“You have killed one of the Desert’s own in cold-blood! Now the vengeance of the wastes must surely come: you have called down destruction upon us.” The clerics turned towards the raving woman, but had no opportunity for any other reaction. The gentle zephyr burst into a howling simoom; hot, sand-laden wind lashed against us all, and blotted the sun from the sky. The storm had come without warning. Even the most venerable among us, who had seen innumerable sandstorms come and pass, and who could read the signs and omens as clearly as another might read a printed page, could not have foreseen the fierce eruption of this divergent tempest.
Those gathered in the market scrambled for shelter at once, as the blinding, biting gale howled through the streets and tore the fabric coverings from merchants’ stalls. I caught a glimpse of the clerics rushing towards the cobbled road by which they had entered the square—making a dash for the shelter of their stone cathedral. Rushing towards a vacant booth, which would offer some small protection from the simoom, I called for Thistle to follow. My sister did not move from the spot where she stood—she seemed rooted to the pavement.
“This is not the Desert’s storm,” she said, her voice a cryptic hiss, as I pulled her bodily towards the ersatz refuge. “This is not the Desert's will,” she whispered, shutting her eyes against the wind, her expression strangely unaffected.
I had no time to inquire after her meaning, for in the next instant the clerics hurtled back into the market, as if carried upon the wind like dried leaves. No sooner had the stricken men crashed to the ground, scattered and broken, than another form appeared. Hideous beyond even the most feverish vision of nightmares, was this phantom. Galloping upon hooves which struck fire with each step, a pale horse sprang into the marketplace—snorting steam from a snout of bleached bone, it drew the storm around itself like a shawl, half-concealing the fearful symmetry of its skeletal carcass in a grainy, churning cloud. The thing seemed to have perished long ago, neath the unforgiving sun of the wastes, yet it upreared and bellowed still—though beetles and larvae swarmed upon its mouldering hide, which stretched like desiccated leather over the bulges and ridges of its bones. The empty sockets of its cracked skull housed no eyes, but held ignescent impressions of whitish, sputtering fire. I caught only scattered glimpses of the thing, amid the swirls and bursts of the dusty, choking currents which enshrouded it.
Through the Fury’s crooked, shriveled neck, a slender, silvery sword had been plunged: perhaps, I thought, by the hand of some warrior, ere he learned that no mortal weapon could halt the onslaught of the monstrosity. I pushed Thistle into the stall and leapt in after her—hoping against hope that the creature would pass our hiding place by.
It made after those who still scrambled within the market—groping blindly through the storm like benighted children, or wiping painfully at their eyes, encrusted as they were with flecks of sand and grit. The Fury was soon upon them, rearing and striking out with its flame-wreathed hooves. The piteous screams which tore through the square were quickly swept away by the wind, and drowned-out utterly, as a deep, rumbling voice arose like a groan from the very roots of the world, shaking me as a doll, rattling me out of my senses.
“Come is the herald of a new age,” the daemon boomed, “And his name who follows in my wake is Death.” If the voice spoke further, I cannot attest—for at this resounding declaration, shuddering off through the foundations of the city, the buildings surrounding the square teetered briefly, before resolving themselves into dust and rubble. In the din and panic of the the dissolution, a fragment of timber fell upon me, and I knew no more of the storm...

A vast expanse of luminous space shimmered before me. Gone was the pandemonium of the marketplace—gone were the bleached bones of the rampaging Fury, glinting under the wash of encrimsoned sun which filtered through the relentless whirl of the sand-laden blasts. Within the gulf of unblemished radiance through which I drifted, the warbling strains of an unseen choir rose and fell, in time with the dinosauric pulse of a underlying tone so deep and pure, that it seemed to engulf me in the resonance of its boundless, plangent vibration—it throbbed sweetly in my ears, and banished all tension and fear.
The steady, silvery voices of the singers wove around me a blanket of harmony, holding me as a hapless captive, suspended in the melodious strains of their otherworldly song. Each lilting refrain, sung in a tongue I felt I had once known, but long since forgotten, poured into the next as a single fluid drone of primal, rhythmic sound—rendered in a spectrum of overlapping tones so broad, that I felt I could perceive only the meanest fragment of it. The hymn awakened in me an unbearable yearning which defied comprehension, welling up through my chest and seizing my throat until I thought I must be strangled. It was a yearning to return home—to a home I had never seen, could not recall, which was nonetheless imprinted upon the very atoms of my being, and sung of with reverence in the spaces between those atoms.
At last, a single voice arose within the gulf, speaking words I could understand.
“The time has come to awaken, Enos,” the voice swept over me like molten light, warming me to my very bones, and sending my mind reeling in unalloyed exultation. “The time has come to recall who you are.”