The Glassbelt Interior

Overview

The Glassbelt Interior is Caeldon's first named true desert, lying beyond the inland edge of the Windscar Expanse. Escorts and crossers call it simply the Glassbelt, after the glassed ground that marks its worst stretches. It is a country of dead fire and dead sea, where the salt-crusted dead walk the old shorelines at night, figures fused into the ruins whisper after those who rob them, and every crosser has heard of a furnace-lord's treasure-vault that the sand uncovers once a lifetime and covers again.

The Windscar is dry and hard but still has its uplands, basin rims, escarpment routes, defended wells, and Orc passage custom. The Glassbelt begins where all of that gives out: salt flats, heat basins, glassed ground, dead furnace zones, rare wells, mirage roads, and country that even skilled Windscar escorts will not enter without need.

Lay of the Land

The Glassbelt lies between the halves: the cradle-web to the west, the Windscar Expanse to the east, to the north desert that nobody has followed to its end, and to the south a sand sea that no crosser has walked across. Beyond it lie the Shadewells, which no crosser has seen. On the west it meets the ruin margins of the Broken Marches and, two or three weeks further south, the fog of the Hushvale under its unnamed range. On the east it faces the Lastwater Wells of the Rimward Basins and the inland edge of the High Scars. The crossing runs west to east between those edges, four to six months well to well, and nobody starts it in the hot months; see The Lay of the Land.

What Happened Here

The Glassbelt was dry before anyone lived in it, but people made it worse, twice.

The elder Ash-Furnace Civilization burned hardest in parts of this country. Its overburn, and the god it fed, Ozhar the Pyre-King, left vitrified ruins, slag belts, and glassed ground that still shape the land as much as the climate does; see The Fall of the Ash-Furnace Civilization (c. 225,000-c. 168,000 BR).

Separately, an inland sea once lay here, and the people who harvested its salt grew so devoted to preservation that their worship helped kill it. Their faded god, Mereth the Salt-Witch, is remembered in desert lore; the people themselves are not, and their sea is now salt pan and dry seabed.

What Is Known

The Glassbelt is not empty. It is thinly peopled at its edges, crossed by few, and survivable only by knowing the wells, fearing the ruins, and never trying to hurry.

• Land. Salt pans and dry inland seas, ash-coloured flats, heat-shimmer basins, stone deserts, glassy furnace scars, buried road-lines, dead cisterns, caravan wells, shade sanctuaries, and ruin fields.
• What bites. Sand-coloured horned vipers lie buried at the edge of shade; the pale scorpion of the glassed ground kills, and crossers shake out their boots every dawn; sun spiders run at a sleeper's shadow.
• Who comes here. Windscar peoples know its edges and some crossing routes, especially from the Rimward Basins and High Scars, but the deep Glassbelt is not Orc homeland, and Orc escorts keep to its Windscar edge.
• The old sea floor. Out on the pans, the stepped shorelines of the vanished salt-people still rise far above any water.
• The furnace scars. In the deepest dead furnace zones the glassed ground is said to hold the fire's heat still.

On the far-side edge, below the southern end of the Rimward rim, every crosser knows the crystal valley of the Hanging Vale as never-touch ground, and every crosser has heard of someone who touched it anyway. Crossers hush their children with the warning: "the glass is bright, the glass is still, and so will you be".

At the Glassbelt's cradle-facing edge, at the foot of an unnamed range, lies the fog of the Hushvale, which crossers know only as a route nobody takes and a place nobody comes back from unchanged.

Settlements

No settlement of the Glassbelt's own is known. Its caravan wells and shade sanctuaries are stopping places rather than homes. Crossers tell of oasis towns deep in the interior, of lamps seen at night where no well is marked, and of a kindred that went to find one and came back rich, or did not come back; none of it is known. Every circuit has a crosser who will swear, after the last of the water is shared out, that he saw towers in the heat beyond the mirage roads, and that the lamps were moving towards him. On the Windscar side it is faced by the Lastwater Wells, where crossings begin and end; on the cradle side no town is known to face the crossing.

The People

No settled population is known. A few hundred crossers go over in the cool months in a good year, most of them Edgeway kindreds, with some Ogre and Troll crossers and Goblin and Wrought salvagers; they go wrapped from head to foot against sun and salt. Thirst and heat kill more of them than anything in the ruins, but the raiders at the wells, the haunted ruins, and what walks in them take enough that every circuit sings a list of names at the far well. On the far side the Lastwater Wells, with a handful of custodians and kin at each, face the crossing (see the Rimward Basins).

What Is Not Known

The desert interior is left deliberately open: where its hidden oasis towns and true wells lie, if they exist; who lights the lamps crossers see at night; which desert peoples and caravan customs hold its routes; what heat- or metal-working magic grew out of its ruins; which furnace-lords' vaults, beyond the few dead furnaces the Slag-Tenders keep, still lie under the glass, and what guards them; which Wrought war and labour remnants still lie buried; where the kept ruler of the salt-people sits; and which salvage routes are worth the lives they cost.

Tensions

• Slag in the market. Fused glass and old metal from the furnace scars fetch good prices, and the salvagers' own warnings say never to carry ash or slag out of them.
• The unmarked furnace. Salvage circuits keep the few furnace sites the Slag-Tenders guard to themselves.
• What the sand uncovered. After the last storm season a Goblin salvager came in to the Lastwater Wells half-dead, with a furnace-lord's seal of red glass and a tale of a vault door standing clear of the sand.
• Offerings at the terrace. Some Wrought salvagers leave clean metal at a Slag-Tender's terrace in case it might one day cross into selfhood, and will not work its slag.