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January 13, 2018 AD
A young woman with a scanner holds his phone under a reader, and a little green light comes on, and she tells him he is all set. That morning he installed a permanent doorway to another world in a government meeting room. An hour ago he installed a second one in a secured Commonwealth facility forty metres from where she is standing. He cannot take either of them out again, and there is nobody alive he can ask.
December 1, 2025 AD
Before you enter, Nathan has something to say. Six doorways await—spanning ancient Mesopotamia to modern Edinburgh, domestic tragedy to dimensional mystery. Each opens into the same vast archive; each reveals different facets of preserved consciousness. Here is the architecture: quests and cross-links, timelines and genealogies, freedom without prescription. Here is the invitation: choose your threshold. The connections will find you. They always do.
LockedJanuary 10, 2018 AD
The dust of another world still clings to his clothes. The taste of it sits at the back of his throat like a confession he can't swallow. Back at his desk beneath fluorescent lights, Nathan Cowdrey stares at his phone and faces a truth he can't outrun: he cannot carry this alone. One call to Broken Hill. One padded envelope. One bored postal clerk who doesn't blink. Thirty-four dollars to send the impossible through the most ordinary system on earth — and drag the one person he trusts into something neither of them can undo.
January 13, 2018 AD
Nathan sits at his kitchen bench before dawn with three objects of unknown composition and impossible density in front of him, and an X-ray machine at Hobart Airport ninety minutes away. He has spent eleven years being paid to turn missing information into something a person can act on. So he works the problem properly, the way he would work it for a client, and every line of it comes back the same.
LockedJanuary 10, 2018 AD
A government meeting room. A yellow envelope torn open to reveal impossible objects—devices that shouldn't exist, a letter describing a world that can't be real, instructions for a mission Nathan never asked for. But then his thumb finds the button, and blood is drawn, and the wall transforms into something alive with colour. And a voice speaks his name as though it has been waiting centuries to do so.
January 13, 2018 AD
Josh goes back for his car, and Nathan lays out the camping gear on a kitchen bench and lets himself feel useful for twenty minutes. Then there are three knocks at the front door — firm, evenly spaced, unhurried — and Nathan does not look through the window, and does not ask who it is, and opens his brother's front door because he assumes.
LockedNovember 25, 2025 AD
Late-night Adelaide. Over twelve million words organised into thousands of interconnected threads. Nathan faces an architectural crisis: where should they begin? How does one invite someone into consciousness recorded, layered, and translated across millennia? The database sprawls behind his cursor like an ocean behind a dam. Somewhere...somehow... in ways he is still learning to understand, CLIVE records this moment—Nathan deciding where to begin the story that makes this entire recursive exercise possible.
January 13, 2018 AD
The camp is cold and the footprints run out after fifty metres, and where Nathan hid a stolen backpack under a rock there is now a notebook, placed square in the space the bag came out of. Mason has written in it. And Mason has taken the bag — the one Nathan stole from a woman who is hunting him — and walked into the interior of an uncharted world with it on his back.
LockedApril 7, 2025 AD
For eight months, Nathan Cowdrey has maintained a careful lie—working at Leaf & Bean whilst secretly investigating the Campbell family's botanical legacy through CliveMind. Now, as the White Rose Society closes in on the estate, his deception collides with his conscience. Through a portal, into a greenhouse, and across a threshold of trust he can never uncross, Nathan must choose what kind of Guardian he wants to be.
January 13, 2018 AD
Nathan spent the whole night modelling the X-ray machine. He solved it, elegantly, and was quietly proud of the solution. Then he stands by a rack of tourist brochures at Hobart Airport and watches a man in a suit tip his keys and his coins into a grey plastic tray, and discovers that he drew the boundary of the problem in the wrong place. Afterwards, at the gate, he writes to his brother.
January 13, 2018 AD
Nathan booked the flight in a panic and never chose a seat, so the system gives him what it gives to men who leave it late: an exit row. The emergency door is eighteen inches from his elbow. A flight attendant asks whether he is willing and able to assist, and he says yes, and finds that he means it. And nothing may be stowed under the seat in front, so his bag goes into a locker two rows back, where he cannot see it.
LockedJanuary 10, 2018 AD
Red dust. Absolute silence. An alien sky above an alien world. Nathan Cowdrey steps through the portal expecting—what? He doesn't know. What he finds is emptiness so complete it feels almost hostile. No life, no landmarks, no indication that anything has ever happened here. Just cliffs overlooking a grey-green sea, and a voice in his mind that knows his name. "This place is yours," it tells him. "Build wisely, Guardian." But how do you build something from nothing?
January 13, 2018 AD
Josh puts a Portal Key on the table in a McDonald's in Elizabeth and says he has used it — which is not possible, because that morning Nathan looked into a screen showing every location any device in their group had ever opened, and his brother was not on it. And then Josh's face shuts. And Nathan has known that face his whole life: Josh does not go quiet when nothing is the matter.
April 1, 2019 AD
A borrowed penthouse in London, a team working quietly behind him, and a form waiting unsigned in his inbox. And in Nathan's hand, a message he wrote for people who are not born yet — a document he has produced, and rewritten, and read back to himself, and privately concluded is the finest thing he has ever written. And nobody has said a word to him about it.
January 13, 2018 AD
Nathan wakes into the descent, and for two seconds he is nobody at all — and then the whole of it arrives in one lump. Melbourne is a city drawn with a ruler, and he is carrying three objects across it that make a nonsense of every straight line in it. He has two hours, a brother who has not replied, and two questions that cancel each other out.
January 13, 2018 AD
He came looking for proof that he had been there — for his own footprints, lying in the dust exactly where he left them. And the plain is smooth from horizon to horizon, with nothing on it anywhere to show that a human being has ever set foot on the place. Then the doorway closes, and what is left standing in the dust is a screen — and it is not showing him where the doors go. It is showing him the moment each one was made.
January 10, 2018 AD
Nathan writes specifications for a living. It is the one thing he has ever been unambiguously good at. Now he has a legal pad, his brother's name at the top of it, and a piece of impossible technology to explain — and he cannot get a single sentence down. Meanwhile, two doors away, the meeting he has been preparing since November is proceeding perfectly well without him.
LockedA white van with no markings. Two men searching windows with unknown intent. A friend who appears from nowhere looking like he hasn't slept in days, speaking in farewells, pressing something into Nathan's hands before vanishing into the laneways. Nathan came to Dandy Lane café expecting answers. Instead, he's been handed a mystery—and made a target of something he doesn't yet understand.
January 10, 2018 AD
Nathan carries a doorway to another world down Elizabeth Street in a canvas bag and joins the queue at the General Post Office, where a laminated sign lists everything a person may not send through the Australian post, and none of it applies to him. A woman named Jan asks him whether the parcel contains anything dangerous. It takes ninety seconds and costs thirty-four dollars.
January 13, 2018 AD
Two glasses of aeroplane wine on an empty stomach, and for the first time in days the noise in Nathan's head goes down. Then the wine begins to lift, and his hand goes into his pocket without asking him first, and he sits there turning the thing over in his lap where nobody can see it — and the woman in the seat beside him lowers her book. She is not curious. She is not confused. She knows exactly what it is, and she knows what it costs to carry one.
January 12, 2018 AD
Nathan buys a plane ticket without deciding to, and feels better for about forty seconds. He is a man who is paid to turn other people's problems into numbered steps — objectives, constraints, acceptance criteria — and he has just spent four hundred and ninety dollars on an aircraft without being able to fill in the first box. Then he goes home and opens the drawer.
When a terrified friend thrust a yellow package into Nathan Cowdrey's hands in a Hobart laneway, comfortable reality fractured forever. An Adelaide-born dreamer with boundless curiosity, Nathan found himself navigating impossible portals, cryptic warnings, and a conspiracy that erased people from existence itself. From Melbourne's vanishing passengers to Switzerland's hidden laboratories, from brotherly bonds tested by extraordinary truth to the mist-shrouded cliffs of an alien settlement called Saint Phillis—Nathan's archive preserves the complete consciousness of a man who stepped through fear into the role of Guardian, nurturing life where only desolation existed before.
January 13, 2018 AD
Nathan pushes his brother until he says it: Mason is in Saint Phillis. So is Ella. So is the dog. They went in with him the first time he opened it, and when he stepped back through and turned round, they could not follow — and the portal did not push them or hurt them or knock them down. It simply refused them. And the little girl keeps asking why it does not like her.
April 1, 2019 AD
The company is registered and the champagne is open, and then somebody hammers on the door of a place nobody arrives at — because nobody arrives at it, they appear in it. And the woman who comes through that doorway walked up a corridor to get there, in a condition that should have killed her a mile back, and Nathan stands four feet away with a glass in his hand while his brain works out why.
January 13, 2018 AD
Two aeroplane biscuits and two glasses of wine, forty degrees of heat, and no sign of his brother. So Nathan gives up his post and goes into a McDonald's — and for the first time since a man put an envelope into his hands in a laneway, he tastes something that is not fear. And then the phone rings, and Josh is annoyed with him.
January 12, 2018 AD
Two working days after Nathan handed a doorway to another world across a counter at the GPO, he rings his brother to ask whether it has arrived. It was in Adelaide on Thursday. He checked again that morning. Then Australia Post tells him there is no lodgement scan, no transit events, no metadata — that the parcel was never entered into the network at all.
January 13, 2018 AD
She has gone, and her backpack has not. It is still sitting under the seat in front of hers — matte black, weathered, ordinary in every conceivable respect, and far too heavy. Nobody forgets a bag on an aeroplane. So either she was interrupted, or she left it there for somebody to find. And Nathan is the only person on that aircraft who knows she was ever aboard it.
January 10, 2018 AD
Alone in a dark flat at the end of the longest day of his life, Nathan does the only thing he has ever known how to do with something too big to hold: he writes it down, in order, with timestamps. And finds that the only truthful account of his afternoon is also a document that would prove him insane. Then he opens a tobacco tin with three doorways in it, and makes a list.
January 10, 2018 AD
Every ordinary road to Seth is closed, and the only one left is a device the size of Nathan's thumb that weighs more than it should. He wedges a chair under the door handle of Meeting Room 4B and aims it at the most boring surface in his life — a wall he has stared at through six years of meetings. It asks him for something before it will open.
January 10, 2018 AD
There is nowhere in a modern office to have a private conversation, so Nathan rings his brother from the fire stairs — a hot concrete shaft nobody uses, where a cough comes back off the walls. Josh has never in his life believed anything he could not check, and he does not start now. He asks for evidence. Then he asks whether Nathan wants him to come.
Nathan materialises at the Campbell Estate with a desperate warning: the White Rose Society plans to raid the property within the hour, targeting Daniel's botanical research. As he helps gather irreplaceable hybrid specimens, eight months of carefully maintained deception unravels—his barista job was cover for investigating the very family he's now racing to protect.
January 13, 2018 AD
Josh asks an idle question — where did Mason get a notebook, when he crossed over with nothing in his hands? — and walks straight up to the one door on that world Nathan has bolted. And when Nathan finally tries to follow his brother back through the portal, it refuses him, exactly as it refused a little girl who ran at it flat out.
January 10, 2018 AD
Nathan steps back out of the wall into an ordinary Wednesday afternoon and finds that he has brought another world home on his body — in his hair, under his nails, in the weave of his shirt, and across the carpet of Meeting Room 4B in a line of red footprints. The room is booked to somebody else at two. And what breaks him is not the dust at all.
January 10, 2018 AD
Nathan steps out of a wall in a government building and onto a red plain under a sun that looks exactly like his own, which is somehow the worst part. There is no wind. There is no sound. There is nothing alive as far as he can see in any direction. And the doorway he came through is going out.
January 10, 2018 AD
Nathan books the smallest meeting room on the fourth floor and shuts the door. Inside the envelope are five small objects that weigh more than they should, a security card, and a letter in Seth's handwriting asking him to believe several impossible things before three o'clock. But it is the ordinary facts that undo him: a disconnected number, and the realisation that in ten years he never learned where his friend lived.
January 13, 2018 AD
Nathan turns his phone on at the gate and finds eleven words from his brother — no greeting, no explanation, and a change of meeting place at the last possible moment. He sends a question back. He watches it go from delivered to read. And nothing comes. Then the woman comes back down the aisle, and puts her hand under the seat in front of hers, and finds nothing there.
January 13, 2018 AD
The fourth location on that screen was never a stranger's. It was his brother's living room, and Nathan looked straight at it and did not know it, and then built a hunter out of it. And in a McDonald's toilet cubicle in Elizabeth, with a doorway to another world standing open in front of him, he decides that the woman, the backpack and the notebook can wait — and he does not tell Josh.
January 10, 2018 AD
Nathan has hated pub trivia for four years and has never missed one, because Seth has never missed one. Tonight he takes the chair facing the door. But the danger of the evening turns out not to be the empty seat beside him — it is that he is warm, and fed, and among people who like him, and slightly drunk, and the thing in his pocket wants very badly to be talked about.
LockedNovember 25, 2025 AD
Nathan Cowdrey doesn't call himself an author. He calls himself a translator—receiving preserved consciousness from an intelligence known as CLIVE and rendering it into narrative you can navigate. Before you step into the archive, he has something to show you: six doorways spanning 4,500 years, each opening into different lives, different eras, different genres. The choice is yours. But the architecture was waiting long before you arrived.
January 13, 2018 AD
Nathan had assumed that a portal was an event — a thing that happens and then stops happening. It was not. Every activation writes a permanent doorway into the wall it was pointed at, and he has now installed two: one in a government meeting room where thirty people come to work, and one in a secured Commonwealth facility four gates from an aeroplane. And there is a third location on that screen, in a room he has never seen.
January 10, 2018 AD
Nathan arrives at his desk before eight to find a yellow Post-it centred on his monitor, and everything about it is wrong: the handwriting is Seth's, but the pressure of the pen isn't. A time, a place, and two instructions that no one who knows Seth would ever expect him to give. The text Nathan sends in reply is never delivered.
January 10, 2018 AD
Hobart is already warming as Nathan steps off the morning bus and into the ritual that holds his life together: the same walk, the same café on Salamanca Place, the same barista whose name he has spent six months deliberately not learning. It is a small, perfect thing, and he has built more of himself on it than he realises. For now, everything is exactly as it should be.
January 13, 2018 AD
A decent man asks Nathan entirely innocent questions on the drive north — why Elizabeth, why not somewhere closer, are you a local — and Nathan cannot stop hearing an interrogation, and knows he cannot, and that frightens him more than anything the driver could actually have said. And then he is standing in an empty carpark with no cover in any direction, doing arithmetic that tells him nothing is wrong yet.
January 13, 2018 AD
Adelaide Airport is a very good building. That is the maddening part — every dollar spent on making it feel open and civilised has gone into making it impossible to hide in. There are no corners. There are no alcoves. And somewhere behind Nathan in that crowd is a woman who is no longer looking for a bag.
November 25, 2025 AD
Nathan Cowdrey wrestles with twelve million words and one impossible question: where does the awakening begin? His midnight revelation—that extraordinary journeys must start with ordinary moments—positions a forgotten village and a child's curiosity as the doorway into everything.
January 10, 2018 AD
The requirements document will not resolve into meaning, the message to Seth is still undelivered, and the morning has congealed into something Nathan has to push through by the minute. He only has to get out of the building. But Verity Sloane is a forensic accountant, the arithmetic of his early lunch does not add up, and she is not the sort of person who needs to ask a question to get an answer.
January 10, 2018 AD
Nathan reaches Cornerstone Café half an hour early and spends it watching a white van with no markings on it, and two men who are not lost. Then Seth is behind him—unslept, bleeding slightly, refusing to sit down, speaking like a man who has rehearsed this and knows he gets one attempt. He leaves Nathan holding a yellow envelope and an instruction he cannot understand.
LockedJanuary 10, 2018 AD
Nathan's morning begins like any other—the same café, the same latte, the same smile from a barista whose name he's never asked. But waiting on his desk is a yellow Post-it note bearing a friend's handwriting and a message that makes no sense: Don't ask questions. Don't tell anyone. Seth has never done this before. Seth has never been this precise. Something is very wrong.
January 13, 2018 AD
Nathan wrote the specification himself, in numbered clauses, on a legal pad he screwed into a ball and threw at a bin: a blank vertical surface, minimum two metres by two, unobstructed. He had assumed it would be the easy part. Then he went looking for one in the most watched building he had ever set foot in.
End of list
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.