Both girls dreamed that night. Pattie, safe in her room, door locked. Rachel, weary from the day, curled up under the blanket which she had pulled up over her ear.

Deep into the night, the dream came, a rolling storm over their restless slumber. They met on a world scarred by charnel sands and shifting desolate dunes dark against the pallid sky haunted by a dying star. They walked together, naked and crippled by the awesomeness of the vast desert. The air was thin and there was no wind, though the sands brushed over the flatlands as rolling dunes turned the landscape into something new with every passing minute. And just as the land was empty, so too were Rachel and Pattie. All memories of the waking world had left them, all the chaos of the bones and wishing for a better life were lost somewhere on this strange, sick planet.

For a while, they wandered hand in hand, happy to experience the sensation of insignificance, basking in the freedom that came with existential wonders. A void had taken over the desiderium left by the passing of life. Those future images of earthly wealth and liberation consumed by a hollow atmosphere. After shuffling aimlessly, they noticed on the horizon a great storm rising. A tumultuous wind had picked up dust and sand, lifting the shifting ground into a helpless frenzy. Sound apprehension returned, putting an end to wondrous wanderings. The girls stopped as the desert moved around them. Yet, the storm pulled them closer to the horizon, and they saw that before the wall of sand bodies hung in the air, suspended from invisible strings as if in decoration. Many were contorted into abnormal positions. All were silent, but their frozen faces conveyed an active torment that could only be expressed through gaping mouths and bulging eyes.

Still more disturbing than the multitude of the damned was the sandstorm that trailed behind. Its billowing dust clouds overtook the hazy sky, pulsed past all the layers of atmosphere to reach the empty vacua of space. It was not a part of the planet, but was a living organism of colossal magnitude. It covered the fractured moon that occupied a quarter of the sky and brought the world into a darkness that took the breath out of the girls. But the darkness only lasted for a little while. Before madness could settle, the floating disciples of that storm emitted a deep earthy light, their bodies translucent, their eyes glowing — lanterns heralding the storm.

There was no denying Rachel and Pattie would be pulled into that desert tempest. Though they wanted to close their eyes, they could not. The storm would not allow it. Feeling that the gargantuan anomaly would consume them in seconds, the girls clutched to one another and waited for the unknown to take them.

It swallowed them whole.

And yet, the turbulent winds did not shred their skin. Their eyes were not blinded and their hair only lightly whipped around their faces in an ethereal, angelic way. The inside of the storm was quiet. Bodies drifted around them like jellyfish. Sand bubbles rose from the dark below. Something lifted them, not the wind and not violently, as they were expecting to be, but gently as if a to gather them up in a manner of curious inspection. Somewhere deeper within, something the size of a planet moved. The girls could only distinguish it as a large structure, some cyclopean monolith a darker shade than the sands. When it passed, the light returned for only a moment before the next structure eclipsed. A deep, rooting horror had claimed the girls, their hearts struggling to pulse against the glacial fear that had settled in them. As each eclipse passed, the girls began to understand through some cosmic gift of perception that the thing swimming in the storm before them was indeed of planetary size and they could dimly recognize it as a great creature stripped of skin and muscle and tendon with towering spines that fanned from the joints of a spine. And, as these bones finally moved past them, the desert god turned its head back to look at them and, though they could only feel and not see those empty sockets staring at them, it was enough for their hearts to finally give in.

At three thirty-nine in the morning, both girls died in their sleep. At three forty, they woke up, pale and tingly and softly panting.