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The air grows colder even as the day grows brighter. Willow has to walk with a hand over her eyes at all times, as the dry earth turns ever more yellow and dustier. The wind smells like iron.
And when you finally reach the top of another hill as the road winds and coils around the hunches of the earth, you spot the glare give away to a sheer-black country.
“Ow,” Willow rubs at her sore eyes. “This sucks. I should have carried a pair of sunglasses.”
“I have something,” Sandora reaches for her bag and takes out a bone visor with a thin line carved inside it. “I used this to traverse the Borderlands. It’s similar to how it is there, though this glass is black. But the glare will only get more intense. I got one for all of us.” She gives the others to all of you, and you strap it on your face. Your field of vision reduces to a thin line, but at least you look ahead without continuously squinting.
The land that opens before you look like someone poured molten glass all over the earth, covering it into a thick layer of black sheen.
“It’s like the Kìtum,” Soralisa points out. “Though there are no Kiengir ruins in sight.”
“This is Her hand in action,” Rubida mutters, licking her dry lips. “I have only heard about this.”
And it’s true for you as well. Insofar, you have only felt Ansàrra’s motherly embrace, Her beloved warmth, and only a few times a hint of the righteous fury She is capable of showing to the world.
But what stretches before you is a wasteland of Her own creation.
“In the span of a single night,” Soralisa starts reciting, “the sky parted like a veil, and liquid fire poured off, and the air turned into a furnace, and the very earth into glass, and not a voice remained, nor a tree, nor a bird flew in the sky, nor roots or footprints ever came to trod the marbled sheen. The Throne learned its lesson.”
[cont.]
