SSCS 01: Installment 15 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 15 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…
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.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 15: 19.0727
A breath of warmth caresses the side of Black-fire’s face and she turns back toward the planet or labyrinth or hungry thing. Warmth shivers, and she can feel the beginnings of the honey-drone gathering itself again, a dusty, immense sort of inhale readying itself to call to her.
Beneath her, though, something flashes through the ice-plain. Something green and purple and whirling. And Black-fire’s eyes fill with the ghosts of tears she has long been too hollowed out to shed. It is one of her sisters – dancing. Whether by claw or by some long-hoarded tool she has carried with her, she is weaving past the ice-blocks and scoring their sides, sending up plumes of ice and color in a way they had once done among the waterfalls that flowed into their valley. How they’d played with plumes of mist and rainbow and made the whole world sparkle around them. Green-and-purple is weaving a memory of the eyes, and the cut of her claw into the ice-blocks is cutting a sound into the false waiting sound of honey. Around her they can gather. Around her they can hold tight to the memories of their sisters surrendered before them, waiting for them in the peace of their valley that waits for them also.
Green-and-purple flashes through the ice, and the others fall to her. And the sound of honey pauses, and takes a considering sip of the void. Here is a puzzle it has not quite solved yet, a piece that does not yet quite fit into the song it means to be singing. Beneath them, within the icy whirlpool, a crack of labyrinth opens wider, wide and wide around the whisper of a path the bees laid down long ago. ‘Come within,’ the blackness and the lightning beckons. ‘Gather yourselves and come within. Eyes open or shut will make no difference to me.’