Once upon a tyme a creature of the sand lived alone in a desert far away from everything. The creature, bedecked with long locks and short limbs, wrote words in the sand. Our long-locked short-limbed creature found that she liked her words in the sand, but the desert wind was contrary. It rushed across the surface of the land in unceasing sprints, leaving swirls of spinning dust in its wake--dust that fell all about the gentle depressions. The sands shifted and the words disappeared.

Everytime our long-locked creature found her words erased she would look to the sky for inspiration, and when it finally breathed upon her she would write more words, new words, old words, all the same words, sometimes with new meaning, sometimes with no meaning at all. When the sun rose she would lay her head upon her bundled locks and slumber though the sun's rays. As the shadows stretched and breathed cool breath upon her face she would rise and shake the dust from her hair, rub it from her eyes, shake it from her feet. And then she would find her words had left her again.

This was her life, day after day she wrote her words and the wind that whipped her locks wiped away her words. One evening as she rose to find her words gone yet again she found that the wind had not raced as hard or as fast as it had in the past. She rushed to see what was left of her words. And she discovered her lines and curls and circles were freckled about by other marks. Tracks. Tracks in the sand. She fell to her knees, her locks spilling all around her, and reached out to touch one of these foreign marks beside her own. But the wind, mindful of its self-imposed duty, rushed to her side, caressed her cheek as if in apology, and writ its name in grand letters right atop her words and the tracks that had joined them.

Before her eyes, she lost what she could never hold, and yet she felt as if she had never lost more. Right there in the neverending sand she wept. The puddle of tears she left behind touched the sand, reflecting in the moonlight. She thought it would be the last time; she could bear no more, though she did not know why. Her fingers drew her soul in the sand before her, while her tears continued to rain upon it. Then she laid down and closed her eyes, wearied from weeping. When next the chill wind woke her, she found her words had not been disturbed. Salty tears protected the last words she drew from the tearing fingers of the wind. And beside them were also the tracks. In the glint of the starlight she saw them for what they were. Pawprints.

Her eyes followed their path beyond the edge of the tears, where they were lost to the night. There, just at the place where the earth and the sky and the night all turned to black. There--a pair of golden eyes peered back at her before their lustre began to fade--fade but never die--everfade.