SSCS 01: Installment 21 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 21 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…
“Can you hear those echoes still?” Black-fire shakes the ice from her fur as her only means of shouting in this enforced near-silence. “Can you follow the ripples, every last one? I have picked up a pebble cast upon a shore and watched the changes in the water that came in its absence. Even water clear as glass will show it. Even the great roar of the OneVoice must bend to the hollows in its song.” And now Black-fire has no more means for shouting. Instead she releases her grip on the great bone, diving along the path of the ribbon of void, not knowing if she will be followed, but only that she must seek.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 21: 20.0115
***
While the scouts seek an echo of absence, the desert is spreading its sand through their valley. It bubbles up from the valley’s center, where the crab shell acts as its lodestone, and amulet, and door. It spreads smooth and wide, building a pool that drowns the flowers in the valley’s center, amethyst and ruby petals held above the sands like hands, and then like fingertips, and then gone. The sands carry the star-frosted beetles aloft, but do not warm them, and they cannot move. They are the flotsam the desert has arrived to wash away.
The air above the spreading sands shudders with a drumming beat.
The sky above the valley-rim is parted and a cold of starlight is pressing down, wanting, calling. Calling. The valley is filled with the smell of honey and the sound of a great heart-beat. Silver-desert-snake glides around the fountain-source of desert sand, around and coil and turn and around, and does not sing. Its scales are made of moonlight and it too knows how to wait. When the sand spills over past the valley’s rim, the desert knows it will have won.
In the sand beside the snake, the bone-bleached feathers shift. They scratch at the sand and sigh. They whisper. They hold a piece of the desert’s wind, and the wind knows how to sing.