SSCS 01: Installment 11 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 11 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 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.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 11: 19.0506
It is then that Star-ice truly wishes that the beetles could claim her, now and be done. Because with this sound comes suddenly a calling, and it is so much worse than the bleak, dry desert that encircles her home.
Swarms and swarms. A keening. A humming straight through the bones, as though all she ever knew and loved was singing at once inside her. And even being inside her, still pulling her.
How did the last scout to come to this place ever leave it? How did she escape? There was nothing in the beacon to give warning.
There was only hope.
But now they six are circling closer, and circling closer. The plain of icy rocks swirls around them and they swirl with it. The honey-wet droning weaves through the shadows of the ice blocks. This way and around. That way, and closer. Come closer.
The stars were singing, distantly, before. But now there is nothing but the calling and the search. Black-fire flicks a wing through ice dust and barely feels it. Star-ice breathes in and out in time to some alien thing, even though there is no air here yet to breathe with. The other four scouts are already further inward still. And far away. Far, far away. The desert draws back from the valley by a breath, by the thickness of a millimeter and the width of a grain of sand. Because it senses something is being lost, and has no wish to be lost along with it.