SSCS 01: Installment 16 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 16 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…
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.’
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 16: 19.0831
The scouts gather around Green-and-purple. In a whirl of stick-thin limbs and ancient hope they skip once through her plumes of ice, bathe in the cold splash of sunlit memory, and then plunge downward.
Black-fire sees the labyrinth yawning, senses a crack of blackness like the blackness between the stars, an empty, without-light-ness that she has grown kin to, and arrows toward it. There is lightning and storm, but not quite there, and she follows that crack of emptiness, the others close behind her like the wind off the desert, like a foe that can be made to help if you know the right lock-turn to do it. And so the scouts bring a piece of their valley, and even a piece of the desert, into the swarming, turning place that has stolen their bees.
Falling further, it becomes hard to keep to the corridors of blackness, because they begin to glimpse bright things just beyond. Whirling flights of hummingbirds. Falling sheets of water mixed with green leaves and soft, pink petals. Things like insects they have no name for moving in formation to create spires and whorls and ancient glyphs. And everything trembling, sparkling, humming in time with a heartbeat so vast it is somehow bigger even than the giant maw of the labyrinth they have plunged themselves into, that now surrounds them all.
At last, there is something solid in the darkness, a sliver of rock or an ancient, blackened bone, or something else unknowable, but it offers them rest, and the scouts fly to it in the blackness, and cling to it, and sob out their fears of where this place is that they have come to. They cling to it, and keep to this shallow ribbon of black void that is knowable, but even this holding still is dangerous; the honey drone and the shimmering throb of heartbeat is pressing in at the margins of things, begging them to cease weeping, and let go.