Night was falling, spreading its indigo carpet across the sky to reveal the cathedral of stars that shone only in the deepest of deserts. The perpetual Sirocco wind whistled softly, carrying with it the sand that over the aeons had etched the limestone bedrock into fantastical forms that sprang up out of the desert floor like giant gnomes and mushrooms, lending the lifeless place an interior life of its own. Massive sand dunes sat hunched in the distance, slowly sailing their lonely courses across the bare bedrock, their hulks propelled by the same unrelenting wind that shaped this place. As
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