Page 86 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
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 ascream. 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.”
