The Arks We Carry

“Clivilius doesn't care what you bring—only what you're willing to keep alive.”

The monotonous task of stacking bags of firewood had taken on an almost absurd weight in the otherworldly hush of Clivilius. Each motion felt magnified, each step heavier than the last, as though the very ground resented my presence. I moved slowly, shoulders aching beneath the bulk of the load, my breath catching against the grit-thick air that hung motionless around me. Every inhalation scoured my throat raw—dust clinging to the back of my tongue, settling into the creases of my skin.

Above, the sun—merciless and unfiltered by cloud or canopy—burnt a hole in the sky. It glared down, white and unwavering, transforming even this menial labour into a quiet war of attrition. There was no breeze, no birdsong, no reprieve. Only the crunch of my boots in the dust and the dull scrape of plastic against cracked stone as I hauled another bag onto the unsteady pile.

Sweat broke across my forehead, ran in salt-streaked rivulets down my cheeks, and stung my eyes with its insistence. I blinked against it, pausing to swipe my forearm across my brow, and let my gaze wander—if only for a moment—towards the vast, featureless plain that ringed our outpost like a cruel joke.

In my mind, I drifted. Not forward, but backward—seeking out places that breathed. Lush rainforest understoreys alive with the wingbeats of moths and the slow drip of moss-laden branches. The coral shallows off Maria Island, where the reef shimmered in impossible blues and pinks, each inch teeming with purpose. Back then, ecosystems had whispered complexity in every breath of wind. Now, the silence pressed in like a weight, and life—real, wild, complex life—felt like something I might have imagined.

A flicker broke the stillness. A brief, darting motion at the edge of my vision, subtle enough I might have dismissed it as a trick of the heat. But instinct honed over decades of fieldwork stilled me. I crouched, eyes narrowing, scanning the lower edge of the woodpile.

There—half-obscured behind the fogged plastic wrapping of one of the bags—a slender, dark form skittered with sudden urgency. My breath caught. I leaned closer, squinting against the glare. Legs—long, splayed, jointed like delicate scaffolding—tensed against the plastic as the creature sought an escape route.

A huntsman.

Not some Clivilian mimicry or apparition, but a true Earth native. Delena cancerides, if I wasn’t mistaken. My heart surged in recognition, chased by a kind of grief I hadn’t expected. There was beauty in the shock of it. The knowing shape. The way its body hugged close to the plastic, each movement cautious, purposeful. It must have been hiding in the woodpile since Collinsvale—folded into the stack unnoticed, silent, enduring.

A fellow interloper.

The thought anchored me, even as it tightened my throat. Somehow, in spite of the rupture—through light, noise, and the bending of laws I once thought unbreakable—this small, uninvited traveller had made it too. Here it was now, alive in a world that offered nothing but dust and rocks.

I stayed crouched a moment longer, watching it breathe. The stillness between us felt thick with something I couldn’t name—kinship, perhaps, or a shared defiance. This was no ecosystem. No food chain. No leaf litter or canopy. And yet, here it was. Alive. Clinging on.

The symbolism was too obvious, too potent to ignore. If it could find purchase here—alone, unmoored, unwelcome—then perhaps we could too. Not with ease. Not with grace. But with the stubborn will that makes a spider weave silk even in the dark.

Where there is life, however small, the spark of tenacity flickers on.

Observing the spider’s plight, its legs splayed in awkward tension against the fogged plastic, something settled uncomfortably in my chest. Trapped in that thin, crinkled veil, it was a ghost behind plastic—visible but powerless. Here in Clivilius, left to fend for itself on this scorched, sterile plain, its odds were not merely low—they were negligible. The sun alone would cook it dry. The wind would desiccate what little moisture clung to its limbs. There was no shelter, no insects to prey upon, no leaf litter to curl into, no dew. Nothing.

A survivor like this, engineered by evolution to outlast long dry spells and evade predators, had made it all the way through the rupture between worlds—and now stood poised to die from sheer lack of contingency.

I felt it like a blow.

My throat tightened, and an almost childish defiance rose in me. That this one small, anonymous passenger—an eight-legged envoy of Earth—might be snuffed out here, of all places, seemed unspeakably cruel. A quiet life, reduced to a slow, airless suffocation beneath sun-blistered plastic.

Not on my watch.

Before I’d even formed a proper plan, my body had already made its decision. I turned sharply and started moving—stride purposeful, breath shallow but quick. The spider vanished from sight behind me as I beelined for the cluttered chaos we’d dubbed the Drop Zone.

I moved between the piles with growing urgency, boots crunching over grit, sidestepping the seemingly random placement of dust-covered boxes and multiplying hardware equipment. The Drop Zone was a monument to disorder—But I knew what I was looking for.

Hands moving faster now, I dug through an assortment of storage containers. My fingers closed around something solid—cool to the touch, and mercifully intact. I pulled it free.

There.

A cluster of wide-mouthed jars—old polycarbonate canisters once used for some sort of food storage, most likely, repurposed now as whatever we needed them to be. Thick-walled, clear, their seals still firm.

I clutched them like found treasure.

Already my mind was building the solution—ventilation holes, moisture control, shading—basic triage for a creature unfit for open exposure in this dead heat. They’d be crude shelters, yes. But they’d be arks, of a kind.

And that was enough.

I hurried back to the woodpile, the jars clutched tightly against my chest like relics smuggled from a more forgiving world. The plastic surfaces warmed rapidly under the unforgiving sun, but I barely registered the heat. My heart was thudding, not from exertion but anticipation—an anxious readiness threaded through with purpose.

Kneeling, I set the jars down beside me with care and reached for the bag. My hands trembled as they closed around the crinkled edge of the plastic, the material crackling in protest. I braced myself, preparing to coax out the lone survivor I’d glimpsed earlier.

The moment the tear widened, it released a puff of stale, dusty air that rushed into my face—and with it, a shock that knocked the breath from my lungs.

I stumbled back, one hand rising instinctively to my mouth.

It wasn’t just a single huntsman.

There, nestled within the folds of bark and the fractured contours of desiccated logs, was a delicate nursery—an entire cluster of spiderlings, recently hatched. Dozens of them. Their tiny bodies shimmered darkly in the harsh light. As the bag opened, they scattered with astonishing speed, their legs a blur against the parched wood.

I froze, knees in the dirt, a tightness curling in my throat.

These were lives. Not abstract data points or textbook examples, but pulsing, responsive lives. And now they were mine to reckon with.

A wave of responsibility surged through me, followed almost immediately by doubt. What right did I have to interfere? And yet—how could I not? These were impossibly delicate creatures, evolved through millennia to survive in the mottled shade of eucalypt bark or under damp, decomposing leaf litter. Not this. Not this sterile expanse of scorched stone and dead air.

Could I recreate even a fraction of what they'd need? The microclimate, the prey base, the damp shelter, the biological rhythms carried invisibly within a forest floor?

I didn’t know. But watching them scatter in silent urgency, seeking refuge in the non-existent cracks and crevices of this alien terrain, I knew one thing with certainty: I had to try.

Time was slipping through my fingers like the dry sand that surrounded me.

I moved quickly, instinct overriding hesitation. With a care bordering on reverence, I reached out—cupped palms forming makeshift cradles—and began lifting them one by one. Each spiderling was impossibly light, a whisper of life balanced on the edge of extinction. I murmured nothing aloud, but within me a steady litany thrummed—a pleading to the universe, or perhaps to myself, that these lives would not be extinguished here, not while I still drew breath.

Gently, deliberately, I transferred each of them into the jars. It was delicate work—futile, some might say—but in that moment, I did not entertain futility. Every motion became a vow. Each fragile body, tucked safely inside, felt like a stitch in some greater tapestry I didn’t yet understand.

And as their numbers grew, a strange clarity took hold. These weren’t just accidental passengers—they were emissaries. Carriers of some quiet genetic defiance. Little nomads whose coded imperatives stretched back into deep time, insisting: go forth, survive, persist.

I crouched beside the jars, peering through the translucent curves. The spiderlings twitched and climbed, tapping lightly at the plastic, navigating their confined realm with a kind of primal determination. In their frantic, ceaseless movement, I recognised something deeply familiar—an echo of my own drive to preserve, to adapt, to endure.

The vacuum of this world pressed in on all sides. But here, inside these makeshift arks, flickered something else entirely.

Life.

And I was now its keeper.

With the jars now brimming with their fragile living cargo, I held them tightly to my chest, using the curve of my body to shield the spiderlings from Clivilius’ unrelenting glare. The heat radiated in waves off the parched ground, shimmering upwards in a way that distorted distance and depth, making each step feel precarious. I moved with exaggerated care, feet steady, each pace deliberate. The jars were light, but the responsibility they carried might as well have weighed tonnes.

One stumble, one careless misstep across the brittle, uneven terrain, and it would all be for nothing. The thought alone was enough to stiffen my spine and slow my breathing. These creatures had already survived more than they ever should have been asked to. I wouldn’t let them down now—not through clumsiness.

Up ahead, the caravan came into view, crouched low against the dun-coloured horizon like a relic left behind by some long-departed expedition. Its composite alloy skin shimmered dully in the harsh light, deflecting the worst of the solar onslaught with a battered but enduring grace.

To anyone else, it might have looked unremarkable—functional at best. But to me, it was a sanctuary. A pressure-stabilised vessel of human stubbornness, humming faintly with its micro-generators and half-temperamental filtration units. Its curved form was a promise of refuge—not just for me, but now for the lives I carried.

This wouldn’t just be my home. It would become a biological outpost—a makeshift terrarium sheltering the first non-human colonists of this inhospitable realm.