Fear wins out and you run

The massive centipede creature dives back under the surface of the sand as if it were swimming through water. The dark-skinned man, still oblivious to his danger, looks up at you standing atop the dune and waves his hands at you. And then he calls out, his voice small amid the howling waste, but loud enough to carry to your ears. His fate is sealed. Some distant thought, some sensation of pain and pleasure mingling as you are reduced to nothing, jolts you from your paralysis.

Run! Run, or end up inside that creature!

You turn your back on his fate and set off down the dune, racing and tumbling through the rough sand. You hear a clicking of chitinous limbs and you think you hear a brief scream, piercing through the rumbling of the volcano, but you cannot be certain.

You pick yourself up and run. You make it to another dune and climb it, your legs aching with effort. You reach the top and look back in time to see the serpentine body and scuttling legs of the huge centipede as it arches out of the wasteland and plunges back beneath the surface.

It's getting closer! Your heart pounds wildly in your chest. Does it still beat? Do you still have life?

You can feel it now, growing closer and closer, plowing its way through the sand with such ease that you fear you may never outrun it. Ahead of you, just beyond one more dune, you see a black pillar of stone. Perhaps some ancient statue of titanic size, now fallen and abraded by untold centuries in this nightmarish wasteland.

"You can make it," you moan, forcing yourself past the point of pain.

And as you say those words, you know you likely cannot reach the stone in time, if it even offers you safety at all. You feel the sand sinking in behind you, sucking at your feet as the dune is collapsing around and beneath you.

The horrid creature is rising from the wasteland at your heels. The flickering shadow of its bulk falls over you, backlit by the storm. Your only choice now seems to be to find your courage in these last moments and turn and face your destroyer, or to run and hope that miracles exist, even in the ravaged depths of the abyss.