SSCS 01: Installment 3 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 3 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…
Their scouts left home more recently, perhaps only five-hundred years. Their scouts know that their valley is circled now by a vast, sandy desert. Their scouts know what it is to wait in hope, and the way that the empty, blue sky cuts down like a scythe from above and sets crystal edges to the fields of amethyst-petaled stillness.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 3: 18.0517
In the valley of the flowers, there is only one sort of creature that moves. When the moon is full and rising high above the rim of the desert, the caretaker beetles, the carrion beetles come out and sing. They sing the history of the valley, all seven thousand years of it, from the time when the first purple shoot pushed its way up through the leaf muck at the base of a mist-fine waterfall, to the most recent return of one of their scouts, when the carrion beetles welcomed her home, and devoured her, and buried her bones one each beneath a different amethyst flower.
Her fur they spread beneath only ruby-petaled blooms, which shiver slightly closed in the night and let the starlight through. That way she would be able to remember where she had been while still being pressed as close to the earth of her home as possible. She would be able to smell the desert winds drifting through from outside.
She was only the second scout to come home. There are seven others yet to return.