SSCS 01: Installment 12 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 12 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 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.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 12: 19.0606
***
In the valley of the flowers, the carrion beetles stop singing.
On the wind has come the drifting scent of honey. But it is a dry scent somehow, like something kept hidden away for eons and grown dusty.
But it is sweet. It fills the valley up to its brim, and on the very rim edges where it spills over, the desert shifts back by a few grains of sand more. Shifts backward by an inch. It is not the desert’s wind that carries this honey smell, and the desert wants no part in it, peeling itself away, just a little, just enough. Even its own wind cleaving elsewhere, so that the sky splits around the rim of the valley and lets the true cold of starlight spill down and touch the earth.
Cold as ice, the starlight seeps downward into the valley, mixing with the scent of ancient honey, pooling beneath the leaves of the flowers. When it reaches a place where a scout’s skin is laid, it ruffles the fur, and settles, and makes dew-drops of honey. The first honey the valley has had in a thousand years.
There is no frog-song. But there is bewitchment in the scent of this thing that has been lost for so long. Beneath the leaves of ruby-petaled flowers, around the skin of every scout come home, the carrion beetles gather, streaming inward to each point like a temple. In blue-black lines, and silent hushes, and swarms.
And swarms.
They gather and watch the honey drops grow fuller.