Page 27 of Beneath the Desert Bloom (Of Beasts and Bloom #1)
THE SKY ABOVE them had come unhinged, washed in ribbons of molten light and shadow, blue stretched too far, time unwinding like thread in the wind.
And they weren’t alone.
The land was shifting. Waiting.
Asher knelt beside her, gaze fixed on the horizon. His jaw was tight. His whole body tense, like he could feel the change coming before it broke.
Nora sat up slowly, the motion sending a ripple through the earth.
Something in the desert had been disturbed.
And it was waking. A pocket of silence cracked the air open like a void. A pressure drop so sudden it made her ears pop. Asher’s head turned sharply toward the center of the hollow, his shoulders tensing.
The wind rose next.
It circled them in a widening ring, dragging grit across their skin. The sand shivered. The light shifted again. The Watcher’s shadow twisted sideways.
And the ground began to shake.
Nora could feel it. An old rhythm, older than language. A heartbeat. The desert’s.
It had seen them. It had waited for them. And now that they stood together, it would not make space. It would make trial.
Asher pulled her upright, and the moment her feet touched earth, the mark on her throat flared. A blinding ring of light bloomed around them. The same circle she had scorched into the earth during the failed ritual. But now, it recognized them both.
The Hollow closed.
The rocks shifted subtly, like vertebrae cracking into place around a spine.
They were inside something now. Something sacred. Something ancient.
A trial ring. A mouth. A trap.
“Asher,” she said, voice rasping. “Something’s wrong.”
“I know.”
“Like… the desert wants to eat us wrong.”
“I know.”
A jagged scream split the wind, from something made of land and hunger and loss. The sand lifted into a wall around the edge of the circle, high and hissing. They were sealed in.
The trial had begun.
A vibration passed beneath her bare feet. Asher steadied her, his palm flat to the small of her back. She could feel the burning under his skin. His bark was splitting in places along his ribs, golden sap trickling down his abdomen like molten sunlight. His body wasn’t handling this well, either.
The land did not want them joined.
It wanted proof.
Then the first crack opened.
Not in the ground. In the air.
A jagged seam tore open between them and the center of the hollow. The sky above the Watcher turned black. A vortex of shadow formed overhead, laced with firelight. Wind shrieked in a circular scream.
From the center, a shape began to rise.
It was a body made of stone and root and the outline of desire. Female and not. Blooming and broken. Its limbs split at the joints, flexing outward in motions that bent too far, too wrong. It dragged itself forward with the sound of breaking branches and grinding teeth.
Nora’s chest seized.
The form opened its mouth, and her own voice came out.
“Let the land decide what survives.”
Twisting vines burst from the base of the Watcher and whipped toward them in twin spirals.
Asher stepped in front of her with a roar, his body widening, bark crawling up his chest and arms in thick protective plates.
The first lash struck his shoulder. Shattered bark flew.
A second snapped across his back, leaving a welt that pulsed gold.
Nora staggered back, grabbing the obsidian blade from her bag. She hadn’t even realized it was there. It pulsed in her hand, hot and eager. A tool. A weapon. A promise.
“Asher—” she began, but he was already lunging forward, swinging his arm in a wide arc that sent a spray of golden sap and earth-light out across the sand.
The vines retreated.
The shape in the center hissed.
The storm built fast. Vines shot upward from the ground in thickets, clawing toward the sky. Roots cracked upward through the stone, trying to cage them in. The wind tore at their bodies. The sun vanished.
The only light left was them.
Nora’s skin burned at the collarbone. The mark blazed. The obsidian vibrated in her hand.
She and Asher looked at each other across the crack that had just opened between them.
And they stepped into the storm.
Together.
The crack widened between them. Sand poured downward into the rift like blood from a wound, and the surrounding light dimmed. The desert inhaled.
And then it pulled them apart.
One blink, and Nora was gone from Asher’s side. One blink more, and the sky itself fractured.
Nora fell backward into something that wasn’t air, wasn’t solid. Just pressure. She didn’t scream. There wasn’t time. There wasn’t gravity. There wasn’t sound. There was only the feeling of being turned inside out and scattered like dust.
When the fall ended, she landed on her feet—but not in her body.
The world around her was desert, but not the one she knew. It was night here, though the stars blinked wrong. The air was suffocating. The sand glowed faintly beneath her bare feet.
She looked down. Her skin shimmered.
No.
Her skin glitched.
For a second, her hands were her own. Then not. Fingers too long, joints wrong, glow pouring out of her nail beds. She clenched her fists.
Ahead, a figure waited.
She didn’t recognize it, but it knew her shape. Female. Desert-burned. Her same boots. Her same body.
But her eyes…
Her eyes were empty holes filled with light.
“You wanted this,” it said, in her voice. “To be chosen. To belong.”
Nora’s heart slammed against her ribs. “You’re not me.”
“No,” the figure said. “But I’m what you’ll be. If you don’t hold on.”
The ground rumbled beneath her.
The figure smiled—and cracked. A bloom opened in the center of its chest. Not petals. Teeth.
Nora turned and ran.
***
Asher’s world didn’t fall.
It sank.
The rift swallowed him in silence, and he let it. Arms wide, body loose, ready to descend. He had done this before, long ago, in another form. He knew what waited at the bottom.
He landed hard, knees hitting cold rock. He stood into darkness so thick it pressed against his chest. The walls of the chamber weren’t walls. They were roots, wet and tangled, pulsing faintly with desert heat.
It smelled like old rain and crushed blossoms.
And somewhere in the dark, something wept.
“You should’ve stayed buried,” said a voice.
His voice.
He turned—and faced himself.
Not as he was now, but as he had been: human, trembling, still soft around the eyes.
The version of him who had first been bound.
“This is your fault,” the other Asher said, voice cold as wind through stone. “She’s here because of you. You didn’t stop her. You let her burn.”
Asher staggered under the words. They were the wound that would never stop bleeding.
“You were supposed to protect her,” the voice pressed. “And you failed.”
He dropped to his knees. The ground pulsed beneath him. The vines tightened, hungry.
For a moment, he believed it.
But then, he remembered her voice. Calling him. Choosing him.
“No,” he said, louder now. “She chose this. She chose me.”
He stood.
“She called me. Like no one ever has.”
His voice cracked open, low and reverent.
“And I came. I come. I will keep coming. Because she is the only thing that matters.”
The roots around him constricted. The light dimmed further. His chest hurt from something pressing inward, something trying to collapse him back into what he had been before he earned a name.
But he had a name now.
And so did she.
He pressed his palms into the earthy walls and remembered her voice, calling his name like it meant something. Like he did. And he let himself burn.
***
Nora stumbled down a slope that hadn’t been there a moment ago. The stars changed overhead as she ran, the constellations shifting into warning signs. Her breath caught in her throat. The ground beneath her grew softer. Sticky. Red.
She was running through blood-soaked sand.
The light shifted. And suddenly, she was watching herself again.
Not a doppelg?nger.
Her real self, feet planted, obsidian blade in hand, facing the Watcher alone.
“You’ll die,” the dream-Nora said.
“Probably,” she muttered.
“You’ll forget who you were.”
“I already did.”
The dream-self turned. Her mouth opened in a silent scream. And the sound that finally came wasn’t hers.
It was his.
“Asher,” Nora gasped, spinning.
The desert split behind her. Light blasted through.
She reached for it.
Asher’s fingers tore bark from the wall. His mouth opened around a snarl.
He thought of her hands. Her mouth. The way she touched him like she didn’t care what he was. The way she called him by name, his name, that she couldn’t have known.
He remembered her pain. Her defiance. Her glow.
And in that moment, he clawed upward.
The root chamber burst into light.
They found each other again in the center of the Hollow.
The dream shattered.
The world reset.
The sky blinked open overhead. The storm had not stopped.
But they were together now.
And the desert would have to burn to stop them.
The Hollow did not breathe them back into stillness. It shuddered.
A long, deep exhale pulled through the ring like the land itself had been holding its breath, waiting to see if they’d come back whole.
They had. But not untouched.
Nora stood in the circle’s heart, the earth warm beneath her feet, her mark glowing not just at her throat now but across her shoulders and down her forearms, veins of light threading through her skin like roots seeking the surface.
Her breath came slow and hard. Her hands were fists. The obsidian blade pulsed in her palm.
Asher stood at her side, bark cracked and steaming down one arm. His ribs flared with golden scars. His glow was dimmer now, but steadier, grounded deep in the structure of him.
They turned their heads at the same moment.
The sky changed.
What had once been lightless shadow now broke open with color. Red and orange, green and silver. Something between clouds and fire. A bloom turned inside out above them, petal by petal, each pulse overhead casting new shadows across the Hollow’s jagged floor.
Then the wind came back, howling and screaming.
The wall of air hit them with such force Nora’s knees buckled.
She landed hard, one palm catching herself in the dirt.
Asher stepped in front of her, shielding her body with his own, teeth bared.
The wind tore across them sideways, lifting sand into whirling towers, slicing their skin with air like glass.
The circle ignited, a ring of golden flame bursting up around them.
And from the center of the cracked basin, the creature rose again.
The same twisted form, blooming and broken, all root and bone and wrongness.
Its surface flickered between stone, bark, mirror.
Reflections rippled across it: Asher writhing in pain. Nora burning from the inside out. The land cracking open to swallow them whole.
She knew this thing. Had felt it in her dreams, in the vines, in the way the desert sometimes looked back.
But not now.
Now she stood.
“I’m not afraid of you anymore,” she said.
It hissed like wet sand against fire.
And charged.
Asher roared and ran to meet it. They collided in the center of the ring, claw against claw, light against shadow. The force of the impact knocked dust into the air like an explosion. Nora moved behind them, dodging vines, ducking debris, eyes locked on the battle.
The storm thundered around them.
The wind picked up until the sound of it became almost music, low and pulsing. The Watcher loomed above them, cracking visibly now, lines of light spreading across its surface like veins through ancient stone. The desert wasn’t just attacking.
It was coming apart.
Nora didn’t wait.
She moved to Asher’s side, ducking under one of the creature’s flailing limbs, slicing deep with the obsidian blade into the joint at its shoulder. The blade sank in with a sickening crunch. The creature howled, something inside Nora’s ribs reverberating with the force.
It turned toward her.
Eyes like mirrors.
It showed her herself. Collapsing. Alone. Unmarked. Forgotten.
But the vision faltered.
Because Asher stepped in front of her again.
“No,” he growled, voice thick and jagged. “She is seen. She is chosen.”
And the storm cracked. The vines recoiled. The creature shrieked and melted into the earth, leaving only a charred patch behind.
The Watcher split with a sound like mountains screaming.
Nora grabbed Asher’s wrist. Their blood mingled—her red, his gold—and something in the ground answered with a shudder.
Not submission. Not defeat.
Recognition.
The Hollow no longer demanded more.
Not because they’d fought hardest.
But because they had refused to break apart.
The ring burned low. The vines withered. The air stilled.
And for the first time in centuries, the Hollow exhaled.
Nora collapsed to her knees.
Asher followed.
The wind was gone.
The trial was over.
And the desert waited.