Tag
There is another name in this camp and nobody has offered to introduce him. There is a tent he is inside, and a conversation going on over Chris Owen's head about who ought to be sleeping in it, and a man whose face falls at the suggestion. Chris has spent his whole life reading things that don't answer back, and not one bit of it is any use to him here. So he does the only sensible thing available and picks up a box.
July 27, 2018 AD
There is a fire going and logs to sit on and a smell of smoke, and for about a minute Chris Owen could be back in the Tasmanian bush with a beetle key open on his knee. Then the young man comes out of the tent and stands up in the firelight, and Chris finally gets a proper look at what has been on the other side of that canvas all day. Everything he worked out this afternoon rearranges itself in about four seconds.
July 26, 2018 AD
Chris Owen has the grade right, his hands in the ground, and no idea at all what the rest of the evening has been doing without him. Then a voice, and a torch beam, and three shapes standing at the edge of the light where a moment earlier there had been nobody at all. One of them has come a long way out of her own night to be there. Chris works out why in about a second.
Conservationists Karen and Chris Owen, aged fifty-seven and forty-five, vanished from their remote Collinsvale cottage around 27 July 2018. A neighbour's 000 call three days later brought police to an open front door, daisies on the verandah, and a blood trail belonging to no one the investigation could identify. Their vehicle disappeared. Their geese fell silent. A witness described activity she was geographically incapable of observing. The case offered everything except an explanation.
July 27, 2018 AD
The hole in the ground is no longer Chris Owen's. Word travels about eleven metres in a camp that size, and now there are four people crouched round it and a bag of seed going round, and everybody is delighted. Chris is holding the soil in his cupped hands while other people plant things in it. Somewhere in the middle of all that, somebody says a sentence about water, and Chris remembers what he did at the river.
July 26, 2018 AD
There's a list, and Chris Owen is working down it — the stone fruit, the compost, a drainage problem at the shed footer that his notebook has been quietly complaining about since June. None of it is urgent. Nothing that has gone wrong ever was, before it went wrong. Behind the wall of the house there is also a junction box he has been meaning to deal with since May, and a decision waiting in it that a sensible man would leave until morning.
July 26, 2018 AD
The house has its power back — or it will, once Chris Owen can persuade his hands to hold a tool. Everything he meant to do tonight is still waiting, in the wrong order, in the cold. Behind him the kitchen window is lit, and there are two people inside it who have managed the whole evening perfectly well without him. He will have to go in eventually, and say something. Or not.
July 27, 2018 AD
The camp has loosened and gone noisy, and Chris Owen is drawing table drains in the dust with a stick when he catches a sound underneath the talking that he cannot place. It is coming from the one man in that circle who has every reason not to be making any noise at all. What happens over the next few minutes makes Chris revise a list he has been keeping all day, and he does not enjoy the revision.
July 27, 2018 AD
There is somebody coming across the dust, and Chris Owen's first instinct is to get down and stay down. Karen's is to stand up and wave. Whatever else has changed this morning, that hasn't. The woman jogging toward them is clean, unhurried, and has plainly been here some time — and she is about to ask a question about Luke that neither of them can answer, and to hear an answer that lands squarely on Chris.
July 27, 2018 AD
Every ten paces, a hole. Chris Owen has a tent peg, a river to follow, and no way at all of writing any of it down, so he is carrying the numbers in his head and losing them at roughly the rate he collects them. The ground keeps giving him the same answer, and it is not the answer he wants. And then his wife comes up the line behind him and takes hold of his hand.
July 27, 2018 AD
Two blokes have come back into camp in a vehicle, laughing, filthy, delighted with themselves, and Chris Owen would give a great deal to be either of them. Introductions get made. Somebody asks the obvious question — what is it you actually do — and Karen answers it properly, the way she always does. Chris has an answer ready too. It is four words long and not one of them is true.
July 27, 2018 AD
Chris Owen has found something in the far edge of the trench that he has been waiting most of his working life to find on his own land. He is filthy, he promised to stay out of the way, and there is a visitor in the house. None of that is going to stop him. So he comes in the back door and goes along the passage rather than through the dining room, because the lounge door at that end is shut.
July 27, 2018 AD
Karen has him by the arm and something she badly needs to say, and Chris Owen is not listening to a word of it, because there is a sound coming from behind the tents that he has not heard since he arrived and did not expect to hear again. What he finds at the bottom of the bank is the first thing in this world he has the equipment to understand. It is also the first thing that properly frightens him.
Chris Owen would rather be with soil than with people, and he has spent a lifetime making that sound like a virtue. He watches before he acts — studies a paddock, a person, until he understands it — and calls the waiting patience. He hangs at the edge of every room and every crisis, hands busy, mouth shut, letting his wife do the talking and the world do the deciding. He is quietly sure he sees what the others get wrong. The edge is a comfortable place to stand, and it costs the people around him far more than it costs him.
July 27, 2018 AD
There are two eggs, one pan, and a stove that leans four millimetres to the left, which Chris Owen has measured and not fixed. There is also a wife who prepped the greens and has no interest whatsoever in being told how omelettes work. Somewhere behind all of it there is a far edge of wall still holding water, a visitor who hasn't turned up, and forty minutes of an ordinary Friday that Chris intends to spend being right about breakfast.
July 27, 2018 AD
The wall is finished, and finished properly this time, which is more than Chris Owen could say for any previous attempt at it. His hands are ruined, his back has opinions, and there is a duck egg omelette somewhere in his immediate future. There is also a visitor who was supposed to be here at nine and isn't — one of Karen's bus friends, a species Chris gave up trying to understand a long while ago. He goes down to wash.
July 27, 2018 AD
Chris Owen has gone further up that river than he meant to, and he is alone, which he has not been all day. There is something glinting in the rocks ahead of him and it turns out to be a tool, which is impossible, and then the breeze shifts and explains everything. What he works out standing there is the worst thing he has worked out since he arrived, and it has nothing whatever to do with soil.
July 27, 2018 AD
They are planting a line of coriander back from the rocks to the river, one every ten metres, and Chris Owen has worked out the line is wrong before they are halfway along it. The seed runs out sooner than his wife expected and exactly when he expected. Then there is a long walk back to the camp, with three things in his possession that he has not mentioned to her, and two of them in his pocket.
July 27, 2018 AD
Two women are having an argument a few metres from the fire, and Chris Owen is standing beside them contributing almost nothing, because his fingers are in his pocket and have been all evening. His wife stops mid-sentence and asks him what is wrong with him. He has been hunting for a reason to put it down since the riverbank, and he has found one that will do. He is about to learn what it costs to let go of it.
July 27, 2018 AD
It is a long haul through deep sand and Chris Owen is not dressed for it, hasn't had water since breakfast, and keeps turning round to check that the thing they came out of is still standing behind him. Ahead somewhere is a settlement, and the woman leading them walks as though it were the most reasonable destination in the world. Chris has begun counting the things that aren't there, and he can't make himself stop.
July 27, 2018 AD
Somebody has to decide what happens to four coriander plants, and Chris Owen is the only person in this camp who has given it a thought. He puts them in properly, which takes a while, and then discovers that the two things every gardener does without thinking are both beyond him here. After that there is a tent going up that he isn't needed for, a river running away upstream, and the first thing he has asked anybody for since he arrived.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.