SSCS 01: Installment 14 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 14 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…
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.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 14: 19.0711
In Star-ice’s dying song, Black-fire lifts her muzzle and tastes the empty, non-existent wind of the void around her. Closer to the planet, the other four scouts feel the last embrace of their sister, and the honey-drone clears from their eyes. They look downward to the planet.
Below them, the field of ice surrounds what now appears as a labyrinth of roiling storm-clouds and lightning and fissures in…something. A labyrinth because it shifts, but slowly. It turns, but not chaotically. It is a puzzle-box bigger than the moon above their desert, and the path of their bees – old and thin and straight as starlight – leads inside it.
Around them, now, the blocks of ice are not only blocks of ice. They are something screaming, or singing, locked in a perpetual whirlpool around this place, deadly and dying and exalting. And old, too. The blocks of spinning, tumbling ice, the great plain of them, are something that was here before the hungry labyrinth of storm at their center. Black-fire can taste it in the way, one un-heartbeat later, Star-ice’s death has already left this place. She has been flung outward and away. In a very long time, some small few grains of her will reach the valley again, will sift down beneath the leaves of the amethyst-petaled flowers, to settle, and sleep. This is the only gift the singing, screaming, turning ice can offer, and it is already done. The ice is too vast to remember any more gifts beyond that. The ice is too old to remember…how to stop falling.