Sanctum Lukei
Sanctum Lukei is the first of the five Bixbus portals, bonded to Luke Nathaniel Smith and standing on the plain beside the Bixbus River where he first crossed into Clivilius in July 2018. For a time it was shared with Beatrix Cramer. From 2019 it stood within Vault A of the Bixbus Portal Complex, reserved for high-priority transfers, and early settlers knew it as the First Gate.
The First Gate
Sanctum Lukei was the first portal to stand in Bixbus. It is bonded to Luke Nathaniel Smith, and it stands on the patch of open plain beside the Bixbus River where Luke first came through into Clivilius on 23 July 2018. Like the four portals that followed it, it is a translucent upright plane when inactive, roughly three metres wide and five metres high, faintly luminous, with no frame and no visible support. It has never moved.
For the first days of the settlement it was the only way in or out. Luke crossed back and forth through it over 23 and 24 July, and on 24 July he ferried the boxed tents through it that became the first shelter in Bixbus. That same day Paul Smith and Jamie came through with him, and when they tried to return, the portal threw them back. Only Luke could cross. It was at Sanctum Lukei that the rule governing every later arrival was first learned: the journey was one way for everyone but a Guardian.
The people who came through it in that first week arrived with little or no warning. Kain Jeffries was forced through on 26 July, and Karen and Chris Owen found themselves standing beside it in the ochre dust the following day. The settlers of 2018 remembered it afterwards as something that stood in the open air, in plain sight of the camp.
A Shared Door
When Beatrix Cramer became a Guardian, she did not at first have a portal of her own. From her first crossing on 28 July 2018 she worked through Sanctum Lukei alongside Luke, shuttling camping supplies from his house in Berriedale to the Drop Zone that was growing up around it. On 29 July she held it open inside her parents' house while Paul Smith and Nial Triffett tried, briefly and successfully, to carry a WiFi signal across.
The arrangement lasted until Jarod James became a Guardian. Soon afterwards a second portal appeared, which Beatrix and Jarod shared, and from then on Sanctum Lukei answered to Luke alone.
Vault A
The Drop Zone spread out across the ground in front of the first portals through the second half of 2018, and in November and December the Bixbus Founding Architecture Project fenced them in. From January 2019 a hall was built around Sanctum Lukei where it stood, roofed by May and lettered Vault A. A ramp from its threshold floor later led down into the Undercroft.
Of the five portals, Sanctum Lukei carried a ceremonial weight that none of the others did. Within the Complex it handled high-priority transfers: senior figures, urgent consignments, and whatever the Clivilius High Council wanted brought through without delay. Vault A was the hall most often visited by dignitaries and the one least used for routine freight.
Out of Sight
Public access to the Vaults ended in July 2019, and the portal that had once stood in full view of the camp became one that most of Bixbus never saw. The settlers who had arrived through it in 2018 went on calling it the First Gate long after the walls went up. By 2026 few others in the city knew it existed.
