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The sun rose over the mountains, shifting their shadows on the sand. Skylar hooked his thumbs on the straps of his backpack and surveyed the land.

“There’s no harm in waiting, you know. It’s supposed to rain day after tomorrow,” his mother said.

He turned and put a hand on her shoulder. “You know I have to go,” he said, voice soft as she began to cry.

She stood at the edge of the sand and watched him go, but when Skylar drew the courage to look back he found that the desert had swallowed the world, and where he had come from looked exactly the same as where he was going.

The first night he camped near an acacia, drilled a spire into its trunk, drank deep from the liquid he could gather, and dreamt of the roiling ocean.

The second day Skylar walked until the the horizon became again a world of dunes, loose rocks, and swirling wind. No compass or map, Skylar charted the temperature and the sun’s position and wandered, looking for the storm.

The sign came on the third day. Atop a barchan dune, he saw a cloud moving slowly over the sand, swallowing the landscape in its wake. Skylar had an urge to run toward it, to sprint until his legs cramped and his lungs burned, but he clenched his fists by his side and tracked its progression instead. Once he was sure, he slid down the dune and headed to intersect it.

As the wind picked up he had to squint and shield his eyes. Sand swirled around him and battered his arms and legs and the back of his neck. Through his fingers he could see a fuzzy picture of the edge of the haboob, a solid wave of dust about to envelop him. The fine grains seeped through the space between his fingers and blinded him; he cupped his hand against his nose to try and keep the dust from his lungs as he dropped down onto his knees and crawled into the storm.

The wind roared and blew sand over him and buried his arm up to his wrist and coated him outside and in; as he gasped against his little cup of air his thoughts turned to failure and death and disappointment, and a sudden urge to scream and shake and beat his fists against the earth overwhelmed him.

Skylar took one last breath and released his hand, his burning eyes shut tight, and let the sand sting his face in a show of acceptance. It was over, he thought, he just had to endure.

The wind lulled. He could hear the roar of the storm, but the air touching him was calm. He lay still for a few moments, and as he was brushing the sand from his arms and pulling his legs free of it, a voice spoke.

“Open your eyes,” it said. Unable to wipe them with his sandy hands, he blinked until tears unblurred his vision. He was in the center of the storm, like someone had erected an invisible barrier. And there, standing not five feet away, was his father. Skylar was too weak to do anything but roll onto his back and gulp down the still air and cough at the sand that coated his throat and lungs and the inside of his nose.

It wasn’t his father’s voice, but it was his image who knelt and stroked his hand over Skylar’s cheek. The sand in his throat and lungs dissipated and Skylar gasped at breathing’s sudden ease.

“Dad?” Skylar asked.

“Yes, and no,” said his father, his features changing as Skylar watched. The being was a woman now, her long hair a different color from his father’s brown. The woman became a bearded man, who became tall, who became again a woman, who shifted back into the form of his father. Skylar recognized their faces only from the photographs and paintings.

“You have traveled far,” the being said. “You have shown great bravery. And for that, you will be rewarded with the gifts of time and knowledge.”

“I don’t understand.” From his position, Skylar could stare up the impossible eye of the sandstorm and see the clear blue sky.

The being pressed its hand flat against Skylar’s forehead and held it there for a moment. Skylar’s vision of the sky narrowed to blackness again, and then bloomed back to a different world. He could see, suddenly, his father lying in the sand years before, and his grandmother before that, and her father before her. He could see the sandstorm and the storms it had come from, and the storms it would become, each image superimposed in a circular, repeating loop.

“Who are you?” Skylar asked, in an echo of the past.

“We are you,” the being said, and vanished. The barrier keeping the storm from him collapsed. Wind whipped sand against his skin just as it had for each before, and in concert the idea both came to him and was given to him.

Skylar shut his eyes tight and allowed the storm to pummel him. He felt its rhythm and began to guide it along with his father and his future daughter and her future daughter. The wind slowed; Skylar turned his face up to the sky and watched the dark clouds gather. The first drop of rain fell on his outstretched palm, and then it was upon him, drenching him as he began to laugh.