SSCS 01: Installment 18 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 18 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…
The birthing of what?
The scouts do not speak the question. They let it shiver through their fur, along the hollow planes of their stick-thin bones, and into the finest, ice-coated point-tips of their claws. Speaking thus together, the great bone, black as void, can hear them, and it answers:
“Another universe. Worlds pulled from within worlds. To push this one aside and spring forth new.”
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 18: 19.1101
***
In the valley, circled by desert, the carrion beetles have gathered and waited for seven days around the scattered remains of their fallen scouts. They have kept their star-watch patterns, and have moved not a feeler, nor fluttered a wing, nor uttered a single note of their songs, but only watched. Watched as the honey drops continued to gather and swell and pool outward from the last remnants of their star-touched. The icy wind calling down from the stars has blown over them, and they are covered now in a diamond frost, glittering. But they wait. With nothing but amethyst and ruby petals guarding over them, the flowers themselves untouched by aught but – faintly – the rising of the Sun, and the setting.
It has been seven days, and the frost has grown thick and hoary, and the honey has spilled outward, tracing the paths of the gathered beetles, shining wet, smelling of dusty stars. It has made a network beneath the leaves of the flowers, joining each to each, linking all the valley’s present dead.
And at last, the desert sends an emissary to inquire.
A snake, silver as moonlight, tastes the rift of starlight surrounding the valley, then slips over the edge, and glides downward. A river of sand spills after it. An ancient crab shell and a clutch of balding, bleached white feathers tumble in its wake. The feathers hold a bit of wind, but it is waiting; it will not blow yet.
The honey cracks where the sand touches it, and grows dry. But the desert is cautious. The snake does not speak until it reaches the very center of the valley – and has collected a meal of cold beetles along the way.
“I claim this valley for desert,” silver snake hisses. “Unless there is one who will challenge for it.”
But the beetles are frozen, their songs trapped by star-frost. And the flowers continue, only and always, to wait.
Instead it is the honey that answers. “You may have it,” the dry honey-cracks whisper, the wet honey-veins slurp, “if you can refuse to sing.” And in the distance, all around the rim edges of the valley, the star wind pauses and breathes in, and begins to beat, and beat. And beat. With a vast, greater-than-worlds heartbeat.
In reply, Silver-desert-snake plants the crab shell in the valley’s very center, then coils – not around it, but off to one side – and watches as sand, spilling out flat and silent, begins to bubble forth.