SSCS 01: Installment 28 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 28 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…
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.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 28: 20.1129
Four scouts now cling to each other in the blackness, swinging in their orbits through a void that is crowded all around its edges with light and sound and Voice.
They are searching for silence, for a very particular silence that must belong to them and yet is unlikely to be. Their bees were never ones for patience or keeping thoughtfully apart. The honey-drone of their bees waits on the edges of their void, on the edges of what is everything else, and so they know their bees have joined in the OneVoice. That some or one might have kept separate and silent is a desperate, hopeless thought, a dizzy wish that circles around their minds while they fall in circles through their scraps of void. And always Old-rememberer’s song calls to them, whispers wingbeats like arrows stabbing them toward her. If that is the song of the connection, no bee that stayed away from it could have stayed away very long. And it is long and long the scouts have searched. Five-hundred years of searching, and more beyond that that their bees have been gone.
Wing-beats of starlight.
A wailing scrap of dervish under an empty sky.
The honey drone. That smells like amethyst cathedrals. That tastes like the mists of pounding waterfalls and of frogs singing in sunlit hiding.
The reason they’ve grown thin as starlight.
The reasons their bones have grown more hollow than the sky.
So that now the wide-desert emptiness is calling them. Missing its voice, yet heavy and dry.
The desert. It is an emptiness that grows wider, more still and vicious, and presses itself outward from their void. Its voice was taken by a sky that did not belong, but the scouts have brought pieces of it here already. It does not have to search a thousand years, to wait in silent wishing. It is here now, and the scouts know where its voice has gone. And there is a void here, too, that is like kin. And so the Desert has come, and it will do what it has always done, and fill up all the spaces it can find, and grow itself larger.