Bruise Without A Wound

“In Clivilius, nothing bruises clean—and no one walks back from the dark unchanged.”

The early evening sun cast a warm, golden veil over our modest settlement, bathing the crude outlines of tents and sheds in a soft, almost painterly light. It mingled with the gentle flicker of the fires we had kindled around the perimeter—each flame a sentinel, standing guard as the day slowly tilted into evening. The interplay of natural and man-made light created a scene that was strangely serene, its beauty sharpened by the fragility of our circumstances.

For a fleeting moment, I was taken back to summer evenings in Hobart—specifically, to the coastal shallows near the estuary, where the water would sometimes shimmer with bioluminescent plankton. I remembered trailing my fingers through the tide and watching the sea light up in response, as though the ocean itself were breathing in pulses of blue light. The memory warmed something deep inside me.

That natural rhythm—silent, reactive, alive—felt eerily echoed here in Clivilius. These flames weren’t sea-glow, but they shared a similar purpose: small bursts of light fighting against a tide of encroaching dark.

I smiled to myself, briefly, almost shyly, as if the memory were a private indulgence. It was a kind of comfort, I supposed, to see echoes of my old life manifest in this strange place, even if only through metaphor.

But the smile faded quickly, swept away by the constant undercurrent of vigilance that ran beneath every moment here. Beauty was always barbed with consequence in Clivilius.

The fires, picturesque though they might appear, weren’t kindled for ambience. They were born of necessity. Guardians more than ornaments. Our priority now was to conserve our limited firewood supply, letting the flames burn low through the late afternoon and only feeding them once the shadows thickened into full night. Every log counted. Every ember meant another hour of protection.

I crouched beside one of the smaller fires and stirred its glowing core with a length of charred branch, the orange coals shifting and cracking like sun-baked clay. The rhythmic motion grounded me, gave my restless hands purpose. My gaze drifted to the low flames, and an idea settled gently in my mind like ash on skin—this fire would be perfect for cooking tonight’s meal.

That thought, simple and domestic, brought an unexpected sense of comfort. A shared dinner. A campfire meal. It was a ritual that reached across time and place—older than history, as vital as breath. I had spent so many nights like that in the Tasmanian wilderness, huddled close to colleagues and students, trading anecdotes and theories over tins of beans and scorched bread. The heat of the fire, the crackle of twigs, the low murmur of tired voices—those were the elements of memory that still clung to me like the scent of smoke on wool.

Here, too, the idea of a communal meal offered something close to hope. A fragile, flickering sort of normality.

From where I knelt, I had a clear line of sight to the main fire, where Paul and Nial stood in quiet conversation. Their postures were relaxed, but their heads were bowed close, the tone of their voices low and weighty. I couldn’t catch the words, but the cadence was earnest, considered. No laughter, no idle chatter.

I didn’t move closer. I didn’t need to. Insects, I remembered, communicated through far more subtle means—pheromones, vibrations, nuanced shifts in movement. Their social systems, while foreign to many, were deeply intricate. A flick of an antenna, the twitch of a leg, a hum of wing—these were entire conversations, dense with intent.

And humans, I had come to realise, weren’t all that different. There was a language in how Paul clasped Nial’s shoulder, in the way Nial’s gaze flicked toward the rolling hills. A choreography of responsibility, of new bonds forming in the vacuum left by old certainties.

We were learning how to read one another again, here in this fractured place. Rebuilding the social fabric thread by thread, gesture by gesture. I let them speak without interruption, respecting the quiet intensity of their dialogue. Whatever they were discussing, it mattered. And somehow, I trusted that it would find its way back to me in time.

Turning back to the fire at my feet, I let the silence settle again, the sounds of Clivilius filtering in—the hiss of embers, the soft murmur of wind across dusty hills, the faint movements of others in the distance. We were all in motion, together yet apart. Islands on a shared sea of grit.

But for this moment, I let the fire hold my attention. Let its light ward off the deep questions that lingered, unsolved, in the corners of my mind.

As I crouched low, coaxing the fire with careful flicks of my stick, a shift in the ambient noise drew my attention. The subtle rhythm of camp life—the quiet rustling of wind through canvas, the soft crackle of flames—was disrupted by a familiar, uneven cadence. Kain.

He had returned to camp.

His limping figure emerged between the tents, moving slowly but with more determination than I’d expected. His presence sent a ripple through the fabric of the scene—subtle, but palpable. From where I sat, I saw how his arrival caused Paul and Nial’s private conversation to falter. Their postures straightened, their expressions adjusted. The low murmur of their exchange lifted into clearer speech, their tones adopting a more performative edge now that a third voice had joined the mix.

Kain’s voice carried across the camp with its usual lack of reservation, slicing through the evening like the sudden cry of a crow. “What’s with all the extra fires?” he asked, his tone curious but laced with a fatigue that had never quite left him today.

I didn’t lift my head to watch the exchange unfold. There was something oddly comforting in choosing not to. Instead, I kept my gaze fixed on the coals in front of me, watching the red glow pulse and shift with each subtle movement of my stick. Sparks leapt briefly into the air, vanishing almost as soon as they appeared—tiny reminders of the impermanence of everything here.

I let Paul’s voice drift across to me, weaving into the background like a steady current beneath the camp’s activity. His tone, calm and practical, did what it always did—it anchored me. Whatever he said in reply to Kain’s question was measured and methodical, no doubt outlining the reasons behind our new fire perimeter, the need to keep the Shadow Panthers at bay, the urgency of visible, reliable defences.

It was reassuring to know he was handling it. He always would.

The three of them spoke for a while, their words ebbing and flowing like a tide I chose not to wade into. I let it all wash past me—their concerns, their questions, their attempts to make sense of this twisted place—while I focused instead on the more immediate reality before me. The fire was hot, ready now, the bed of coals beginning to flatten into an even layer, ideal for cooking. A small task, yes. But one grounded in necessity, in the quiet repetition of care.

There was a strange kind of solace in that.

From the corner of my eye, a movement caught my attention—a subtle blur of motion breaking the stillness beyond the perimeter. I turned slightly, squinting against the amber glow of the fires, and saw Chris making his way back from the direction of the lagoon. His silhouette stood out against the fading light, his arms swinging low, but not with their usual relaxed cadence. There was a tautness to his stride, an urgency that didn’t sit right with me. My breath hitched.

I abandoned the fire I had been tending, brushing my palms against my trousers as I moved quickly towards him. The ground beneath my boots felt suddenly less stable, as if it too had sensed the shift in atmosphere. Chris wasn’t one for unnecessary haste—if he was moving like this, something had happened. My thoughts raced ahead of me.

As I drew closer, I could make out the stiff set of his shoulders, the slight rigidity in his neck. It was the posture of an animal caught mid-flight, not quite running, but hyperaware—like a leaf mantis, frozen on a branch, pretending it wasn't seen. That same survival tension. My concern bloomed into something sharper, more instinctive.

“What the hell happened to you?” I blurted as I reached him, my eyes immediately locking on the raised, purplish bump blooming above his brow like some grotesque flower. The skin was already bruising, the edges swelling. My gut twisted.

Chris flinched slightly at my tone but didn’t stop moving. His hands were restless at his sides, fingers twitching as though they didn’t know what to do with themselves. “The rocks around the lagoon are slippery,” he said, voice light—too light. Something nestled beneath his words like a tick under skin: hidden, buried, and unpleasant.

I didn’t buy it.

“And you hit your head?” I pressed, moving alongside him now, reaching out to gently take hold of his forearm. His pace slowed, but the tension didn’t leave his body. It was like holding onto a cable stretched too tight.

He frowned, reluctant. “Yeah,” he muttered, and that was all.

Just “yeah”.

Chris—who usually couldn’t help but explain things in unnecessary detail, from fungal spore patterns to sediment formation rates—had suddenly become monosyllabic. It put my nerves further on edge.

“Did you black out? Are you concussed?” The words tumbled out of me before I could temper them, worry lacing every syllable. My heart drummed a fast beat in my chest, the entomologist in me suddenly overridden by the human who cared too much.

He shook his head with an air of forced nonchalance. “It was just a small cut.”

But that wasn’t a cut.

I leaned in, peering at the injury, my eyes scanning the mottled skin, the way the edges puffed without breaking. “It doesn't look cut to me,” I said, voice quieter now, almost to myself. “There's no blood. No open wound.”

He shrugged. “Perhaps I didn't hit it as hard as I thought,” he offered, evasive. Then he turned and kept walking, leaving me staring after him.

I followed, my boots crunching softly on the dust as my mind churned. His answer had the right words, but none of the tone. It was like a mimicry of reassurance—a butterfly wing painted with false eyes to scare away the predator, hiding the truth beneath.

There was something he wasn’t telling me. I could feel it in the way he wouldn’t meet my gaze. In the forced steadiness of his pace. In the small fracture in his voice when he first spoke.

It gnawed at me, deep and slow, like the steady work of beetles burrowing through bark. Something had happened down by the lagoon. Something more than a slip on the rocks.

As we neared the campfire, its light casting long fingers across the dust, I saw Paul glance up. His gaze moved between us, sharp and assessing, like a hawk catching the twitch of a mouse in the undergrowth. His eyes lingered on Chris’s bruised temple, and I could already see the question forming on his tongue.

“The clumsy bugger slipped on the rocks,” I said quickly, forcing a small smile that I hoped read as casual. My tone was light, but a little too quick—like a spider darting over water. I needed to steer attention away before it settled, before Paul decided to dig deeper. Whatever had happened at the lagoon, Chris wasn’t ready to speak of it, and I wasn’t prepared to force him. Not here. Not yet.

Paul gave a slow nod, unconvinced but willing to let it drop. For now.

I knew the cost of stirring the sediment too soon. In a place like Clivilius, where the ground itself felt laced with unseen tension, secrets could act like tectonic stress—harmless if left untouched, catastrophic if cracked open in the wrong moment.

As we rejoined the others, the heat from the fire brushing against my skin, I found myself only half-present. The murmurs of conversation, the hiss of dry wood catching flame—all of it faded into a low, indistinct hum. I couldn’t stop my mind from circling back to the lagoon. To Chris’s strange demeanour. The bruise without a wound. The evasiveness.

Something had happened. I felt it as surely as I felt the pulse in my wrist. And whatever it was, it wasn’t just a clumsy misstep on slick stone.

In Clivilius, nothing was ever just what it seemed.

Each small event, each off-note in someone’s voice or shift in their posture, had a way of threading itself into a larger pattern—one we couldn’t yet see clearly. Chris’s injury was another strand in that web. Tangled. Unexplained. Heavy with implication.

But I kept my silence, for now. The fire crackled beside me, glowing embers rising into the dusk like lost thoughts.

I didn’t know what Chris was hiding.

But I was certain it would find its way to the surface—eventually.