Page 26 of Beneath the Desert Bloom (Of Beasts and Bloom #1)

IT FELT LIKE walking into a storm before the clouds even knew it.

Nora moved through the thinning daylight like a woman already half-claimed. The wind caressed her bare skin. Dust curled up with each step.

The desert was still listening, watching her every move.

Joshua trees lined her path like sentinels. The sky stretched raw and endless above her, the color of fading blood behind a film of heat. The wind coiled at her back.

Her skin tingled. Her thoughts blurred at the edges.

She reached Hollow Wash by instinct.

It felt different this time. Closer. Charged.

The Hollow Watcher loomed, its edges sharper somehow, shadow cast long and angled like a sundial at dusk. The ring of stones at its feet was too neat. Too expectant.

She stepped into the circle. And there, at the center, was the obsidian stone. Her breath caught. He’d left it for her. He knew. Or the desert did.

She knelt. The ground beneath her felt warm, alive.

She took the bundle from her satchel: dried flowers, tied with red string by her grandfather. She laid it down.

Then came the knife. Obsidian. Her grandmother’s blade. Dark, glass-sharp, ancient.

She drew it across the inside of her forearm. Her blood dripped onto the flowers.

The desert inhaled.

The obsidian throbbed faintly in her other hand.

She pressed her palm to the ground. Glowing. Sand clung to her fingers, damp where it shouldn’t be.

And then she whispered an offering.

“I give what I am. I open. I ask.”

The wind stirred. Her skin thrummed. A pulse moved beneath her knees, slow and seismic.

For one strange, weightless instant, something accepted.

The air thickened. The horizon blurred. A bloom stirred beneath the ash.

Then—

The light died. Not dimmed. Not set. It was snuffed.

The sky dropped two shades. The temperature plummeted. A jagged sound split the air, like stone shearing open beneath her feet.

Nora cried out as the ground cracked.

The circle around her twisted. Dust rose in spirals, shaped like grabbing hands. The bundle at her feet blackened, hissed, and vanished.

The obsidian shuddered once, then exploded, split down the center, its two halves hitting the ground like thrown dice.

A wind screamed through the wash.

Nora tried to crawl backward. Her hands sank into the dirt like it was trying to keep her. Her blood sizzled on the ground from the cut on her arm, and the mark on her throat flared like it was being branded from the inside.

The desert surged.

Heat poured up from below her. Wet heat, slick and electric, like a pulse, like a flood. She gasped and the air ripped down her throat, dry as glass.

The change hit next.

Her veins lit up, blazing gold beneath her skin. Her thighs clenched. Her back arched. Her bones felt wrong, like her skeleton was trying to unlace itself from the inside.

She screamed.

But the wind swallowed it whole.

She began to convulse, her limbs seizing, wild and involuntary. Her fingertips dug into the ground. Her nipples ached under her shirt. Between her legs, she pulsed with unbearable pressure. Her skin glowed so hot it felt like it might split open.

Her vision fractured. Her limbs gave out. She fell.

Images broke across her mind like mirrors:

A woman like her, bent over with blood running from her mouth.

A dead bloom wrapped in red thread.

A storm that wanted something and would take it if it wasn’t offered.

Asher, standing in the dark, splitting open like a tree struck by lightning.

Nora’s cheek pressed into the dirt.

Her body was burning from the inside. Her mouth tasted like copper and flowers.

She wasn’t crying anymore.

She was glowing.

Out of control. Unheld.

And the land knew it.

The earth groaned beneath her, like something old and starved turning over in its sleep. The Watcher pulsed again, casting its shadow like a net.

She had given everything.

And the desert still wanted more.

Just before blackness took her, she opened her mouth one last time. Nothing came out.

The ritual hadn’t failed.

It had refused her.

And she was no longer sure the land would give her back.

The world didn’t go black.

It went bright.

A surge of gold behind her eyes, searing and formless, like she’d looked straight into the ribcage of a god. She wasn’t unconscious. She was caught between states, skin flickering, nerves exposed, the breath caught in her throat like a trapped insect.

She couldn’t move.

Couldn’t think.

Couldn’t stop glowing.

Her body pulsed in time with something beneath the earth, slow and titanic. The ground was breathing. She felt it rise and fall beneath her ribs, a heaving rhythm of old hunger and ancient memory.

What did I do?

That was the last full thought.

Then the wind arrived.

But not around her. In her.

It invaded her lungs like smoke. Hot, damp, insistent. Her spine jerked as it filled her, stretched her from the inside. Her back arched violently, her hands scrabbling in the dirt. She gasped, choked, and tried to scream, but nothing came out but light.

A beam of raw, golden energy seared from her mouth.

It hit the ground and scorched a perfect circle around her.

A boundary.

A warning.

Her limbs spasmed. Her muscles twitched like they were trying to crawl out of her skin. Her fingers curled inward. Her legs kicked and buckled, toes digging into the earth.

She wasn’t dreaming.

The desert had cracked open her body like a shell.

Her skin sizzled. Her sweat steamed. She smelled copper, salt, burnt sage, herself. Her cunt throbbed, involuntarily, fiercely, like the ritual was summoning every ache she'd ever buried under logic.

And the worst part?

Some small part of her liked it.

Some deep, primal thread was howling Yes, more , even as the rest of her screamed Stop.

She was burning from the inside. The mark on her neck glowed so bright it stung her jawline. Her pulse was staccato. Her vision dissolved into double images, then triple.

The Hollow Watcher is a door.

Your bloom is the key.

He was never meant to guard it alone.

She blinked, and the world split in two.

In the first world, she was here. Writhing in a glowing ring, skin cracked with light, fingertips bleeding into the dirt.

In the second, she was her.

The one who came before.

Kneeling naked in the sand, mouth open in ecstasy or pain. Nora couldn’t tell which.

Asher was there too.

But not her Asher. This one was younger. Softer. His hair was shorter. His eyes were wide with something like fear.

Then her chest opened.

Literally.

It cracked down the center, not blood, but light unfolding from the inside out. She disintegrated into dust and wind and memory.

Asher screamed and changed.

Transformed.

His skin split, revealing veins of amber and stone. His spine rippled into knots of muscle and root. His mouth stretched in agony. His eyes turned molten.

And when he stood again, he was the Guardian.

Bound. Alone.

Nora sobbed as the vision shattered.

The sound never reached her throat.

She was back on the ground. Flat. Writhing. Glowing too hard to hold herself together.

A new pulse slammed through her core, low and ancient.

The desert was not killing her.

It was trying to finish what she’d started.

Her transformation had begun. But without him, without the balance, it was warping her.

A fresh crack split the earth beside her, this one wide enough to see the shadows swirling below. Her body pitched toward it. The sand sloped under her spine, cradling her like an altar.

The ground was offering her.

The wind hissed against her ear:

You are not enough.

Her thighs clamped together against the pull. Her hips bucked. Her arms spasmed. Her bones hurt, not from pain, but from becoming.

She felt her teeth change shape.

Her jaw stretch.

Her breath come in bursts like howling.

Her heart pounded so hard she thought it would burst. Not from panic.

From wanting.

The desert had awakened something inside her and was feeding it.

And if Asher didn’t come—

If he didn’t finish this—

It would take her. Break her open and replant the pieces. Use her body like a vessel. Bloom her without consent.

“Help me,” she tried to say. It came out as a cracked exhale. Half sob, half prayer.

But the wind answered with laughter.

Dry. Feral. Familiar.

Then a growl broke through the air.

Low. Deep. Not human. Not animal.

It sounded like it came from the earth itself.

Just before the wind answered, something shifted. The way air bends around a lightning strike before it hits.

Then, he was there.

Asher.

Fully formed.

Fully Guardian.

Lit by moonlight that hadn’t been there a second ago.

He stood at the rim of the cracked circle, steam rising from his skin, chest heaving. His eyes glowed gold, wrathful.

And the desert turned its gaze on him.

The desert didn’t greet him. It recoiled.

As Asher stepped over the threshold of the hollow, the ground beneath him tightened like skin resisting a needle.

The air was dense, thrumming, electric with refusal.

His body, massive and heat-glazed, trembled under its own weight as he moved forward, drawn toward the collapsed ring where Nora lay curled in light.

She didn’t move. Her skin glowed fever-bright in the dust, hair clinging to her cheeks in wild dark ribbons.

Her limbs twitched softly, like a puppet in a slow, unraveling seizure.

Light pulsed from the hollow of her throat in rhythmic waves.

The ritual had not only rejected her. It had tried to remake her.

And now she lay in its unfinished cradle, neither fully body nor fully bloom, her glow fighting against itself.

He took another step, and the desert answered.

The earth rose slightly beneath his foot and shifted just enough to threaten his balance. A gust of sand hissed sideways into his face like a whispered curse. Far above, the trees groaned, not from the wind, but from the memory of what they had witnessed before.

He had waited.

And the desert does not wait.

It claimed what stepped forward.

Now it would make him prove his place beside her.

Or bury him trying.

From the edges of the Watcher’s base, thick vines burst from the sand, thorned and sharp and fast. They lunged, coiling around his calves with a snap, slicing through bark and stone as if his body were no more sacred than flesh.

His muscles surged in resistance, snapping taut, forcing the vines back with a roar that shook the shallow hills.

But the land didn’t stop.

The vines pulled harder, wrapping upward, biting into the creases of his knees, around his waist, and finally his throat. He buckled, knees in the dirt, fingers clawing at the tendrils. They pulsed with heat. They were testing him, searching for weakness, pressing against the memory of hesitation.

Asher bellowed and twisted violently, one hand tearing the vines from his throat, another ripping them from his ribs.

Golden sap splashed to the earth. He staggered forward, half-choking, the sand rising around his legs like a second set of hands.

The Watcher turned its shadow toward him, stretching across the hollow. The stones groaned. The light dimmed.

He pushed forward another step, shoulder-first, absorbing the next hit as it came.

A rock the size of a man’s chest detached from the high ridge and hurled itself toward him like a cannonball.

He caught it midair and threw it down at his feet.

It shattered, but the impact jarred him.

His vision wavered. His knees buckled again.

A crevice opened just ahead, deep and narrow, glowing with heat from within.

He could feel it on his shins, a breath from the earth’s deepest mouth.

Still he fought.

He was not soft. He was not safe. But he was hers. And that meant he could not stop.

The vines struck again. This time, they came not with thorns but with memory.

The tendrils flickered as they rose, and within their coils, he saw glimpses of past pain.

A thousand failed rituals, a hundred blood-soaked Blooms, women kneeling in the dark whispering names no one answered.

He saw a version of Nora among them, her back arched, her mouth open, whispering “you came too late.”

Asher roared in refusal. He tore through the illusions, his body battered and glowing with effort. The desert shifted beneath him like a creature uncertain whether to strike or surrender.

Another step. And another. His hands burned. His breath came in sharp, shallow bursts. Bark split at his ribs and knees.

Nora was close now. Just ahead. Her body was still glowing, but erratically, like a candle about to gutter out.

He reached the edge of the broken ring as the land made its final move.

The wind stopped. The sky closed.

And the Watcher, still just a hunk of stone, but never just that, shifted subtly and turned to face him.

Asher dropped to his knees.

He laid one hand flat on the earth.

“Burn me if you must. Break every piece of me. But I am hers. I have always been hers. And I will not let you take her.”

The vines hesitated.

The silence deepened.

And the land… shifted.

Not in surrender.

In recognition.

Slowly, as if reluctant, the vines began to unfurl. The glow receded. The wind returned in a low, mournful sigh.

Asher crossed the final distance to her side.

He dropped to his knees, massive hands trembling.

Not from exhaustion.

From restraint.

From everything he hadn’t let himself feel. Until now.

He touched her cheek.

She burned beneath his palm. And for the first time since the desert had swallowed her, Nora moved.

Her eyes fluttered. Her hand reached for him blindly. Her lips parted, cracked and dry.

"You came," she breathed.

He bowed his head to her shoulder.

“The land tried to keep me. But it made me for you.”

He looked up toward the sky, toward the Watcher, toward the still-breathing land.

And under his breath, he said, “I came to carry this with her.”

“And I will.”

They stayed like that for a long time.

The bond unfinished, the world holding its breath.

And beneath them, the desert began to stir.