SSCS 01: Installment 31 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 31 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 is made up of losses, and now they number in the thousands, in the tens of thousands. That is enough.
The desert is death, and death opens its eyes. The OneVoice is young, not yet even born. But death is impartial. And death has come.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 31: 20.1227
***
In the desert, there is a valley hidden beneath the sands. For eons it was filled, rim to rim, with amethyst and ruby-petaled flowers. It saw seasons of lushness, of frog-song and the songs of misty waterfalls, of bees drowsing and droning amongst the petals of the flowers. And for another eon it held its breath, waiting for those lush seasons to come again, hoping and whispering to itself, while the desert waited in a great wide circle outside its borders, singing its own songs of things passed on, of dervish dances with distant lightning, of its hunger to claim the valley as its own.
Until, at last, the desert did just that, slipped inside the valley’s borders and filled it rim to rim with desert sand. But in doing so it buried other things, and in doing so it lost its voice. A great, distant, Other voice, more void than the desert itself, stole the desert’s voice away.
And that might have been the end it, if the voice of death truly could be stolen.
For now the desert waits in perfect stillness, no breath to stir its grains of sand, to laugh back at the lightning when it strikes.
For now there are carrion beetles, the care-taker beetles, dug down deep where the roots of their flowers still lie. For now they tunnel upward only in moonlight, feeding off amber crystals of honey caught within the sands, and dodging the flashing scales of silver desert snakes who would feed on them in turn.
But there is a hole in the sky leading straight up to starlight. And death has gone through it, and on the other side it has torn a distant, hungry Voice to pieces, and sent those pieces spinning and flying back again. Out. Away from that center. All the pieces flung back through all and any of the strange corridors the Other Voice had cut through our universe, and left still open.
The pieces, some of them, whichever were flung this way, will be falling back through the sky soon.
Pieces of whirling motes of light, perhaps, or spinning blocks of ice, or maybe slivers of great, black crackling bones. Maybe even a few bees. They are all dead, their souls tossing and keening within the song of a desert wind that has been flung back along with them. But they are coming, all at once and soon.
And the desert knows what will happen then. A great breath. A great awakening, of some new life.