SSCS 01: Installment 20 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 20 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…
Soft hiss and crack now as the great bone beneath the scouts’ claws releases them from the other place, and the velvet void is soft again and thin, though they can still feel – almost, almost – where the other great bones might be. Soft spider-webs of shuddered thought. “So it might be with your bees, if they are not all surrendered. If there is one left that you can find by her silence.”
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 20: 19.1227
“It has been centuries, and our bees were never known for their sense or patience. However much we love them, we should flee this place.”
The words would have been spoken boldly, with passionate sorrow, if any of the scouts had dared to raise her voice above the faintest whisper. As it is, the scout who speaks speaks half in shudders that whisper through the great bone they all cling to. The black ribbon of void all around them is cold and cold, making ice gather softly in their fur. And the answer to their quest is possibly upon them. And possibly the answer is that it had all been for naught, that they have been away from their beloved valley for centuries and now will have only just enough time to return to it before death claims them and settles their bones beneath ever-frozen flowers.
And then the rest of the valley will have to choose too, whether to die along with them, to let the desert in, and be at peace.
“We cannot feed the OneVoice,” Green-and-purple whispers back in agreement. “And the desert at least will remember us. It has heard the frogs sing, and smelled the close sweet of honey, if only in faint, wind-snatched whispers and draughts. The desert remembers everything it has touched; it is a beast of memory.”
“Are we not already riding within the belly of a great beast of memory?” Black-fire growls back. “The songs that make up the OneVoice must come from something, else it would not have called them to it, else it would not have stolen from us. But what it has stolen, we can steal back. All the patience our bees lack resides in us. Or has confrontation with this new darkness driven it all from you?”
All the scouts who are here, who are all that is left, bristle at these words, their claws skittering across the rough black of the great bone as they tense and shift and wonder. The ice in their fur glints with light cast from beyond their ribbon of void.
“I am a patience beyond centuries,” First-shivered hisses, almost without breath.
“And I.”
“And I.”
“But we cannot track nothingness. Faint though it was, somethingness brought us this far. Our sister-gone-before-us heard their echoes and made a beacon so that we could hear them too.”
“Can you hear those echoes still?” Black-fire shakes the ice from her fur as her only means of shouting in this enforced near-silence. “Can you follow the ripples, every last one? I have picked up a pebble cast upon a shore and watched the changes in the water that came in its absence. Even water clear as glass will show it. Even the great roar of the OneVoice must bend to the hollows in its song.” And now Black-fire has no more means for shouting. Instead she releases her grip on the great bone, diving along the path of the ribbon of void, not knowing if she will be followed, but only that she must seek.