothing—no moon, no stars, just black pressing down like a held breath. Two people sit by a fire that feels smaller than it should, trading truths they've been carrying alone. The storm that burned Jamie. The world that won't let them leave. And then, before she retreats to the tent, Paul gives her something unexpected. A word. A claim. A beginning.
July 24, 2018 AD
Pizza and wine by the campfire create a dangerous illusion of normality, until Paul remembers the children he'd somehow forgotten for hours and guilt crashes through his contentment. When Luke leaves and darkness descends, Jamie points upward at a sky that should be scattered with stars but offers only absolute void—no moon, no light, no familiar points to navigate by in this world that keeps revealing new impossibilities.
July 25, 2018 AD
Night watch is easy when you're fresh. When your body isn't a catalogue of burns and bruises, when your mind isn't spiralling through faces you may never see again, when the sky offers familiar constellations to mark the hours. Paul has none of these luxuries. Just a fire that must not die, a darkness that remembers what happened last time, and eyelids turning to lead whilst something that might be exhaustion — or might be something else — presses down.
July 25, 2018 AD
Paul's vision of a new civilisation dies on Jamie's sceptical stare. After last night's terror, after the fire and the phantom voice and the complete psychological collapse, who could believe in grand futures? But then Jamie appears by the river with words that change everything. What begins as killing time becomes something neither of them expected.
July 28, 2018 AD
Paul never asked to lead. Never wanted the weight of decisions that could kill the people trusting him to make them. But someone has to count heads whilst the shadow panther corpse rots beside the campfire. Someone has to hold things together when the group begins fracturing in every direction at once. And when something ancient speaks directly into his chest with words that burn, Paul understands: he was never given a choice.
July 23, 2018 AD
The highway stretches like a ribbon of ink through absolute darkness. Paul drives towards Adelaide, arms stinging from rose thorns, phone silenced against Claire's thirteen missed calls. Out here between Broken Hill and nowhere, there's just the road, the thoughts he can't outrun, and the unspoken vow pulling him towards Tasmania. Then a kangaroo explodes from the scrub. Some disasters you survive. Others you drive straight into.
July 24, 2018 AD
Pizza and Chardonnay by a dying campfire. The absurd comfort of takeaway food in a dimension that shouldn't exist. Luke masks guilt with laughter, Jamie aches for a home he can't reach, and Paul remembers—suddenly, devastatingly—that he has children who don't know where their father has gone. Then Luke leaves. And Jamie points upward at a sky that offers nothing. No stars. No moon. Just void.
July 25, 2018 AD
Paul wakes with burnt feet and no memory of stepping on coals, only Rose's voice calling through the darkness. When Jamie insists it was a nightmare born of pure blackness, Paul's defences crumble into a terrifying question: is his mind already breaking? But doubt transforms into desperate clarity—if he's trapped here forever, if the darkness can use her voice to torment him, then he needs his children here.
July 25, 2018 AD
Their ancestors built pyramids. Cathedrals. Entire civilisations from nothing but stone and determination. Paul and Jamie can't figure out how to pour concrete for a garden shed. The instructions only explain mixing, not preparation. The wheelbarrow keeps getting stuck. The cement clumps where it should be smooth and seeps where it should stay bounded. By the time Paul's stomach announces its grievances, Jamie's lagoon-born calm has curdled into something that looks a lot like despair.
July 24, 2018 AD
Adelaide Airport. Six-thirty AM. Paul boards his flight carrying five hours of darkness, rose thorn scratches, and an unspoken vow. The engines wind up. Then cut off. Mechanical delay. He texts Luke. Nothing. Five minutes. Nothing. Thirty minutes. The silence transforms from unusual to ominous. When the plane finally lifts, Paul surrenders to exhaustion at thirty thousand feet. But worry lodges in his chest like a stone. Something's wrong.
July 28, 2018 AD
A severed head on a stake. A camp of empty tents. And a man in the back seat who keeps saying he has a wife and a toddler to get home to, as though saying it loud enough might bend the universe into listening. Paul knows how to introduce people, pitch a plan, make the impossible sound manageable. What he doesn't know is how to be the person everyone needs him to be without losing the parts of himself that still remember how to feel.
July 25, 2018 AD
Paul has built something. It's not finished, it's not pretty, but the tent skeleton stands against the sky like a declaration of intent. Then Luke's voice carries across the dust with a single word that rewrites every priority. Seven shopping bags materialise through the Portal, and Duke proves once again that dogs understand the important things — diving headfirst into provisions and emerging victorious with exactly what he came for.
July 26, 2018 AD
Working alongside Kain transforms Paul's understanding of what might actually be possible in Clivilius—not just surviving but building something real. As concrete pours and conversation turns to families waiting on Earth, Paul begins to see a future he hadn't dared imagine. Then Glenda's urgent voice shatters the moment. They're moving Joel, and the destination she announces makes no sense whatsoever.
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 24, 2018 AD
Luke returns with garbage bags and a grin, calling this wasteland beautiful. Paul isn't sure whether to laugh or scream. But when Luke steps back through the portal carrying their rubbish, something impossible happens — something that makes Jamie turn to Paul with an expression he's never seen before. Two words that change everything. Two words that might be delusion or might be the first light they've seen since the portal sealed them in.
July 26, 2018 AD
Paul meets the stranger properly for the first time whilst Glenda prepares to attempt the impossible inside the tent. Kain's handshake is firm, his build suggests usefulness, and his connection to Jamie makes sense. But as Paul asks how Luke recruited him, the story that emerges transforms relief into horror.
July 24, 2018 AD
Paul returns from the lagoon to find smoke rising from camp, and his panic about what's burning gives way to something worse—Jamie's contempt, a catastrophic wardrobe malfunction, and the realisation that standing too close to fire whilst distracted by another man's underwear choices is a terrible idea. At least Jamie won't witness this particular humiliation.
July 24, 2018 AD
Luke drags a mattress through the portal, and suddenly Paul finds himself making a bed with his brother and Jamie like it's the most normal thing in the world. When Luke jokes about the sleeping arrangements, the laughter that follows is the first genuine sound any of them have made since being trapped here.
July 28, 2018 AD
Everyone left with a mission. A warrior, a grieving father, a doctor chasing a dead man's voice — all of them marching toward something urgent enough to justify walking away. Paul turns around expecting another departure and finds the only ones who didn't leave: two dogs standing in the dust, watching him with eyes that don't understand abandonment but recognise it anyway. Sometimes the thing that finally cracks you open isn't the crisis. It's what the crisis forgot.
July 28, 2018 AD
The shatters when Lois begins growling at something in the darkness. The Portal flares to life while Luke stands beside Paul, and the impossible realisation hits like ice water—someone else can use it, someone else is here. When an terrifying shriek tears through the night and Lois bolts into the black, Paul runs after her without thinking, chasing a threat he can't see toward a danger he doesn't understand, until a scream that isn't canine stops him cold.
July 28, 2018 AD
The shadow panther corpse beside the campfire is rotting faster than anything Paul has encountered, filling the air with a putrid stench. As Paul tries to project confidence he doesn't feel whilst ordering a headcount, the gaps in their scattered group become impossible to ignore.
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
Paul arrives in Hobart to find Luke standing half-naked in winter and offering apologies instead of explanations. When the supposed crisis turns out to be a lie Jamie knew nothing about, Paul realises he's been conscripted into something far stranger than a relationship intervention—and by the time Luke activates the device in his study, it's already too late to walk away.
July 28, 2018 AD
A severed head on a stake. A camp that fits in a single glance. And a newcomer who keeps mentioning his wife and toddler as though repetition might build a bridge home. Paul knows the script — give the man a role before despair sets in, pitch the problem, introduce the solution, keep moving. He's been running this playbook all day. The trouble is, every time he claps someone on the back and says they'll be alright, he walks away a little faster than the moment before.
July 24, 2018 AD
Jamie didn't ask to spend his morning in airport purgatory, eating chocolate cake and watching delayed flights crawl across departure boards. Paul didn't expect to fly interstate for an emergency only to find his brother at home making breakfast. Yet here they are—two men whose only common ground is the person who isn't there—about to share the longest, quietest car ride of both their lives.
July 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 27, 2018 AD
Meeting Karen and Chris should feel like a victory—more hands, more help, Luke's promise of growth becoming real. Instead, Paul finds himself grappling with an uncomfortable question as everyone around him springs into action with skills and purpose he doesn't possess. When Karen speaks about masterpieces and blank canvases with unshakeable conviction, Paul's skepticism wavers. But as tasks multiply and he's gently redirected away from helping, he begins to wonder what his role actually is.
July 25, 2018 AD
When the portal opens to reveal an elegant blonde woman in professional attire, Paul's disbelief dissolves into desperate hope. Glenda wastes no time, demanding to see the patient, and what follows inside the tent is medieval brutality disguised as medicine.
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 24, 2018 AD
The dust is the colour of dried blood, and the welcome is telepathic. Paul Smith followed his brother through impossible light—and discovered too late that some doors refuse to let you leave. When Jamie is thrown backward by the portal and Luke vanishes with the only key, Paul confronts a truth more devastating than the alien wasteland surrounding him: he may never see his children again.
July 28, 2018 AD
Clivilius spoke, and Paul listened. Now the camp is answering — by falling apart. Every direction he turns, another person is walking away with their own mission, their own grief, their own secrets. A warrior hunting a pirate. A doctor chasing a dead man's voice. A brother's companion disappearing over the dunes with a body that deserves better than this world gave it. Paul wanted silence. What he got was the terrible clarity of being the only one left standing.
The camp empties in every direction — hunters, healers, grievers — each following their own desperate mission into the dust. When the last footsteps fade, Paul turns around to find the only ones who stayed: two dogs standing where the chaos left them, watching him with eyes that don't understand why everyone walked away. In the stillness that follows, Paul discovers that the smallest forms of grief can be the hardest to witness — and the easiest to overlook.
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 28, 2018 AD
Clivilius burned its message into Paul's chest, and he's still feeling the heat when his camp begins emptying like a sinking ship. A warrior marches toward violence. A grieving father sprints after her. A doctor abandons medicine for a voice only she can hear. Paul shouts for silence and nobody even turns around. Now he's standing in the dust with a Shih Tzu and a coriander update, wondering how leadership found the one person least equipped to survive it.
July 23, 2018 AD
As Paul drives through the vast darkness between Broken Hill and Adelaide, the empty highway becomes a confessional where he confronts the uncomfortable truths about his failing marriage, his complicated brotherhood, and the unspoken vow that's pulling him towards Tasmania. When a kangaroo explodes from the scrub and Claire's thirteenth call lights up his silenced phone, Paul realises that some disasters can't be outrun—they can only be survived.
July 24, 2018 AD
After Jamie's blunt assessment of Paul's condition, Paul retreats upstream for a private reckoning with his humiliation—only to discover that the river offers more than cleansing. As he submerges himself in waters that are cold and warm simultaneously, something shifts: the tension that's held him captive since stepping through the portal begins to loosen, washed away by currents that ask for nothing except his presence, leaving him standing on the bank with wet feet and an embarrassing physical response that makes him grateful Jamie can't see him from here.
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.
July 27, 2018 AD
The brief triumph of Luke's BMW becomes another humiliation when Paul buries it in dust within a hundred metres, and the mockery that follows cuts deeper than it should. As the day stretches on and exhaustion compounds with failure after failure, something in Paul begins to fracture. When Luke arrives with more belongings for people who barely have shelter, the dam finally breaks, and Paul discovers that rage has been waiting just beneath the surface all along—rage at the dust, at his helplessness, at becoming someone he doesn't recognise.
July 27, 2018 AD
The fourth morning begins with Paul bracing himself to unwrap the bandage, certain the grey will have returned despite the river's healing. When Glenda materialises behind him with her unnerving silence, the state of his arm becomes secondary to a more uncomfortable truth—Joel is awake now, aware, watching from the tent with eyes that might remember everything. As Paul claims his corner and forces himself to call this alien place home, acceptance comes with a price he's only beginning to calculate.
July 27, 2018 AD
A single pillow. A set of car keys. And an offer that sounds too good to be true — because in Clivilius, it probably is. When Kain hands over his keys, he's trading the last piece of his old life for the promise of something familiar. When Paul watches the ute bunny-hop through the Portal, he's already calculating what it costs to keep secrets from a man who deserves better. Then the engine roars, and for a few reckless minutes, none of it matters. Just speed, dust, and two men remembering what it feels like to be alive.
July 26, 2018 AD
Paul wakes embarrassed after failing his watch, but the morning shatters when Henri's frantic barking leads him to something impossible floating in the river. As recognition dawns on Luke's face and panic replaces his usual calm, Paul watches his brother transform from reluctance to desperate urgency, sprinting downstream toward the lagoon where Jamie waits oblivious.
July 23, 2018 AD
When Luke's cryptic phone call shatters Paul's deteriorating evening, he makes a split-second decision that leads to an undignified escape through the bedroom window and Claire's rose bushes. As he drives west towards Adelaide with scratched arms and a purchased plane ticket he didn't ask for, Paul can't shake the feeling that he's not just running to his brother—he's running from a life that's been slowly suffocating him for years.
July 23, 2018 AD
A marriage collapsing in real time. Claire and Paul circle each other in the kitchen, years of resentment finally erupting. Then Luke calls—needs Paul urgently, already bought the ticket. While Paul listens to Luke's "serious issues," Claire vents to her sister about her "bastard" husband. The window becomes Paul's escape route. Rose bushes become his obstacle. And by the time Claire reaches the porch, his taillights are disappearing into the night.
July 28, 2018 AD
No one answers when you need them. Luke vanishes minutes before Paul arrives. Beatrix is between worlds. And the only people left at the Portal are a man who can't walk and a stranger who doesn't want to be here. Nial Triffett built fences for a living — until Paul's brother decided Bixbus needed them more than Tasmania did. Now Paul has to turn a traumatised abductee into an ally, whilst carrying every supply in camp on shoulders that were trained for piano, not labour.
July 25, 2018 AD
Paul escapes to the river and stands measuring impossible distances when Glenda appears beside him, looking at twenty metres of water and declaring they'll build a bridge. His automatic "we can't" earns a challenging look from the woman who just performed surgery with a t-shirt, and suddenly Paul realises he's arguing against possibility whilst she sees only solutions.
July 25, 2018 AD
The delivery driver is in the toilet. They have minutes — maybe less — to unload tent boxes before Luke's hijacked truck is reported stolen on the other side of reality. Exhaustion makes tempers fray and apologies stumble out half-formed. Then Jamie lifts his shirt, and Paul dicovers that he was hiding something that makes Paul's injured foot feel obscene to mention.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke's truck emerges through the portal loaded with building supplies, transforming the Drop Zone's first delivery into tangible progress—until he extends his hand and asks for something that shatters the moment entirely. Paul's instinct is to comply, to cooperate, to do whatever survival demands. Then he thinks of Claire and the children, and his hand pulls back.
July 28, 2018 AD
Paul's ridiculous escape into fantasy—climbing into a kayak and pretending to paddle through dust—ends with Charity's warning about an imaginary river monster and his humiliating capsizing into reality. But the laughter dies quickly when debate over Duke's cremation reveals Jamie's breaking point, and Paul's careless words about shadow panthers crossing to Earth spark false hope he immediately regrets.
July 25, 2018 AD
Luke hijacks a delivery truck with minutes to spare before the driver finishes in the toilet, transforming tent delivery into frantic chaos. As Paul and Jamie haul boxes in exhaustion, tempers fray and apologies stumble out—then Jamie lifts his shirt. What Paul sees beneath makes his burned foot feel like an insult to mention, and Jamie's calm finally shatters into something raw and terrifying.
July 25, 2018 AD
A dog barks in Clivilius—impossible, absurd, unmistakable—and Jamie's face transforms with recognition before horror replaces it entirely. Luke emerges from the portal carrying more than just supplies, and what should be a reunion becomes Jamie screaming about mouths to feed and Luke's terrible choices. Then Luke shoves back, his hands landing exactly where they shouldn't, and something ruptures that can't be fixed with apologies.
July 25, 2018 AD
Paul returns from the river with hard-won water to find Glenda sitting awkwardly on the tent floor, her arm wrapped in one of his t-shirts, extending a dog treat toward Duke with visible wariness. Before Paul can process what happened, the man whose life she just saved is glaring at his rescuer with pure hostility.
July 28, 2018 AD
The shadow panther's head greets them at camp — mounted on a pole, teeth still stained with blood, a grotesque trophy declaring victory to anything watching from the darkness. Three men arrive carrying different burdens: a newcomer mourning a family he may never see again, a leader trying to hold the settlement together, and a wounded survivor who's reached the limit of what he can carry.
July 25, 2018 AD
When Paul accidentally interrupts a private moment between Luke and Jamie, he retreats into awkwardness—then watches something break in Jamie's face as Luke steps through the portal and vanishes. Left alone with cement and tools, Paul begins arranging supplies with a precision that borders on ritual, building hope from building materials whilst trying not to ask the question that keeps surfacing: what happens when the money runs out?
July 28, 2018 AD
Huddled in the darkness with Kain's blood soaking through Paul's makeshift bandage, a woman's voice cuts through the night claiming she means no harm. But the bloody arrow in her grip and her impossible knowledge of their camp location tell a different story. As something far worse than a stranger growls in the darkness beyond Lois's warnings, Paul faces an impossible choice: trust the armed woman who appeared from nowhere, or stay and face whatever's circling just beyond the light.
July 28, 2018 AD
The absurdity of a barefoot woman dragging a recreational kayak through alien dust should be funny, but Beatrix's torn dress and bloody wounds make it horror instead. As Paul carries her kayak toward camp whilst she deflects every question with monosyllables, Luke storms past them—eyes wild with grief, moving like a man running from something he can't escape. Paul knows what Beatrix will find behind the tents, knows he should warn her, but the words won't come.
July 24, 2018 AD
When Jamie shoves Paul toward the portal in desperate hope, the violent rejection comes with a voice that speaks directly into Paul's mind—five words that transform their imprisonment from possibility into permanence. As Jamie's rage erupts and Luke vanishes without explanation, Paul collapses in the dust and does something he hasn't done in years: he prays to a universe that won't answer, begging that his children will somehow know he never stopped trying to come home.
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.
Gladys Cramer wasn’t looking for trouble—just a quiet glass of red and maybe a cat that actually came when called. But when a Portal opens, a body turns up, and a man with too many secrets begs her trust, Gladys is pulled into something vast, strange, and far too dangerous. She doesn’t know the rules. She doesn’t want the job. Dryly funny, quietly furious, and not at all qualified—Gladys is about to learn that staying out of it doesn’t mean staying safe.
When a series of disappearances grips Tasmania’s remote edges, Detective Sarah Lahey is drawn into a case that threatens to unravel her—professionally and personally. As tensions flare with fellow detective Karl Jenkins, trust becomes a gamble neither can afford. In the search for truth, they’ll find the shadows run deeper than they imagined. Into the Dark is a haunting thriller about loyalty, obsession, and the cost of stepping beyond the light.
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.
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.
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.
