SSCS 01: Installment 9 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 9 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…
And then, all at once, the starlight within her cries out, seems to take a deep breath in, while the star-black sky beats down at her, shouting. Shouting and whispering and sobbing, beating and breathing. A beacon trembles through her.
And she lets go her perch, to follow where it calls.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 9: 19.0409
***
Elsewhen, the beacon touches another scout where she hangs suspended in the vastness and the wide-bellied loneliness of space. The shudder passes through her, and she could not say if she is shaken, because there is nothing and nothing nearby she could have been shaken against.
But she breathes in.
Her first inward breath in a hundred years. And even through there is no air to it, only emptiness and microscopic dust, it brings a taste with it, like heat and honey sliding slowly down her throat, to lie pooling in her belly. The stars had been so distant and so cold, but now here is a heat that might move her.
Here is a fire that might burn away night.
Because she had forgotten why she had come, what she had lost, how to search for it.
She had forgotten the pounding of the falls in the valley. The air thick with the light. The ground beneath singing and calling, praying and weeping, bellowing and living. But now the shudder through nothingness that became honey and heat has become that sound.
And she will arrow toward it. She will meet it at that place they all must come, now that the beacon has called them. And as she arrows, her mouth is filled with a fire that, once lit, it can know no quenching, not in a hundred years. Not in a thousand.