SSCS 01: Installment 13 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 13 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…
There is no frog-song. But there is bewitchment in the scent of this thing that has been lost for so long. Beneath the leaves of ruby-petaled flowers, around the skin of every scout come home, the carrion beetles gather, streaming inward to each point like a temple. In blue-black lines, and silent hushes, and swarms.
And swarms.
They gather and watch the honey drops grow fuller.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 13: 19.0619
***
Elsewhere, far, far elsewhere, but somewhere the starlight knows well, the blocks of ice swirl in their vast plain, hurtling through space, tumbling and droning with honey song. If there were air, Star-ice thinks she might smell it, might feel the bees crawling, soft, soft, over her fur, as though she were a flower, open to the valley and the sun.
She can feel the soft brush of their wings against her muzzle. She can hear their droning song, the ancient lullabies she’d searched and searched for but thought in the black, lost center of her soul were lost forever. They surround her with light. With home, and with joy.
Though it has been a thousand years since that time was true, and now she is little more than a bundle of sticks and fur, tumbling inward toward an unknown doom, surrounded by shards of ice.
Black-fire tumbles past and Star-ice sees her, makes herself stretch her senses outward for the others. They look so far away, with the honey-drone muffling her ears and nose and eyes, but the distance is nothing compared to what they have crossed already, the faintness of their trail blazes bright in comparison to the whisper of an unheard whisper that was their bees. And their bees did come this way. This mimicry is not them, but if they can break free of it, Star-ice knows they will see the path in truth, and maybe even the why of it. If they can just break free.
She does not have the desert wind, and she does not have 17 grains of sand, but she has her seating stone and the drops of her own blood. Her beacon does not have to last long or go far and there are other forces near at hand to power it. They’re hurtling all around her. Now her stone is past her teeth, is sliding down her throat to fall nearer her heartbeat, as the ice rushes closer.
Her body has already turned thin as starlight. When the ice block catches her, it shears through her like starlight, flinging her bright and outward and everywhere in a thousand dusty, crystalline pieces. And for an instant, she is singing strong, and loud, and clear.