SSCS 01: Installment 22 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 22 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…
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.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 22: 20.0131
***
The scouts have been following the path of the ribbon of black void and have found that it has many branches. At first they found one split and chose a direction, determined, now that they have regathered, not to part. But then there was another split, and another. And then they came to a nexus of the velvet void and a great branching of ways.
Beyond the void ribbon(s) is something that is like a vast hall of mirrors. The scouts do not dare venture into that space, not unless they have to, not unless there is no other hope. First they must learn all the paths of the void ribbons. But the network of void is vast too. It is twisted all throughout the rest, like a honeycomb throughout the other vastness that is trying to become, that expands when that other is expanding. They have passed hundreds of partings and joinings by now and could no longer find their way back to the great bone if they wished to. Worse, they begin to fear they could not find their way out.
And worse still, as long and infinite as the velvet black is, within it there is nowhere else to land. The great bone was a solitary break from this pattern, an interruption of somethingness within the nothingness. Now there is only nothingness, and the scouts navigate along it the way they navigated among the stars. Only here there are ragged bends, and choices. Here they are trying to stay with one another whereas before their entire goal had had them disperse.
Green-and-purple’s wing-claw accidentally grazes the edge of the corridor of nothing, causing a sparking shower of the everything else to come blazing and shouting in at them, too much bright, too much a heavy droning beat of the OneVoice that smells like rainfall and honey no matter how well the scouts know it is a lure only and not truly their bees calling to them. At last the sparks flicker and fade, caught up and put out within the velvet blackness. The great heart-beat dims until it can almost not be heard.
“How can we seek silence where there is only silence?” First-shivered whispers, clutching Green-and-purple’s talon with her own so that the other scout cannot stray too far again. “How can we be the patience between the stars when there is no starlight to navigate by? When we cannot stop and wait?”
“We must seek an orbit,” one of the other scouts replies. She is greyer than the others. She remembers the valley of the flowers as more than just a season of beauty that was snatched away too soon. Remembers the mud and the trackless green before the flowers fully filled it. Remembers when the desert would toss the rainclouds along to them, laughing, and, distant neighbor, play them a dazzling show of lightning along the horizon, joyful arcing between land and sky. “If we cannot be still, we will find the path to circle this place, around and around. Waiting. We will make a dance to build our own beast of memory.”