Lines in the Dust

“Every step we take here leaves a mark—and the question that haunts me is whether those lines are beginnings, or scars.”

As I stepped into the Clivilian sunlight, I was momentarily blinded by its brilliance.

The white-gold radiance spilled across the horizon with a clarity unlike anything on Earth—sharper, somehow, as if the light itself had been filtered through something purer than atmosphere. The quietness struck me almost immediately. An uncanny, deliberate kind of silence that pressed in against the ears. No wind rattling branches, no birds cutting the sky with their song, no background hum of life at all.

Only the faint crunch of my own footsteps, magnified in the stillness.

It was the sort of silence that made you aware of your own breathing, your own heartbeat, the blood moving through your veins. The sort of silence that reminded you how very alone you were, even when you weren't.

It was in that hush that their absence became glaring.

No Paul. No Jamie. No familiar banter or disagreement drifting across the open air to tether me with its warmth. The space where their voices should have been felt hollow, like stepping into a house where a fire had just gone out—residual warmth still lingering, but the flame itself gone missing.

I pictured them down by the river, no doubt buried in the task of pitching the tent, their concentration swallowing up their usual stream of jibes and chatter. The image steadied me, though the silence around me never fully loosened its grip. Somewhere out there, beyond the gentle swell of the dunes, my brother and my partner were building something. That thought alone was enough to keep my feet moving.

Dragging the shovel behind me, I began my walk across the strange expanse.

The metal edge cut a shallow furrow through the ochre-coloured dust. The sound was a dull scrape, steady and oddly reassuring, grounding me in a place that still felt too vast and too alien to be trusted. With each step, fine clouds of Clivilius dust kicked upward, clinging faintly to my shoes, staining the fabric in rusty tones as though claiming me.

The trail etched by the shovel stretched behind me in a wavering line, stark against the otherwise pristine surface of this world.

There was something almost ceremonial about it, as though I were signing my presence onto a blank canvas. A reminder that we were beginning to leave marks—small, temporary, but marks nonetheless—on this untouched land. The first graffiti on an infinite wall. The first footprints on a beach that had never known tides.

Every now and then I paused, turning to look back.

The groove snaked away towards the Portal's vanishing point, a line scratched across infinity. Each time, the sight tugged at me in ways I couldn't quite name: pride, guilt, awe, and the faintest prickle of fear at altering a world that seemed to breathe with its own quiet consciousness.

Was I an explorer, charting new territory? Or an invader, scratching my presence into something that had been perfect before I arrived?

Still, the sight anchored me. A tangible proof that we were here, that this was not just dream-stuff dissolving on waking, but a reality with dust that clung and soil that remembered.

Paul's voice cut cleanly through the stillness, carried across the open stretch of dust and river air with its usual blend of bluntness and affection.

"Finally!"

The word rang out, startling me from my quiet reverie. I looked up to see him striding towards me, his figure sharp against the gleaming backdrop of the river. His steps were purposeful, shoulders squared, but there was a flicker of relief in his expression that softened the briskness. Excitement too—his eyes gleamed with it, the way they always did when his hands were busy shaping the world around him.

"I wasn't gone that long," I replied, though my tone came out lighter than I'd intended, almost playful.

I extended the items towards him, only to have them snatched eagerly from my grasp. The shovel, the toilet paper—mundane treasures from a world that already felt impossibly distant. The sudden absence of weight in my hands left me oddly bare, as if the simple act of carrying had been part of my tether to this moment.

"You were gone long enough," Jamie chimed in, his voice steady, good-humoured, but with a glance that pulled my gaze where he wanted it to go.

I followed it instinctively.

The tent stood there by the riverside, no longer a jumble of canvas and poles but an almost-complete shelter. Its structure was neat and reassuringly solid against the alien landscape, the fabric rippling faintly in the breeze off the water, catching the sunlight so it shone pale and new.

Like a flag marking the first outpost of our existence here.

The sight tugged at me with unexpected pride. It looked like belonging. It looked like proof that we could do this—that we could take the raw materials of Earth and the raw emptiness of Clivilius and make something that might, with enough stubborn effort, become home.

"You've made great progress. You'll have it finished in no time," I replied cheerfully, my words carrying more warmth than formality.

For a moment, the three of us stood there in something approaching peace. Not forgiveness—not yet—but something close to it. A temporary armistice born of shared labour and the simple satisfaction of watching a shelter take shape.

"I'll come and have a closer look at it later," I added, my voice dropping into something more casual, almost conspiratorial, "but right now I reckon I'd better go find Paul some clothes."

I waved a hand towards my brother's bare chest, his skin browned by the sun and marked faintly with dust from the work. He looked like a construction worker on some impossibly remote site, stripped down to essentials and utterly unbothered by it.

The thought pricked at me—I'd meant to bring some clothes, to think ahead, but my plans had unravelled the moment Gladys appeared at the door. Her intrusion lingered in me still, the ripple of lies and half-truths carried into this world like contraband in my pocket. The weight of it sat uneasily in my chest, a reminder that no matter how far Clivilius stretched, I could not step cleanly into it without dragging shadows from home.

The walk back to the Portal unfolded slowly, each step crunching into the ochre dust.

The shovel's edge had left its furrow like the tail of a reluctant plough, and now I walked beside it, following my own trail backwards. That line was almost accusatory, pointing out the effort wasted in small, laborious journeys. The simple act of carrying things here was beginning to feel like trying to build a city with a teaspoon—possible, yes, but maddening in its futility.

The conviction sharpened with every footfall.

There had to be a better way. The necessity of devising something—a cart, perhaps, or a sled—for transporting supplies became increasingly clear. No longer a passing thought but an imperative pressing into me with quiet insistence.

To build here, to remain here with any sense of permanence, demanded more than muscle and willpower. We needed system. Innovation. Something beyond dragging and stumbling back and forth like pack animals on an ancient trade route.

My eyes drifted often to the line behind me, the scar pressed into Clivilius's untouched surface by the shovel.

It looked both crude and symbolic—a first sketch of civilisation on a blank page. Each glance back seemed to mock my current inadequacy while daring me to imagine something greater: paths, mechanisms, solutions not yet born but already whispering at the edges of my mind.

The solitude of the return journey gave me room to entertain them.

No Paul, no Jamie, no interruptions—only the sound of dust shifting under my shoes and the steady thump of my heart. Space to dwell on the problem, to tug at the loose threads of possibility. I let my thoughts expand, stretching into quiet calculations, strategies forming like shapes in cloud, not yet solid but insistent.

What if I could rig some kind of trolley? Something with wheels that could roll across the packed dust, carrying loads that would break my back if I tried to haul them myself? The hardware shop would have caster wheels—I'd seen them a hundred times, stacked in bins near the checkout. And plywood. Rope. The bones of something useful, if I could just figure out how to assemble them.

Innovation. Adaptation. Foresight.

These would be the currency of our survival here. And though I had no immediate answers, the determination lodged itself deeper with every step.

There had to be another way.

And I would find it.