The Star-Shard of the Glass Desert

The Glass Desert stretches out like a frozen sea, melted long ago by a heat far fiercer than the sun. Your reflection walks upside down beneath your feet, the air shimmers with warmth, and every footfall rings with a clear, brittle chime, as if the world might shatter at any moment. A veiled nomad tells you that a rich city once flourished here, until one black night something came crashing down out of the sky.

What the fall left behind has never departed. Deep beneath the glass a shape stirs, slow and patient, and the mirages dancing above the plain are no trick of the heat but bait. Travelers chase visions of cool water and shade straight to their deaths, and the shards of their bones lie like glittering stars beneath the hardened crust. You have come to find a vanished caravan before they, too, are glazed into stars.

You follow the trail into the crater city, where the glass is still warm to the touch and the melted gate gapes at a broken angle. You learn to tell the true reflections from the false, decipher the last message the dying townsfolk scratched into the glass, and hear the voices whispering beneath your feet, the voices of everyone it swallowed.

Then the crust breaks. The Starshard rises: an aberration of stellar fire and molten stone that thinks and speaks with the voices of all its victims at once. Will you save the caravan and shatter the Starshard before the whole plain tears open, or become the next glimmer beneath the glass?