The Glow That Draws

“Every light we strike in Clivilius pushes something back—but it might also call something forward.”

I wiped the sweat from my brow, the back of my hand streaking a line of grit across my temple, and made my way over to Paul. My footsteps were deliberate, the kind you take when you're walking into a conversation that matters. Each pace across the dusty ground felt like crossing a threshold—from private fear to shared responsibility.

“Do you think this will be enough to keep them at bay?” I asked, stopping just short of him, my voice low but not hesitant. There was a thin strand of hope in the question, but it was wrapped tightly in trepidation, a reflection of the unease that had been coiled at the base of my spine since nightfall yesterday.

Paul paused mid-reach, one hand hovering above a pile of split wood. He didn’t answer straight away. Instead, he stood very still, eyes fixed on the flames before him, as though trying to read some kind of omen in the shape of the fire. I watched the line of his jaw tighten, the furrow in his brow deepen. It was a silence thick with calculation. You could almost hear the inner arithmetic: number of fires, number of people, number of hours in the dark.

“It should help,” he said at last. The words were quiet, cautious—far from the reassurance I had hoped for. My pulse didn’t slow. My mouth stayed dry. It wasn’t doubt in his voice, exactly, but it wasn't certainty either.

“According to Charity, Shadow Panthers’ eyes are sensitive to light, so they avoid it.”

There it was. A lifeline. A thread to hold onto. I felt something ease slightly in my chest, like a valve turning just enough to release the pressure. But the relief was brittle, delicate. I’d seen enough in the wild to know how quickly a sense of safety could shatter. There were species that lured with light, after all—bioluminescent traps spun like sirens into the night. For every deterrent, evolution offered a countermeasure.

Paul glanced at me, perhaps sensing the flicker of doubt that hadn't quite left my eyes. His voice was steadier this time, anchored by resolve. “But they've evolved to become stealthy apex nighttime predators, so we must remain vigilant.”

The second half of his sentence landed like a weight across my shoulders. I swallowed hard, jaw tightening against the shiver that crept up my back. Images of last night returned in fragments—dark movement, sudden breath, the flash of claw. Fires or not, we were still prey in the dark. I thought again of those insects I’d studied—masters of disguise and ambush, predators that waited patiently for hours, motionless, until their quarry made one fatal mistake. The Shadow Panthers had perfected that same instinct, only on a scale that made us the insects now.

Still, I didn’t flinch. I couldn’t. Not in front of Paul.

I nodded, willing strength into the gesture, shaping my voice into something steadier than I felt. “We'll keep watch in shifts through the night.”

The words came out with more authority than I expected, and I clung to that. It was a promise, both to him and to myself. A vow not to yield to fear, not to let it seep into the cracks and make a home there.

Paul held my gaze for a moment. I could see the flicker of appreciation in his eyes—quiet, wordless, but real. He needed us to stand behind him, not just follow orders but share the weight. His confidence wasn’t an endless resource. It needed fuelling, just like the fires we lit.

I thought then of the queen ant, not because she ruled but because she endured, because her survival meant the colony’s. And for her to endure, the workers had to be relentless, loyal, unshakable.

That, I decided, was who I needed to be. The one who kept the fire burning—even when the night pressed in around us.

Nial's arrival, his arms full of firewood, came as a timely interruption—one of those small mercies that broke the weight of a heavy conversation without diminishing its gravity. The logs thudded softly into the dirt as he dropped the bundle beside us, a practical offering wrapped in quiet effort. But even before the dust had settled around his boots, his words cut through the moment with a sharpness that shifted the energy between us.

“We're also more visible now,” he said, the warning folded neatly into his tone. “Not just to the Shadow Panthers, but to anything else out there.”

The air stilled. His observation struck me like a plucked string—subtle, resonant, but impossible to ignore. I hadn’t considered that side of the equation, at least not fully. We had been so focused on surviving last night’s terror that we’d failed to account for the implications of illuminating ourselves like a beacon in the dark.

I looked towards the fires encircling the camp. Their dancing flames had felt like lifelines, protective sentinels holding the night at bay. But now, I saw them through Nial’s eyes—tiny suns in a vast, unknown land, each one a signal flare not just to the creatures we feared, but to anything curious, territorial, or worse. The thought unsettled me, roused a deep animal instinct in the pit of my stomach. We were no longer cloaked by darkness. We were shining, exposed.

My mind spun through the ecology of light. Bioluminescent insects—those shimmering, delicate things I’d spent years studying—flashed for mates, for warning, or for deception. But some did it to lure prey, their glow irresistible, fatal. Were we doing the same? Lighting fires to protect ourselves, but in doing so, becoming prey to something watching from the deeper dark?

I swallowed against the dryness in my throat, a tight little gulp that did nothing to ease the tightness in my chest. A chill traced the line of my spine. For a moment, I imagined eyes out there beyond the endless dunes—not just feline, not just Shadow Panthers, but things unknown. Shapes I couldn't name, rules I didn’t yet understand.

But Paul didn’t flinch. He turned to Nial with the kind of calm that I had come to recognise as earned rather than assumed. His posture remained steady, his eyes level, unafraid. When he spoke, his voice didn’t waver.

“I know,” he said, meeting Nial’s gaze. “But right now, we're dealing with the devils we know. It's a risk, I know, but we have to take it.”

There was something deeply grounding in those words. Not comforting, exactly—comfort felt far away these days—but solid, like the quiet acknowledgement of a path chosen. The pragmatic necessity of it.

He was right. Of course he was. And even if part of me wanted to rail against the exposure, the risk, the potential for inviting more danger in… the logic was irrefutable. The Shadow Panthers were real. We’d seen them, smelt the blood they’d drawn, felt the fear they brought. They were here. Now. Known. And if these fires gave us even a marginal edge, then the gamble was not just reasonable—it was imperative.

I let out a long breath I hadn’t realised I was holding. In the insect world, vulnerability was often the trade-off for adaptation. Bright colours warned of poison, but they also painted a target. Sound might attract a mate—or a predator. Everything had its cost.

The same applied here.

Lighting these fires wasn’t a guarantee of safety, nor a declaration of bravado. It was a decision borne of necessity. And necessity, in Clivilius, walked hand-in-hand with danger.

The three of us stood there in a triangle of firelight, faces warmed by the flickering glow, shadows dancing across the hard lines of our exhaustion. Behind us, the rest of the camp moved like drifting embers—slow, purposeful, tired. The fire crackled between us, an ancient language we’d learned to speak again. Light, heat, warning.

I felt a quiet resolve settle over me, the kind that took shape not in the mind but in the marrow. We couldn’t control everything out there. Maybe we couldn’t control most of it. But this—this line of flame, this human act of boundary-making—was something. And sometimes, in a place like this, something was enough.

For now.