SSCS 01: Installment 10 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 10 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
And she will arrow toward it. She will meet it at that place they all must come, now that the beacon has called them. And as she arrows, her mouth is filled with a fire that, once lit, it can know no quenching, not in a hundred years. Not in a thousand.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 10: 19.0419
***
The scout of blackness-and-fire meets the scout of ice-and-starlight at the edge of a vast, rocky plain before the others have made it to them. Perhaps they are all that is left. Perhaps all their other sisters have turned back by now. It is a shudder of loneliness to think of it, and a shudder of longing, too. The valley of their birth is frozen in time, embattled, and surrounded by a sea of desert. It is empty and still, at least in the ways that matter. But it is home. It is a place of amethyst radiance, even without the bees to breathe the life from those jewels, cutting and sharp. Black-fire and Star-ice know that the dream of the valley has come to take the place of their heartbeats. To imagine that for all the others, perhaps it has already taken the place of their skins…
But then others arrive too, and the vast plain seems bright for a single moment, and the silent emptiness between them sings ever-so-briefly with frog-song. They are six still together. Though flagging, they are still strong.
And then another sound sings across the plain. That sheet of swirling rocks that has neither up nor down but only inward shudders once in time with the beacon, and at last the planet at its core shudders, too, forcing outward that last hint of sound and memory. Of swarms.
And swarms, and swarms, and swarms.