Page 98 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
It went bright.
A surge of gold behind her eyes, searing and formless, like she’d looked straight into the ribcage of a god. She wasn’t unconscious. She was caught between states, skin flickering, nerves exposed, the breath caught in her throat like a trapped insect.
She couldn’t move.
Couldn’t think.
Couldn’t stop glowing.
Her body pulsed in time with something beneath the earth, slow and titanic. The ground was breathing. She felt it rise and fall beneath her ribs, a heaving rhythm of old hunger and ancient memory.
What did I do?
That was the last full thought.
Then the wind arrived.
But not around her. In her.
It invaded her lungs like smoke. Hot, damp, insistent. Her spine jerked as it filled her, stretched her from the inside. Her back arched violently, her hands scrabbling in the dirt. She gasped, choked, and tried to scream, but nothing came out but light.
A beam of raw, golden energy seared from her mouth.
It hit the ground and scorched a perfect circle around her.
A boundary.
A warning.
Her limbs spasmed. Her muscles twitched like they were trying to crawl out of her skin. Her fingers curled inward. Her legs kicked and buckled, toes digging into the earth.
She wasn’t dreaming.
The desert had cracked open her body like a shell.
Her skin sizzled. Her sweat steamed. She smelled copper, salt, burnt sage, herself. Her cunt throbbed, involuntarily, fiercely, like the ritual was summoning every ache she'd ever buried under logic.
And the worst part?
Some small part of her liked it.
Some deep, primal thread was howlingYes, more, even as the rest of her screamedStop.
She was burning from the inside. The mark on her neck glowed so bright it stung her jawline. Her pulse was staccato. Her vision dissolved into double images, then triple.
The Hollow Watcher is a door.
Your bloom is the key.
He was never meant to guard it alone.
She blinked, and the world split in two.
In the first world, she was here. Writhing in a glowing ring, skin cracked with light, fingertips bleeding into the dirt.
In the second, she was her.
The one who came before.
