SSCS 01: Installment 6 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 6 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…
Once the seating stone is placed, and prepared, then it must be fixed beneath a fine layer of blood. This will be the heart of the beacon.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 6: 18.0901
However, the scout does not have very much blood to spare, and the stone she brought, which did not seem large when she first selected it so long ago, when she drew it up and took it away with her, hoping in her deepest heart that it would never be necessary, now seems wide and thirsty for every drop. Her 17 grains of sand sit precariously on its glassy, smooth face, while every drop of precious, too-black blood falls, and pools, and soaks inward.
A cold wind picks up, breathing faster and faster up the high mountainside, coming to rattle away her hopes and sacrifice, and the third scout home squeezes the last drop of blood her stick-thin body has to offer, watches it drop, and pool, and spread solid across the stone like a window of night.
Now, when the wind howls upward, the heart of the beacon trembles, and shudders, and beats its first beat. And the cold, desert wind is forced to beat the air and the stones in time with it.