SSCS 01: Installment 30 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 30 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 OneVoice subsumes. The OneVoice knows only itself, has stolen thousands of voices so that they will sing to it of itself, building a choir only in order to sing itself into existence.
The desert is death. The OneVoice is the nothing that lies on the other side of oblivion.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 30: 20.1225
But even oblivion can meet death, can be conquered by it when its time has come.
The OneVoice is a swirling maelstrom inside a swirling circle of ice broader across than many whole worlds and spinning through space.
The OneVoice is a giant heartbeat, a thundering singing made up of thousands, of hundreds of thousands of stolen voices collected over the centuries, all made to sing to the same song, all slaved to the creation of a thing that must devour all around it in order to be born.
The OneVoice has a reach that is almost longer than starlight, has a pull that cannot be resisted once heartbeat and song has been joined. It has sent a silence spreading outward from worlds whose voices have been stolen and so cannot weep for what has been lost.
But the OneVoice does not have memory. Does not understand vengeance. Or death. The OneVoice thunders through all it touches with a song of devotion. The OneVoice is not ready for a devotion that looks like death.
And not all songs are made of voices. And not all things are diminished when something that was theirs becomes lost.
The desert is made up of losses, from a stitching together of things gone missing, of things destroyed. From mournings and weepings and the joy that comes from being released back into the open, unknown cycle of death.
The desert has come, following the thread of itself, carried by the scouts that it claimed, not just once when they were neighbors and made uneasy alliance with each other, not twice when it slipped into the home they had lost and filled it up and claimed it for its own, but three times when it followed the threads they carried and brought them back into the home of itself where they would always be known.
The desert has come to the labyrinth of void, and its scouts are not the only residents here. There are others, alone and searching. Others who carry the last memories of the things the OneVoice would claim. The desert stretches through the labyrinth void and welcomes them all. The desert that will always remember.
The desert is made up of losses, and now they number in the thousands, in the tens of thousands. That is enough.
The desert is death, and death opens its eyes. The OneVoice is young, not yet even born. But death is impartial. And death has come.