Page 24 of Beneath the Desert Bloom (Of Beasts and Bloom #1)

THE SUN WAS already climbing by the time Nora peeled herself off the bed and poured water over her face. Her throat was dry, her limbs heavy, and the bite on her neck was pulsing again, soft and rhythmic like the world's laziest alarm clock. It didn’t hurt, but somehow it made her feel watched.

She wandered barefoot to the kitchen, grabbing the journal she’d left open the night before.

This one was leather-bound and swollen at the seams, water-damaged, stuffed with bits of dried plant matter and ribbon markers that no longer marked anything.

The entries were in her grandfather’s neat hand, but the ink wavered in places, like even he had flinched while writing some of it.

Nora set her mug down, took a breath, and started flipping pages.

Most were observations. Solar cycles. Hiker disappearances. The usual local lore cataloging. But then she found something buried between two meteor charts and a coyote skull drawing.

The Bloom must choose. The land does not take. It only calls.

Her brow furrowed. She turned the page.

The Guardian remains until she walks unshod into the wash. Until she bleeds willingly. Until she blooms.

A shiver climbed up her spine.

She turned one more page and found something older.

It was a sketch, maybe copied from another document.

Faint lines formed a woman’s silhouette, encircled by twisted roots and open blossoms, engulfed in flames.

Her face was distorted in a scream. And just below it, smudged with what looked like ash, a note:

She was the first one. The one who bled too early. The one who wasn’t met. The one who turned to ash.

“Cool,” Nora muttered, an ominous feeling washing over her. “Cryptic women and poetic metaphors. That always ends well.”

She didn’t know what made her move after that. She was suddenly standing, tugging on jeans, pulling on boots, and heading for her keys like her body knew where to go before her brain caught up.

Opal.

If anyone in this town knew what had happened, it would be the woman who sold teeth in jars and never blinked when Nora walked in smelling like sex and sage smoke.

The ride into town felt shorter than usual, the sky too bright and the road too straight. The wind was soft against the windows, but it carried a tension she couldn’t name, like the air itself was waiting for her to figure something out.

When she pulled up to Moondust Mercantile, the “Open” sign was already swinging gently in the breeze.

The shop felt different today.

It didn’t feel spookier, since Opal’s domain always had a healthy baseline of incense and uncanny, but more charged. Like the static before a storm, if the storm was made of old secrets and candle wax.

The bell above the door gave its usual half-hearted jingle as Nora stepped inside.

Opal was behind the counter, where she always was, except today she wasn’t fussing with her display of desert bones or shuffling her cards. She was just standing still, her hands folded. Waiting.

“You’re early,” she said, not looking surprised.

Nora arched an eyebrow. “You get a lot of desert-cursed anthropology grad students showing up before noon?”

Opal smiled faintly. “Only the ones who are blooming.”

That shut her up.

Nora cleared her throat, stepped further inside, and slid the journal from her bag. “I found something in my grandfather’s notes.”

Nora held out the sketch of the burning woman. Opal studied it with sadness in her eyes.

“Come,” she said, and turned without waiting.

Nora followed her past the beaded curtain into the back room.

She hadn’t been invited back here before, and she could immediately see why.

The shelves weren’t for customers. They were packed with oddities that felt less curated and more inherited.

Burnt pages. Jars of desiccated plants labeled in ink that had bled with time.

A small box lined with what looked like snakeskin.

At the center of the room sat a low table with two floor cushions. Opal gestured for her to sit.

“This isn’t a tourist story,” she said.

“I didn’t think it was.”

“It’s not a romance either.”

Nora’s spine straightened.

Opal gave her a look.

“Not in the way you want it to be. It never was.”

“I’m listening.”

The older woman knelt slowly, her movements graceful and deliberate.

“Before this was a town,” Opal said, “before borders and road maps, this place had a Guardian. Not a man. Not a spirit. Something in-between.”

As she spoke, she lit three small candles on the table.

“He wasn’t born that way. The land made him. Called him when it was under threat. It needed a protector, and so it took a man who had nothing left to lose and turned him into something else.”

“Changed him how?”

“His name was stripped. His body reshaped. He became a creature of bark and ash and silence. Bound to the land, but not complete on his own.”

Nora’s breath slowed.

“And the woman?” Nora asked, softly.

Opal’s fingers stilled on the stone.

“She came before. Some called her a witch; some called her a seer. She had the pull.”

A pause.

“But she did not wait.”

The air seemed to hold its breath.

“She tried to command the desert. Bend it to her will. Use its power for herself.”

Opal looked up. Her voice was quiet.

“The land does not bloom for those who try to own it.”

Nora swallowed.

“What happened to her?”

Opal didn’t answer right away.

“She disappeared. Or was consumed. Or burned from the inside out.” A small shrug. “Depends who’s telling the story. But the desert didn’t forget her. Some echoes don’t fade.”

Nora hesitated. Her throat felt tight.

“Will I be like her?”

Opal looked up. There was no smile in her eyes now, just quiet certainty.

“No. You’re not like her. You stayed longer. You listened. You walked into the hollow and didn’t flinch.”

Nora’s mouth twisted. “So I’m not doomed to repeat history? I’m just the next idiot in line?”

“You’re not in line at all,” Opal said. “No one pushed you into this. You crossed the threshold on your own. And he met you there.”

Nora opened her mouth to argue. She wanted to say she wasn’t chosen. That she didn’t believe in cosmic matchmaking. That she had a degree, dammit. But instead, she said, “What happens now?”

“You’ve already taken the first step.”

“I let him—”

“You accepted the bond. With your body. With your breath. Now you have to decide how far you’re willing to follow it.”

A silence stretched between them.

“I’m already changing,” Nora admitted. “Inside. I can feel it.”

“You’re not dying,” Opal said softly. “You’re becoming. But nothing comes without sacrifice.”

“What kind of sacrifice?”

Opal looked at her, steady and unblinking.

“That’s not for me to say.”

Nora left the shop with the sun pressed hard against her shoulders and about four hundred unanswered questions chewing through the back of her skull like termites.

The desert looked different now.

It was still all brittle sage and bleached gravel and that one half-mummified coyote carcass she'd passed every damn time she drove into town, but it felt as if every rock and shadow was watching her now. Not just because they recognized her, but because they were waiting to see what she’d do next.

Waiting to see if she’d run.

Or bloom.

She cranked the A/C in the SUV, but it didn’t help. The heat wasn’t coming from outside anymore.

She couldn’t stop replaying Opal’s words.

"You’re not dying. You’re becoming."

It sounded poetic, sure. Cosmic, even. But what did it actually mean? That she was going to wake up one morning and her blood would taste like cactus nectar and moonlight? That she’d sprout bark? Speak in riddles? Lose the ability to file taxes?

She didn’t want to be someone else.

Except… maybe she already was.

She had let him inside her. Dream and body and breath. She’d given him more than just access; she’d given him invitation. She had begged, moaned, arched into him like he was something holy. And maybe he was.

Or maybe she’d just been very, very dickmatized by a myth.

Nora snorted aloud in the empty cab of the car.

“Yeah, real academic.”

She passed the saloon again, shuttered tight like it had never been open. Like it was waiting for someone who wasn’t her. Or maybe someone she was still in the process of becoming.

The steering wheel was hot under her palms. The seatbelt tugged too tight across her chest. Everything felt close. Pressed in. Like the desert wasn’t trying to scare her anymore. It was trying to fit itself inside her.

She got home and left the car running while she stood in the driveway, staring out at the horizon.

The Joshua trees swayed a little too slowly. The sky looked like it had been painted on in watercolor and left in the sun to bleach out. The wind was soft. Curious.

Nora reached into her pocket and pulled out the dormant obsidian. Today it felt heavy in the way secrets were heavy. She turned it over once, twice. Then pressed it against the bite on her neck.

The skin there buzzed like a tuning fork.

“Okay,” she whispered. “So now what?”

The wind didn’t answer, but her body did.

A flush, low in her belly, like recognition.

She closed her eyes, heart ticking hard against her ribs. She thought she’d cry. But instead, she laughed again. Quieter this time. Like at a joke she didn’t quite understand yet.

She didn’t feel powerful. She felt cracked open.

She pulled the journal from her bag when she walked inside. She flopped on the couch, flipping past the page with the sketch of the burning woman, past the charcoal sketch of the Guardian mid-transformation, until she landed on a sheet she didn’t remember seeing before.

It looked older than the others, with uneven edges and a pale smear of something, maybe blood, maybe rust, staining the bottom corner.

But what stopped her was the handwriting. It was hers. Or close enough to make her stomach twist.

The ink was darker than Orin’s, thicker, and the sentence sat like a wound at the bottom of an otherwise unrelated page of flora annotations.

Go alone.

If you meet too soon, he’ll break before the bond can hold.

The bond cannot form in shadow. It must burn.

Nora stared at it. The words didn’t feel like something she’d written. But they pulsed in her like memory. Or warning.

She reached up and touched the mark on her neck. It throbbed once, in time with her pulse.

Then below it, scrawled in a sharper tilt:

One must call. One must come. One must offer everything.

She stared at the line. Let it burn its way into her.

“What does that even mean,” she whispered, but the ache in her ribs answered before her brain could.

It meant: move.

It meant: now.

It meant: no more waiting for someone else to save you.

Still, she slammed the journal shut.

“Nope,” she said out loud. “Not today, prophetic nonsense.”

She shoved it aside and grabbed a bottle of water, walking to the open window, but she wasn’t laughing anymore.

The desert air hit her skin like a challenge.

Out past the ridge, the light quivered.

Like someone watching from behind the heat.

She leaned against the frame and whispered, “Still here.”

And this time, the wind didn’t just move. It answered.

Good .

***

That night, she dreamed of fire.

But it wasn’t wild. It moved with purpose. Controlled. Encircling a figure in the hollow.

Asher. Kneeling. His skin split with bark, ribs visible beneath ash and vine. His hands were bound, not by rope, but by the land itself. Roots curled around his wrists, holding him in place like a sacrifice half-finished.

His head hung low. Then slowly, he lifted it.

His eyes met hers, and he spoke.

“I can’t hold it back forever. The desert devours unless you bloom.”

His voice sounded like wind through stone, ancient, strained, real.

Behind him, the desert pulsed, alive and hungry.

She tried to step forward, but the ground beneath her was crumbling. Loose sand. Burnt petals.

Another shape flickered behind him. It was a woman, but not Nora. At least not now. A memory.

She reached for him, but it was too late.

The flames swallowed her, and Asher bowed his head again, as if he already knew how it would end.

Nora gasped awake. The mark on her neck pulsed like a heartbeat not her own. Her body ached like it was splitting open.

She stared at the ceiling, breath shallow, until the morning light reached her skin.

Then she moved.

Water. The stone. The note. The obsidian blade. A bundle of dried flowers. The map. One of Orin’s journals.

She tied her hair back. Looked in the mirror.

Her eyes were still hers. But deeper now. Lit with something old.

“I’m not asking,” she said.

“I’m answering.”

And then she stepped into the heat.

And this time, the land opened for her.