Page 100 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
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. Andnow 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.
