SSCS 01: Installment 27 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 27 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…
And then, abruptly, she realizes that she can hear the dervish skirling swelling and fading, and swelling again, in time with a great heartbeat. With this, the cold of the void plunges through her once more, and she rips her claws into First-shivered’s wingtip, pulling her back from the brink, back from the multitude.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 27: 20.1113
“Hush now. Hush now. We have to be all that is hush. We have to reach for the silence again, before it is too late. Follow. Follow. Follow and wait.”
And so it is Black-fire who dives away and leads them in their orbit, a new orbit that will come back to this place, but a way to rest in stillness, a way to wait. She thinks perhaps the others will not follow, that they have already been trapped by the skirling dance of long and hated and long-missed and beloved memory, stolen into the OneVoice. But First-shivered, at least, she’s pulled away by her dusty, bloody wingtip. And Last-and-smallest had been slow to catch up to them and so was slow to be trapped.
Slow to be trapped but not quite free. While two of the scouts fall away and around, loop through and down and down in their new, twisting, black ribbon of orbit, three still are paused on the threshold, unable to tear themselves away.
The desert wind and dervish. Old-remember remembers how it used to taunt at them, how it used to gather unwary bits from the edges of the valley to pull into itself, how it used to laugh with them, and sing its constant lullabies, and chuckle at the skies, a most living, most alive piece of the desert, that built itself up from little bits of death. It has been waiting for her too, she just didn’t remember that. She would have gone to the edges of starlight, but this is what was always waiting for her.
But now Black-fire and First-shivered have made the first circuit of their new orbit, have come back around, have forced speed into their passage. This place is the turning point, the pausing point, yet still they put the strength of their starlight bodies into passing through it and beyond to away, into pulling Green-and-purple away with them.
And so three are free still. Still free. And two are on the threshold and might yet pass through, into the great, consuming everything that wants to strip their voices into building more of itself, that will use their voices for calling.
But the three orbit once more, falling into their thin line of stillness, listening for silence, in case it is still there to be listened to. They fall back to the place, on the edge of the void and everything, where the dervish wind sounds like the great hungry desert, like aid and enemy and something almost like home. This time they reach and grasp and pull Last-and-smallest away with them. Away to wait and rest. While Old-remember reaches out her claw, and is pulled through.
The others, the four only who are left, can feel the shape of where she has gone. Gone and not gone. The path to where she is is like a trail of honey made of bone-fine dust and starlight. And her singing. Lost into the OneVoice, her singing cannot be unheard, no matter what silence they might fly toward. It is the sound of wingbeats in the void, of searching to the edge of starlight and beyond.