SSCS 01: Installment 26 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 26 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 moon reaches its zenith, and the beetles’ song stops. And they burrow back down into the sand, returning to their leaves and petals, returning to the remnants of their dead. And when they are buried, the bone feathers sigh out, and the desert wind sighs across the shallow bowl of the valley, hushing, whispering, singing the emptiness of the sands.
And then the sky beats once more, and the winds are gone. Along with all the detritus of their dervishes.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 26: 20.0506
***
When the desert wind comes ripping past them through the great labyrinth that houses the OneVoice, the scouts, in their endless looping fall, looping flight, almost don’t hear it. Still, they have known that wind too long and too well, a piece of their ancient foe bound close and dear to them by time, so that even not hearing, they recognize it.
It is not the silence they were searching for. But it belongs to them. Something else that belongs to them has been brought to this vast and terrible place. Old-rememberer, who still leads them, does not pause to think, only alters the shape of her fall to give chase. And the others follow.
Even chasing they are able, somehow, to keep to their corridors of blackness, as though their knowledge and purpose has opened up the map of the labyrinth to them. Or perhaps as though the desert’s wind has not been brought into the multitude singing of the OneVoice just yet, but instead must travel the paths of blackness itself until it has been stolen, within and along, to its correct and proper place.
Whatever the reason, the scouts find that they can track the wind and what pulls it, that, even, they are gaining ground.
And then the wind passes into the multitude, and they are brought up short.
Where is the place of sand? they can hear the wind singing. Where is the sky that was cold and hollow, and the black mountains that were nearly too high to climb? In the too-brightness of the multitude, the scouts can glimpse a dervish of air and sticks, sloughs of old scales and bleached feathers, whirling past and through. It is a beauty they had thought that they hated, and now they yearn for it. A piece of their home they are so far from. And it is singing a song that they know.
This time it is First-shivered whose wingtip grazes too close to the wall of bright multitude, tossing sparks of it into their void. The voice of the wind briefly shrieks into the void with them, pulling at them even harder with the melancholy of what is known, of old memories rubbed away to whispers. Black-fire thinks perhaps she has even caught an echo of the cathedral song of the beetles within those fragments, and the sound or the memory echoes hollowly through her bones, drawing her closer.
And then, abruptly, she realizes that she can hear the dervish skirling swelling and fading, and swelling again, in time with a great heartbeat. With this, the cold of the void plunges through her once more, and she rips her claws into First-shivered’s wingtip, pulling her back from the brink, back from the multitude.