Page 89 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
She pulled the journal from her bag when she walked inside. She flopped on the couch, flipping past the page with the sketch of the burning woman, past the charcoal sketch of the Guardian mid-transformation, until she landed on a sheet she didn’t remember seeing before.
It looked older than the others, with uneven edges and a pale smear of something, maybe blood, maybe rust, staining the bottom corner.
But what stopped her was the handwriting. It was hers. Or close enough to make her stomach twist.
The ink was darker than Orin’s, thicker, and the sentence sat like a wound at the bottom of an otherwise unrelated page of flora annotations.
Go alone.
If you meet too soon, he’ll break before the bond can hold.
The bond cannot form in shadow. It must burn.
Nora stared at it. The words didn’t feel like something she’d written. But they pulsed in her like memory. Or warning.
She reached up and touched the mark on her neck. It throbbed once, in time with her pulse.
Then below it, scrawled in a sharper tilt:
One must call. One must come. One must offer everything.
She stared at the line. Let it burn its way into her.
“What does that even mean,” she whispered, but the ache in her ribs answered before her brain could.
It meant: move.
It meant: now.
It meant: no more waiting for someone else to save you.
Still, she slammed the journal shut.
“Nope,” she said out loud. “Not today, prophetic nonsense.”
She shoved it aside and grabbed a bottle of water, walking to the open window, but she wasn’t laughing anymore.
The desert air hit her skin like a challenge.
Out past the ridge, the light quivered.
Like someone watching from behind the heat.
She leaned against the frame and whispered, “Still here.”
And this time, the wind didn’t just move. It answered.
Good.
***
That night, she dreamed of fire.
But it wasn’t wild. It moved with purpose. Controlled. Encircling a figure in the hollow.
Asher. Kneeling. His skin split with bark, ribs visible beneath ash and vine. His hands were bound, not by rope, but by the land itself. Roots curled around his wrists, holding him in place like a sacrifice half-finished.
His head hung low. Then slowly, he lifted it.
