Enveloped in howling winds, with sand stinging his face, the traveler raced. The Thing was nearly upon him now. Though he flew, feet scrabbling up dune after dune, it gently coasted itself across the sands behind him. He did not look back, not once. Behind him, the city, and all that had ever known it, he knew, had been erased. Even now, the whorling sands swallowed its ruined marvels, inch by inch. In a day, there would be no trace it had ever existed... And however intensely his heart beat, and his lungs burned, and his feet carried him, it could not have been enough. However languidly the Thing paced itself behind him, coiling scales twisting across the horizon and back, it was gaining on him.

Atop a tall dune, surrounded in smoking colonnades soon to be forever forgotten, he sank to his knees and begged to the heavens. "God! Merciful God! Hear me! Help me!"

And as the Thing came upon him, two clawed hands grasped his wrists, and two caressed his shoulders; It spoke, then. It was a voice in darkest, wailing agony, and bloodied raw like the squeals of the desperate condemned. It fell upon the Traveler's ears with the force of a crashing wave, but it was so quick, and so quiet, and so subtle and like to be missed, it was as if it were the chirp of a lone songbird far off... There, and then gone. It hissed into the nape of his neck:

"I am God. I am here to punish you."