SSCS 01: Installment 4 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 4 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…
She was only the second scout to come home. There are seven others yet to return.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 4: 18.0622
In the stillness of the highest peak of the highest mountains that lie, not in, but beyond the desert, the third scout has finally landed home again.
The air on the peak is thin and cutting, cold as slivers of ice. But it is warmer here than where she has been, and so she lies on the peak a while, feeling the last of the red light from the setting sun brush against her fur with a blessed warmth it couldn’t impart before. And even in the cold, thin air she can smell the distant desert, and – so faint it is like a dream of a dream – the dry beetle dust that lies beneath the flowers. It smells like a purple cathedral, waiting.
The scout longs to rush homeward, to spread her stick-thin limbs and fly on the fastest wind that will take her. But on her long-long journey, she glimpsed a whisper of the bees. The barest fragment, and not ‘til she was at the very end of her strength, when homeward was the only place she was still able to go. But she must make sure that fragment is not lost. She must build the beacon, and hope that it is not too late to guide her sisters. A honey-thin thread of hope.