4338.211 · July 30, 2018 AD
Eight-Legged Envoys
The firewood came from Earth. Karen doesn't think about that until movement catches her eye — a flicker at the edge of vision, a shape too familiar to dismiss. What she finds hidden in the plastic wrapping isn't supposed to exist here. Neither is she. But something made it through the portal alongside the logs and the dust, and now Karen has a choice: let this world finish what the crossing started, or become the keeper of something impossibly fragile.
The sun hammers down without mercy. Karen stacks firewood in the brutal heat, each bag heavier than the last, dust coating her throat and settling into every crease of skin. Her mind drifts to places that breathed — rainforest understoreys, coral shallows, ecosystems that whispered complexity. Here, silence presses in like weight, and life feels like something she might have imagined.
Then movement breaks the stillness.
A flicker at the edge of vision. A shape behind fogged plastic — legs splayed, jointed like delicate scaffolding. A huntsman. Not some Clivilian mimicry, but a true Earth native. Delena cancerides, if she isn't mistaken. It must have been hiding in the woodpile since Collinsvale, folded into the stack unnoticed, enduring the rupture between worlds.
A fellow interloper.
The thought anchors her even as it tightens her throat. Here in a dimension that offers nothing but dust and rocks, this small uninvited traveller clings on. If it can find purchase here — alone, unmoored, unwelcome — perhaps they can too.
She tears open the plastic, expecting one survivor.
She finds dozens.
A nursery of spiderlings, recently hatched, scattering with astonishing speed across the parched wood. Lives that shouldn't exist here, pulsing and responsive, seeking refuge in crevices that don't exist.
Karen doesn't hesitate. She raids the Drop Zone for containers, punches ventilation holes, creates moisture control. Crude shelters. Makeshift arks. She transfers each spiderling with cupped palms, murmuring nothing aloud but carrying a litany within — a vow that these lives will not be extinguished while she still draws breath.
Her caravan becomes a biological outpost. The first non-human colonists of this inhospitable realm, sheltered by a woman who finally understands what she's meant to do here.
