SSCS 01: Installment 23 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 23 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…
“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.”
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 23: 20.0301
And so Old-rememberer streaks forward, arrow-swift, into one of the wider paths of darkness. It is a long path, and she races along it, faster and faster, until ahead there is a diverging of ways. And then she forces her wings to stop, to hold. To fall. She falls toward the right-most path, skims nearly too close to the boundary between the black void and the loud many that is the OneVoice’s domain, but she twists her body just so, still not another wing-beat just a glide against the nothing.
Behind, the other scouts struggle after her. Old-rememberer is ancient but strong. She would have flown to the very edge of starlight if she had had to to find her bees. To the edge of starlight and carried them back again. But now she holds her wings straight and falls. And falls. Each time there is a split in their way there is one path that is like downward and she plunges within it. Spinning about herself only. Tucking or stretching a wing. The others are like a line of chaff in her wake, blown this way and that by their uncertainty, but persisting, following and following.
After a stretch of time that cannot be known, they come back around to the great diverging of ways, and plunge along the same chosen corridor once more.
This time, Green-and-purple is first behind Old-rememberer and she manages to move her wings nearly as little as their leader, to twist only when the walls of their ribbon try to press too close.
Two more loops and First-shivered has also mastered the path, and Black-fire. And then the last-and-smallest, who had traveled the furthest to reach the gather-place of the beacon and had had to feel most closely the faint, faint drumming of it through her bones, whose bones still buzz with the memory of it, making her long for the peace of the scouts who have returned home.
And so they are falling, around and around. Falling and listening. Listening for silences.