Podcast Episode

March 19, 2026 AD

Episode 001: The Stolen Photograph

Imagine you break into someone's house. Not to steal anything valuable. Not jewellery, not cash, not electronics. You break in because a man you barely know is stranded in another dimension, and his family has vanished, and the only thing you can think to do — the only gesture that makes any sense at all — is to take a framed photograph off his sideboard and carry it across the boundary between worlds. A family portrait. Mum, dad, two kids. The glass is cool against your ribs where you've tucked it inside your jacket. You can feel the edges of the frame pressing into you the whole way through the Portal — that kaleidoscope of impossible light — and when you step out the other side into the dust and silence of Clivilius, you're holding stolen property. Technically. Legally. Unambiguously. But the man's face when you hand it to him. That's the moment I want to talk about today.

March 22, 2026 AD

Episode 002: Welcome Distractions

She's sitting in the driver's seat of an unmarked police car. She's soaked through. Her stitches have torn — she can see the red spreading through the bandage on her hand. Her head is pounding so hard she can barely see straight. And she's trying very, very hard not to notice how her partner's wet clothes cling to his body. That's the moment. Not the blood evidence she's just called in. Not the missing couple whose property they've been searching. Not the dead goose — and yes, there's a dead goose, we'll get to that. The moment is a twenty-nine-year-old detective sitting in the rain, injured and furious, watching a man she has every right to hate walk back towards the car, and feeling something she doesn't want to feel. That's what I want to talk about today.

March 25, 2026 AD

Episode 003: Dust Trails

A six-year-old girl is drawing in the back seat of a car. She's drawn a road — long and straight, stretching to a vanishing point that falls off the edge of the page. She's drawn a sky, big and empty. A wedge-tailed eagle with its wings spread wide. And then two stick figures in the back of a wobbly car: herself, with a bow in her hair, and her brother, arms crossed grumpily over his chest, with too many freckles. Her stuffed toy is tucked under her arm, half-flattened from too much hugging. The sausage roll wrapper is scrunched in the door pocket. Her breath keeps fogging the window, and she keeps drawing faces in the condensation — two eyes, a round mouth — that smile sadly for a moment and then vanish. Nobody has spoken in a long time. Her name is Rose. She's six years old. And she has twenty-four days left.

March 27, 2026 AD

Episode 004: His Father's Eyes

A boy who is not yet two years old reaches for his mother in a corridor and says one word. "Papa." She kneels. Her legs ache. She has already spent this morning screaming, searching, and weeping into the dirt floor of a cellar. She has found a hollowed-out book stuffed with damning financial records. She has learned that her cook heard voices and a thud in the east wing at midnight. She has washed the evidence from her face, smoothed her dress, reassembled herself into the mistress of a colonial manor, and she is holding — by a thread — the appearance of a woman who is merely concerned rather than a woman who is terrified. And now her son is looking at her with his father's blue eyes and asking where Papa is. She lies to him. That's the moment.

March 30, 2026 AD

Episode 005: Wolves at the Supper Table

A seventeen-year-old girl walks through the door of her family's tenement, and her nine-year-old sister nearly knocks her off her feet. It's been one day. She left this morning for her first day of work at an Edinburgh fashion house, and she's come back a different person. She's spent the last twelve hours learning to press silk and keep secrets. She's watched a noblewoman pass hidden documents through a dress fitting. She's been told that the last apprentice who asked too many questions simply vanished. She's walked home through Edinburgh's closes with the distinct feeling of being followed, a stranger's perfume clinging to the air behind her. And now she's standing in a cramped room that smells of peat smoke and beef stew, with her little sister's arms around her waist and the weight of a world she can't explain pressing against the inside of her ribs. She's going to have to talk about her day. She's going to have to lie. That's the moment.

April 1, 2026 AD

Episode 006: Idling

A forty-five-year-old man is sitting in the cab of a firewood delivery truck, parked in a lay-by on an empty road in rural Tasmania. His clothes are soaked through. The heater's dead. The windows are fogged solid. His last delivery just got cancelled by text message. He has nowhere to be and no reason to move. In his shirt pocket there's half a joint his mate gave him earlier. It's still dry. He lights it. And inside that fogged cab, sealed off from the world by a storm that doesn't care who he is or what he's done, Jim Hedger stops pretending that the morning didn't leave a mark. That's the moment.

April 3, 2026 AD

Episode 007: Dark Gifts

Thirteen hundred years before Christ was born, a man with claw marks down his back carries a sack of four mewling leopard cubs through a tear in reality and into another dimension. He collapses on the other side. His legs give out on the packed earth of a settlement called Andhakara. His vision greys. His wounds, wrapped in cloth and forest herbs by trackers who knew better than to ask questions, have reopened. Blood seeps through the bandages. People are shouting. Hands are gripping his arms to keep him upright. He manages one sentence before he loses consciousness: "The cubs. Take the cubs. The enclosures." Four lives, torn from their mothers in the Western Ghats of India, carried across the boundary between worlds by a man who nearly died to get them. They don't know where they are. They don't know that the forests of their birth are not merely miles away but dimensions removed. They know only that they are hungry, and frightened, and surrounded by scents that bear no relationship to anything they've ever experienced. They will change everything. That's the moment.

April 5, 2026 AD

Episode 008: Dark Reflections

A man is polishing an espresso cup in an empty café in Edinburgh. The cup's surface catches the pendant lights and warps his reflection into something older, something more haunted than the face he shows the world. He tilts it. Watches the light bend. Watches the shadows form where none should exist. He has been doing this for eight months. Showing up. Making coffee. Wiping surfaces. Being the last to leave. He is, by every visible measure, a dedicated barista with a talent for punctuality and an unusual willingness to stay late. He is also a Guardian of Clivilius. And the family that owns this café has no idea why he's really here. Tonight, alone in the storeroom after the owner has gone home, he finds a ventilation grate that's been moved. And everything changes.

April 8, 2026 AD

Episode 009: The Price of Normal

How much does normal cost? If you're Kate Gibbons — forty-one, single mother, Glenorchy, Tasmania — the answer is approximately twenty-three dollars. That's what her nineteen-year-old son Joel spends on a Woolworths bag of chicken schnitzel, sea salt chips, fresh broccoli, and a tub of vanilla ice cream on a Tuesday evening when neither of them can afford it and both of them need it more than they can say. Twenty-three dollars. In a household where the electricity bill is overdue and the credit card is at its limit and thirty-seven dollars is supposed to stretch across seven days of meals. Twenty-three dollars that Joel doesn't have, spent on food they don't buy, prepared in a kitchen neither of them can comfortably enter since this morning, when a government document with a name Kate had hidden for nineteen years landed between them and detonated. That's the moment. Not the revelation. Not the lie. The meal that follows.

April 11, 2026 AD

Episode 010: The Dog That Waited

Behind a locked door in South Hobart, a German Shepherd has been standing guard for three days. His water bowl is dry. His food bowl has been licked to a shine. Nobody has spoken to him, touched him, or opened the door since the morning his handler walked out and didn't come back. He's still at his post. That's the moment.

April 13, 2026 AD

Episode 011: Cracks Over Breakfast

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.

Episode 012: The Thursday Ministry

A woman is sitting in an ageing Toyota Corolla in an Adelaide suburb at half past nine on a Thursday morning in July. The engine is running. The heater is trying. Her breath is fogging the windscreen in pale, anxious plumes. In her handbag — brown leather, fraying at the corners, stubborn clasp — there is a laminated A4 sheet. Typed the night before. Double-checked. Cross-referenced. Laminated. It is titled "Greta Smith's Official Thursday Visiting Schedule." It is colour-coded. That's the moment.