Page 117 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
She nodded once. Then again.
It made sense. Even if it shouldn’t have.
The desert didn’t ask nicely. It took. It tested. It ruined.
Except this time.
This time, it had let them through.
Not untouched.
But together.
They stood at the edge of the Hollow.
Not close to it. In it. Inside the ritual ring, inside the mouth of the trial, inside the place where the land had cracked and screamed and begged to be balanced.
Now, the ground beneath them was quiet. Still warm. Still scorched. But no longer writhing with rage.
The storm was over.
Nora stretched slowly, arms above her head, wincing at the pull along her ribs and hips.
“I feel like I’ve been rolled down a mountain and then politely set on fire,” she muttered.
Asher huffed.
That was all. Just… huffed.
It might’ve been the ghost of a laugh.
She smiled, just a little.
They walked together, naked and dust-covered, their bodies still marked in blood and sap and bloom. Her feet were bare. His gait was slower now, less rigid. There was a looseness to him that hadn’t been there before. As if the ritual had softened him from the inside out.
The air shifted as they moved, wind trailing behind them like ribbon.
And the earth…
The earth responded.
With each step Nora took, something small bloomed.
At first, she thought she imagined it. But when she paused and looked down, there it was: a single flower at her heel, white-petaled and open to the sun, growing directly from the impression her foot had left in the dirt.
She blinked.
“Asher?”
He looked down and nodded once, slow and solemn, as if it made perfect sense.
She stepped again.
Another flower.
She raised an eyebrow. “Okay, well. That’s not unsettling at all.”
“Sacred,” he said quietly.
