Page 94 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
“What?”
“You’re too close to the threshold. I can feel it in your skin. If I go further, I don’t know what I’ll unleash.”
She stepped back. Slowly.
And slapped him. The sound rang out in the stillness.
Her hand shook.
“You think I don’t know that?” she said, her voice shaking with something halfway between grief and fury. “You think I don’t feel it every second I’m out here? That I haven’t looked in the mirror and wondered if I even recognize myself anymore?”
She dug into her pocket, pulled out the obsidian again, and slapped it against his chest.
Hard.
It stuck to his skin for a second. Clung. Glowed faintly.
“You gave me this like a guidepost. Like a gift. But you didn’t come when I called.”
She stepped back.
“So take it. I don’t need a map if I’m the one writing it.”
Asher stood there silently in the wind, obsidian in his palm, chest rising and falling like he’d been gutted and didn’t know how to hold himself together.
“You can’t protect the land and abandon what it wants.”
Nora turned.
And walked away.
The wind rose around her like applause.
Or like warning.
She didn’t look back. The desert wouldn’t want her to.
The house felt wrong when she returned.
Like it didn’t know she was different now.
Nora slammed the door behind her. It didn’t help. The quiet clung to her, tighter than sweat, tighter than the ache still smoldering low and deep in her body.
She dropped the bag, the knife, the empty bottle. The obsidian was gone. Still with him.
Good. Let him feel it burn.
She stalked through the kitchen, not hungry. Not even angry anymore. The rage had dulled into something quieter. She felt stripped bare, every nerve left raw.
At the sink, she splashed her face. The water was cold, but not cold enough to bite. She stared at her reflection in the dull metal of the faucet. Sunburnt, glowing faintly, bare-throated and hollow-eyed.
“Great,” she muttered. “I look like I just got dumped by a god.”
She turned toward the hallway and stopped short.
A sound, low and distant, moved through the walls. Not a creak, or the plumbing. Something deeper. Like the earth had cleared its throat.
A crack shattered the silence.
