SSCS 01: Installment 8 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 8 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 so the third-returned scout dives free of the peak to fly home. Home, home, home. Her stick-thin bones may barely hold her, but it will be enough. She will reach the stillness of the flowers. She will be welcomed into stillness for herself.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 8: 19.0315
***
At the edge of night, where sunlight has grown so faint it must now be called starlight, a different scout perches on a cliff of solid ice, above a long plain where ice boulders tumble along in a winding stream of liquid fumes.
With only starlight, the landscape is all sharp-edged shadows, black-and-white and jagged. No hint of lushness, or movement, or breathing. And yet…
And yet, something is here. The scout can feel it, like the very faintest buzzing against the very-tip edges of her wings, against the tip edges of her toes, and the tip of her tongue. Something is here. Or something was. Maybe a hundred years ago. Maybe more. Or maybe only something that meant to come. Her world is far from here, a hundred-thousand-thousand heartbeats and wingbeats away, but something in the alien air smells like home. Not just like home, but the home that once was. Like frogs hiding under lily leaves.
Perched on the cliff of ice, the scout has held herself here, motionless, for a decade. Waiting to scent another clue. The bees came this way once long ago, or will do, or meant to do. But after 500 years, her body has spun itself half of starlight. She can wait as long as she must.
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.