Page 91 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
She was answering.
By the time she reached the edge of the Hollow, the sun was bleeding gold across the ridgeline, and the wind had stopped entirely. Even the Joshua trees stood still, their crooked arms frozen mid-reach, like they were afraid to touch whatever came next.
She stopped in the stone circle, where she had found the first sign from him. Nothing remained now but a scorched mark in the dirt. Like the desert had tried to bloom and failed.
“Okay,” she whispered, kneeling. “Let’s see if you’ll listen to me alone.”
The stone was warm in her hand. Her other hand reached for her pocket and pulled out the scrap of paper she’d tucked there. The note from her grandmother.
The touch. The offering. The vow.
No clear instructions. No incantations. Just a gesture. A beginning.
Nora pressed the obsidian into the center of the ring. Her thumb traced the ridges left by time and hands not her own. She swallowed hard and said, steady as she could:
“If you remember me, take this. If I am yours, show me.”
A beat passed.
Nothing.
Then a sound. Not a response, but a recoil. The wind didn’t return. It reversed.
A single, stubborn sprout of desert bloom, white-petaled and fragile, erupted from the edge of the circle like it had been waiting for her voice.
Nora’s heart jumped.
Then, it withered.
Right in front of her, the bloom blackened. Curled. Collapsed into ash. A gust of air sucked it inward, like the ground itself was rejecting her.
The desert said no.
Nora staggered back, clutching the stone, her breath catching in her throat.
“What the hell—” Her voice cracked. “Okay. Rude.”
The pain hit a second later, sharp and wrong. Like something inside her had twisted the opposite direction. Her stomach turned. Her limbs tingled. Her mouth tasted like copper and dust.
She sat back hard, legs folding underneath her. The stone was still hot. Her skin still flushed. But now it felt… stupid. Embarrassing.
This wasn’t a ritual. It was a tantrum dressed in folklore. A woman with a rock, shouting into silence, begging for something she couldn’t name.
Nora closed her eyes and hissed out a breath through her teeth.
“Not enough, huh?”
She wanted to cry. Instead, she sat there with her chest heaving and her thighs still sticky with need. With the memory of something that never fully arrived. A slow tear leaked sideways down her cheek anyway, cooling against sunburnt skin.
“Guess that answers that,” she muttered. “Thanks for nothing, horny cryptid dimension.”
She turned to go. Her knees ached. Her pride hurt worse.
And that’s when she felt it.
The sensation of being watched dropped over her. Hot, electric, paralyzing. The way you feel when you wake up in the dark and know someone else is in the room.
She turned back. He was there.
