A universe preserved in memory. 14 million words. Centuries of interconnected history. One ancient intelligence holding it all together. You were supposed to find this.
Sarah Louise Jennings, born on 5 May 1948 in Gawler, South Australia, was the only daughter of the farmer Edward Jennings and his wife Margaret, and the child who most took after her bookish, creative mother. She left the farm at eighteen for Adelaide, trained as an artist and teacher, kept her own name on marrying Peter Hollis, and became a respected botanical illustrator. Her mother's lifelong confidante, she lived openly the creative life Margaret had been denied.
April 3, 1926 AD
Mary Catherine Smith, née Hargreaves, was the eldest daughter of a hard Leicester household who built her whole self out of competence and duty. Born in 1926, she raised her younger siblings before her own children, followed her husband to Adelaide in 1964, and found in a late conversion the order and standing she had always craved. Devout, formidable, and exacting, she dispensed a love that never quite arrived without its ledger. She died in 2013, aged eighty-seven.
Mary Ellen Fairchild (1777–1857) was a Painswick-born healer and midwife, daughter of a herbalist and a midwife, and one of Brierly's five founding Guardians. Recruited by Jonathan Blackwood for the one craft the settlement could not survive without, she crossed to Clivilius in 1810 and built its first clinic and herb garden, tending its sick for nearly half a century. She trained her successor, Alice Turner, and outlived every other Guardian to become the last of them — the settlement's final link to Earth, closed at her death.
Kain Thomas Jeffries was a twenty-three-year-old construction apprentice and the only son of Thomas and Louise Jeffries, born into Tasmania's most enigmatic dynasty on 8 April 1995. Known for his athletic prowess, adventurous spirit, and dedication to his pregnant fiancée Brianne Sitch, Kain's promising future was cut short when he vanished on 26 July 2018 whilst checking on his uncle Jamie Greyson, becoming another victim of the mysteries surrounding both the Jeffries family and the dimensional threshold to Clivilius.
Graham Edward Porter (b. 12 October 1961, Bristol) was a civil engineer who spent his career in flood management and water conservation across the Somerset Levels and West Country. The studious son of a waterworks fitter and the first in his family to attend university, he was a careful, conservative engineer who expressed love through competence rather than warmth. He married the hydrologist Lillian Hughes in 1988, and their only child, Nathan, left in 2018 and fell out of contact, a loss he never understood.
Born in Hobart in 1986, Jenny Alexandra Triffett built a distinguished career as a drama teacher and arts advocate, earning the 2016 Tasmanian Arts Educator Award for her innovative work at St. Michael's Collegiate School. Her dedication to nurturing young talent through inclusive, dynamic teaching defined her professional life until July 2018, when her husband Nial's mysterious disappearance preceded her own transition to Clivilius, where she continues educating Bixbus's children whilst forever separated from her grieving Earth family.
Pavel Novak, born in Ostrava in 1949, was a Vítkovice ironworks fitter and the younger brother of the surgeon Mikhail. Widowed when his wife Eva died of cancer in 1985, he emigrated with his young son Stefan to Adelaide in 1987, worked the Holden line at Elizabeth, and married Dorothy Hennessy. An undemonstrative man who loved through provision, he became the steady grandfather his son refused to be, and died in a Salisbury nursing home in 2017.
Gladys May Cramer, born 17 August 1981 in Hobart, Tasmania, built thirteen years of meticulous professional achievement at Aurora Energy before a failed workplace test and dismissal shattered her carefully ordered life. Raised in Claremont as the responsible elder sister to impulsive Beatrix, Gladys embodied methodical competence until discovering Brody Taylor's body in 2014 initiated her slow unravelling. In July 2018, friend Jamie Greyson's partner Luke Smith exposed her to inter-dimensional portals and impossible truths, culminating in Joel Gibbons' murder and receiving Cody Jennings' dying designation as Fourth Guardian of Belkeep—thrusting her into responsibilities she never sought.
In winter-locked Hobart, Jenny Triffett’s husband vanishes without warning. The police insist he left willingly. But Jenny sees signs others miss—bruises on her son, shadows that don’t belong. As her sense of reality begins to splinter, she finds an unlikely ally in Sharon Pafistis, another woman grasping for answers. Together, they uncover fragments of something dark and impossible to explain. But someone is watching. Someone knows what they’re doing. And the closer Jenny gets to the truth, the more she wonders if she’s saving her son—or walking straight into the trap.
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.
Beatrix Cramer survives on invention—faces borrowed, trails broken, truths bent just enough to pass. Between two worlds, she hides behind names that aren’t hers and choices that cut too close. Livestock heists, police stations, and broken families blur into a journey both absurd and perilous. But in Clivilius, disguise is never protection for long. Every mask has its weight, every trail its consequence—and Beatrix must decide whether she is escaping danger, or simply carrying it with her.
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.
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.
Gladys Cramer wasn’t looking for trouble—just a quiet glass of red and maybe a cat that actually came when called. But when a Portal opens, a body turns up, and a man with too many secrets begs her trust, Gladys is pulled into something vast, strange, and far too dangerous. She doesn’t know the rules. She doesn’t want the job. Dryly funny, quietly furious, and not at all qualified—Gladys is about to learn that staying out of it doesn’t mean staying safe.
Men are vanishing across Tasmania, and Detective Senior Constable Karl Jenkins is running out of time, patience, and sanity. Every lead points to Luke Smith—but proving it means crossing lines Karl can't uncross. He breaks into houses without warrants. He sees faces in windows that shouldn't be there. He chases the wine-soaked Gladys Cramer through high-speed pursuits only for her to slip away. His partner becomes collateral damage. His sergeant's warnings go ignored. Karl knows something monstrous is happening on this island, and he'll tear through every boundary to expose it. Even if it destroys him.
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.