The Fire That Speaks

“In the insect world, survival isn’t loud. It’s built in spirals and signals—like firelight, if you’re paying attention.”

As Nial and I meticulously arranged the smaller fires around the camp's edge in preparation for the inevitable nightfall—still hours away, yet looming like a held breath—the rhythmic crackling of flames wove through our quiet conversation. The sound was low and constant, a symphony of warmth and warning. Each fire we lit sent soft shadows flickering across the sand, pushing back at the silence that always threatened to settle in too deeply after dusk.

There was something meditative in the task. With each log placed and each pile of kindling coaxed to life, I felt a rhythm take root beneath the surface of my thoughts. Practicality, repetition, function. But beneath that, something older—something primal. Fire, as it had always been, was both signal and shield.

I found myself thinking, as I so often did, of insects.

The funnel-web spider with its deceptively delicate lacework of silk. The bombardier beetle, spitting chemicals in bursts of heat and warning. The termites that constructed chimneys and tunnels to regulate the temperature of their colonies. Nature, in its quiet genius, had been building defences long before we learned to wield hammers and dig postholes. Here in Clivilius, among dust and sand and unforgiving silence, those same principles held true. Adapt or perish. Signal or succumb.

These fires were more than precaution. They were design. Evolution pressed into kindling and spark.

The task was simple—and yet undeniably vital. A perimeter of flame might not keep everything out, but it made us feel less helpless. A first line of defence against the Shadow Panthers: black-eyed, silent-footed, claws like obsidian shards. I could still feel the echo of their presence from the night before, the way the darkness had seemed to lean in closer around their silhouette.

The forest of Tasmania felt like another life, now. And yet it lived inside me still, as vivid as ever. The hours spent crouched beside moss-covered logs, documenting predator-prey relationships so fragile they could be disturbed by the weight of a breath. That careful balance had always fascinated me.

Now, I was part of the equation. No longer observer. Prey and predator both, depending on the day.

The contrast struck me with strange clarity. The stakes here weren’t numbers in a journal or footage in a documentary. Here, the risk was lived. Felt. Bled. And yet, in that risk, I found a sense of purpose again. A clean, focused thread to hold onto.

Each fire we lit felt like a declaration. Not of victory, but of resistance. Of intention. We were still here. We were still building.

It was a small thing, but it mattered. In a place where so much was unknowable and shifting, even the smallest acts felt like anchors. A tangible piece of the puzzle. Something I could point to at the end of the day and say: this, at least, we got right.

A small victory.

Enough, for now.

“Are we doing the right thing?” Nial asked, his voice laced with a blend of hope and concern as he placed another log onto the small fire we were tending. The question hovered there, fragile and glinting, like a soap bubble poised to burst with the slightest touch.

I straightened up, my spine complaining faintly from the crouched position, and brushed the dirt from my palms. For a moment, I didn’t answer. Instead, I studied his face—the firelight catching in the curve of his cheekbone, throwing half of it into shadow. His eyes were on the flames, but I saw something tight in the set of his jaw, something quietly fraying at the edges.

“I hope so,” I said finally, hearing the softness in my own voice, the uncertainty that clung to the words like burrs. “It’s the best we can do with what we have.”

They were meant to reassure. Him. Me. Both of us. But behind them, my mind tugged at quieter truths—the mental tally I’d already been running. The firewood stack was low. The driest pieces had already gone up in smoke. What remained was cracked and inconsistent, and wouldn’t burn long or clean. There was no clear plan yet for when it ran out.

It was like being caught in a slow collapse, each flickering flame buying us time we weren’t sure how to spend.

Nial’s gaze swept over the perimeter we’d forged in firelight. The line of flames danced in uneven intervals across the edge of camp, like sentinels trying to bluff their strength. “It’s unsettling, isn’t it?” he murmured. “The thought of running out of wood.”

His words mirrored my thoughts so closely it startled me. There was no need to mask the truth. Not with him. Not here.

I exhaled, my breath catching faintly in the cooling air. “It is. We’ll have to ration it carefully.”

Even as I said it, I could feel the machinery of my mind shift into motion. Contingency. Prioritisation. Projection. Like the complex inner workings of an ant colony—every worker aware of the whole, every grain of sand purposeful. Insects didn’t waste. They stored. Reallocated. Adapted.

We would have to do the same.

I pictured the leafcutter ants I’d studied years ago, their caste system designed not from cruelty but from necessity. They carried foliage five times their size, some to feed, some to mulch, others to farm the fungus they lived on. Each one knew its place. Each task mattered.

That, I thought, was the lesson. Efficiency, yes—but more than that, purpose. A collective survival instinct, honed to elegance.

Here, on this foreign soil, fire was our fungus. Our walls. Our message to the dark. We couldn’t afford waste. We couldn’t afford sentiment.

And yet, looking at Nial’s face—creased with exhaustion, lined with the grief of forced separation from a life not long lost—I also knew that survival wasn’t just about building and burning and counting days. It was about connection. Purpose beyond pragmatism. A reason.

The crackle of the fire answered none of it. But it filled the silence between us, and that felt like something.

As Nial picked up another log, he hesitated, his question thoughtful and introspective, a momentary reprieve from the weight of our responsibilities. "Do you ever wonder what else is out there, beyond the camp? In Clivilius, I mean,” he asked, his eyes searching mine, a flicker of curiosity and apprehension dancing within their depths like a candle flame in the wind.

The question caught me off guard, made me pause with a hand still resting on the edge of the firepit. My breath caught in my throat, and for a brief moment, the smoke rising from the fire seemed to curl and twist in rhythm with my unease. It was a thought that had passed through my mind countless times, slipping in at the quietest moments like a whisper I couldn’t quite silence.

“More than I'd like to,” I admitted, my voice soft, edged with something I didn’t quite want to name. The words felt heavy as they left my mouth, as though speaking them aloud might give them more power. “Clivilius seems to be full of mysteries, a Pandora's box waiting to be opened. Sometimes, I fear what else we might find lurking in the shadows.”

I looked out beyond the line of fires, into the gathering gloom that stretched beyond the reach of our light. There was no horizon here—not in the way we understood it. Just the gradual fade of familiarity into something stranger, ominous. The unknown.

I was no stranger to the dualities of the natural world. I’d spent years kneeling in moss and leaf litter, watching insects wage wars invisible to the untrained eye. I’d marvelled at the delicate scales of moths, luminous under a microscope, and felt my stomach turn at the twitching bodies of parasitic larvae burrowing out of their living hosts. Beauty and horror, hand in hand. Nature never apologised for the balance.

But Clivilius—Clivilius was something else entirely. It wasn’t just unfamiliar. It was uncanny. As though someone had taken the rules of ecology and folded them in on themselves. Nothing here felt fully explainable.

The thought of what might be out there stirred something between fear and fascination in me. It was like standing on the edge of a trench in the deep ocean, knowing that light didn’t reach the bottom, but imagining the creatures that did. Bioluminescence and bone-crushing pressure. Leviathans with unblinking eyes and mouths that never closed.

“I think about it all the time,” I added after a moment, quieter now. “What adaptations exist out there that we haven’t seen yet? What has Clivilius shaped in its own image while we’ve been scratching the surface here at camp?”

I couldn’t help but imagine beetles with translucent carapaces, their organs pulsing visibly within. Insects the size of dogs, driven by primal instinct. Microorganisms with behaviour patterns we couldn’t predict or control. How much of it was marvel, and how much of it was menace?

The weight of that uncertainty pressed into me, but it wasn’t paralysing. Not yet. It was a tide I could still stand in—cold, but not drowning. And perhaps that was enough for now. Enough to keep placing logs on the fire. Enough to keep watching the shadows, and wondering what stared back.

Nial placed the log onto the fire, and the flames eagerly embraced it, casting a warm glow across his face. “Maybe one day we'll find a way home,” he said, a trace of hope in his voice.

His words stirred something within me—a quiet ache, sharp and sudden. It was a longing I had tried to bury beneath layers of practicality, of purpose. A yearning for my old life, for the smell of ethanol and insect pins, the quiet hush of my lab in Hobart where my world had been neatly catalogued and pinned in display drawers, each specimen a small, ordered truth. That life felt unreal now, like a dream I could half-remember, one that slipped through my fingers each time I tried to hold it.

I thought of the rows of labelled field journals on my shelf, filled with my careful handwriting, and the years spent crouched in mossy undergrowth, studying the hidden world beneath the surface. It had been a life of curiosity and discovery, of hypotheses and measured conclusions. But Clivilius allowed for none of that control. Here, everything was fluid, wild. Unrelenting.

Still, the hope in Nial’s voice tugged at me. I wanted to share it. But the truth lodged too firmly in my throat: there might be no way back. The Portal seemed more like a lure than a doorway now. I had seen too much, lost too much, to believe in salvation without evidence. And yet, I said nothing to contradict him.

We were like insects caught in a spider’s web—each thread a constraint, each movement a risk of further entanglement. The more we struggled, the more the world tightened its grip. Our only hope was to adapt, to build something strong enough to hold us here. Something that might one day become its own version of home.

The fire crackled gently between us, its glow dancing in tandem with the approaching dusk. Smoke curled upward like a question left unanswered, spiralling into the dimming sky. For a while, we sat in companionable silence, each caught in our own tangle of thought.

I found myself remembering the countless nights Chris and I had spent in the Tasmanian wilderness—fieldwork that had felt raw and alive in a way this place now overshadowed. Back then, our fires had been for warmth, for cooking, for comfort. Now, they were our armour. Our last, flickering line against the dark.

Eventually, Nial and I parted, each of us moving to tend another small fire along the perimeter. Our steps were slower now, the fatigue settling in, a quiet weight draped across our backs. But we did not stop. The work was repetitive, yes, but necessary—one fire at a time, one breath, one heartbeat. These small acts held us together, thread by thread, log by log.

As I moved from one fire to the next, feeding each with careful handfuls of kindling and coaxing the flames to life, a sense of solitude settled over me like a fine layer of ash. Around the camp, others moved in quiet rhythm, their figures drifting through the gathering dusk like half-formed phantoms—visible, yes, but curiously distant. We were together, technically, but emotionally we felt like separate constellations in a wide, darkening sky. A glance here, a nod there, but no true connection. Each of us was orbiting our own private crisis.

I found myself reflecting on the behaviour of solitary insects—creatures that lived and died in silence, focused only on the task before them. No colonies. No hives. Just the constant, instinctive drive to survive. The parallel was striking. We too were driven by necessity now, not camaraderie. Not truly. Survival had stripped us down to our most functional parts.

Still, one figure seemed to defy that isolation—Paul. I watched as he made his way between the fires, crouching to check one, adjusting another with a methodical hand. He was efficient but not hurried, focused but never curt. His face was set in concentration, brows drawn tight, eyes sharp. He reminded me of a soldier scanning the battlefield for weak spots—strategic, but human.

And it struck me then—how he had grown into this role, not with fanfare or declarations, but quietly, naturally, like water filling the shape of whatever vessel it’s poured into. He was the centre around which we all spun, even if we didn’t realise it. His presence lent weight and direction to our otherwise scattered paths.

I found myself smiling at the thought, faint but genuine. Paul wore so many hats now—leader, builder, peacemaker, caregiver. And he wore them without complaint, like he’d always known this strange burden was coming for him. There was something admirable in it, even comforting.

It reminded me of the queens in insect societies—the way a single figure could set the tone for the entire colony. Not by barking orders, but through subtler means. Chemical trails, body language, presence. Paul had no pheromones to guide us, but somehow he was doing it anyway. Keeping us together. Holding us in formation when everything around us threatened to come undone.

And yet there was absurdity in it too, I had to admit. There always is when humans are forced into mimicry of the natural world, trying to emulate systems honed over millennia by creatures no larger than a fingernail. I thought of the extravagant courtship displays of certain beetles and moths, of stick insects performing odd dances to attract mates or warn off threats—behaviours that might look ridiculous to the untrained eye but carried deadly seriousness within their logic. Perhaps our efforts weren’t so different. Half comedy, half survival instinct.

I let out a quiet chuckle under my breath, not from amusement exactly, but from that place where fatigue and surrealism meet. What a picture we must have made—Paul the impromptu general, Chris talking to himself about soil chemistry, Nial still trying to pretend his world hadn’t collapsed this morning, and me… drawing comparisons between our camp and insect societies while lighting firepits to keep panther-things at bay.

It was laughable. It was tragic. It was Clivilius.

And still, the work went on.