Page 96 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
Her voice was steady.
“I’m ready now.”
And the desert heard her.
CHAPTER 20
IT FELT LIKE walking into a storm before the clouds even knew it.
Nora moved through the thinning daylight like a woman already half-claimed. The wind caressed her bare skin. Dust curled up with each step.
The desert was still listening, watching her every move.
Joshua trees lined her path like sentinels. The sky stretched raw and endless above her, the color of fading blood behind a film of heat. The wind coiled at her back.
Her skin tingled. Her thoughts blurred at the edges.
She reached Hollow Wash by instinct.
It felt different this time. Closer. Charged.
The Hollow Watcher loomed, its edges sharper somehow, shadow cast long and angled like a sundial at dusk. The ring of stones at its feet was too neat. Too expectant.
She stepped into the circle. And there, at the center, was the obsidian stone. Her breath caught. He’d left it for her. He knew. Or the desert did.
She knelt. The ground beneath her felt warm, alive.
She took the bundle from her satchel: dried flowers, tied with red string by her grandfather. She laid it down.
Then came the knife. Obsidian. Her grandmother’s blade. Dark, glass-sharp, ancient.
She drew it across the inside of her forearm. Her blood dripped onto the flowers.
The desert inhaled.
The obsidian throbbed faintly in her other hand.
She pressed her palm to the ground. Glowing. Sand clung to her fingers, damp where it shouldn’t be.
And then she whispered an offering.
“I give what I am. I open. I ask.”
The wind stirred. Her skin thrummed. A pulse moved beneath her knees, slow and seismic.
For one strange, weightless instant, something accepted.
The air thickened. The horizon blurred. A bloom stirred beneath the ash.
Then—
The light died. Not dimmed. Not set. It was snuffed.
The sky dropped two shades. The temperature plummeted. A jagged sound split the air, like stone shearing open beneath her feet.
Nora cried out as the ground cracked.
The circle around her twisted. Dust rose in spirals, shaped like grabbing hands. The bundle at her feet blackened, hissed, and vanished.
