SSCS 01: Installment 17 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 17 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…
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.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 17: 19.0616
“It was forgotten.” The coal-black bone they cling to suddenly shifts and cracks, the fissures opening up in a spider-line across its surface, breaking and popping in time to form words.
One of the scouts is startled enough to loose her grip and fall away, but the others clasp their claws quick enough to pull her back. A sparkling humming from outside in the not-dark catches and clings to her wing-tips and trails after her as she returns, sticky as cob-webs.
“It was forgotten that the OneVoice is still small, that there are worlds and times beyond that it has not yet touched.” Snaps and pops sound as the great bone shifts further. “It was forgotten that others might seek. We have not been found, but others might. It was forgotten that the beginning is not yet born. And might not. That there is ‘might.’”
A faint-crackled pause. Then, “Huuussshhhhhh,” just as Black-fire is about to try to speak in return, to question. “OneVoice will hear you. Hussshhh.”
The darkness shifts, not the great bone this time but outside it. The outside-the-darkness shifts, pressing closer, swelling with deep-belling tones and calling. And the cracks widen on the bone softly, just nearby, and just wide enough for the scouts to better sink their claws in to cling to.
The outside humming swells and swells; it calls and calls. The bees sing within it. The scouts can hear them, filling the air that isn’t with the promise of soft, misty evenings, and fruit ripening, the world stirring. Then the voice and singing and honey-drone moves on, following a different crack of darkness, leaving the scouts hanging in a black stillness that is almost like the void they have known and searched for centuries. Even the not-quite-there ancient scent of their bees goes with it.
“You cannot find your heart by following that,” the cracks in the bone whisper beneath the scouts’ claws. “Souls do not reside in the chorus. They are merely trapped by it. There are so many voices needed for the birthing, to tear existence apart enough for it to open.”
The birthing of what?
The scouts do not speak the question. They let it shiver through their fur, along the hollow planes of their stick-thin bones, and into the finest, ice-coated point-tips of their claws. Speaking thus together, the great bone, black as void, can hear them, and it answers:
“Another universe. Worlds pulled from within worlds. To push this one aside and spring forth new.”