SSCS 01: Installment 29 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 29 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 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.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 29: 20.1210
The desert has come, and it is soughing through the black ribbon of void. The void that makes a labyrinth through and around the great chaos the OneVoice has hoarded to itself. The desert has come to take the part of itself that was stolen.
It is not sand, yet the fine grit of it begins to climb under every fingernail. It is not ice-cold night nor scorching day, yet all things still hiding in the void begin to seek shelter. It is not a wind that howls ceaselessly, that skitters and skirls… And the things within the void still feel their souls securely anchored, for that voice has been torn out of the desert. It is silent grit, and silent exposure. But it will not be voice-less for long.
The desert has come. And it gathers the scouts who remain – stick thin as starlight – close into its heart, into that part of itself they have always belonged. And through them it sees…everything.
Because the desert is a great, broad beast of memory. Nothing that touches it it does not own. Like the OneVoice, it gathers and collects all that it can, ravenous and insatiable. Unlike the OneVoice, the desert is no thief. The desert conquers, smothers, shreds to the fine-ness of sand, and offers endless space for the worship of all that is and all that has come before.
The OneVoice subsumes. The OneVoice knows only itself, has stolen thousands of voices so that they will sing to it of itself, building a choir only in order to sing itself into existence.
The desert is death. The OneVoice is the nothing that lies on the other side of oblivion.