The Dustfields gave up little except heat and silence until Rorak and Cally reached the ragged tents of Dusthollow, where a guide named Hakan Darkstone spoke of towers uncovered by a sandstorm far to the east. He spoke of figures caught mid-stride in glass, as though the world itself had frozen an entire city in a single breath. It was the kind of story that drew fools and fortune-seekers alike, and the two travelers were hungry enough for either to matter.
A cartographer named Zahira Sunforge filled in what Hakan's rumors left out. She had walked the perimeter of the glass spires herself and returned with warnings rather than answers: the glass carried sound for impossible distances, cracks spread like disease through the structures, and at night the frozen figures were said to move. She offered her map of the city, drawn from that survey, in trade for a kit she'd been forced to abandon near the southern structure when things had turned dangerous. She also warned them of the Sandgate miners, a rough band of five or six who had claimed the northern approach and did not welcome company.
Two days of walking brought Rorak and Cally to the glass city at dusk, its spires catching the dying light like frozen flame. They kept to the southern route, skirting wide around the miners' claim, and found Zahira's survey kit wedged in a split boulder near the entrance exactly where she'd said it would be. The southern structure itself was a hall of glass pillars that hummed faintly at every footstep and every word, as if the whole building were listening.
Inside, they found the wreckage of someone else's expedition. A miner named Kerrick lay injured, his arm slowly and unmistakably turning to glass, while his companion Joren had already finished the transformation, standing forever mid-motion, more sculpture than corpse now. Then the hall's true danger revealed itself: a frozen citizen of the ancient city that held still only so long as someone watched it. The instant Rorak's eyes wandered, the figure crossed ten feet of stone in a heartbeat and seized his arm, its touch spreading cold crystal toward his skin. His infernal blood refused it, the glass creeping, hesitating, and receding, leaving him shaken but whole.
The hall began to fail around them, cracks branching through the pillars like frost on a window, the structure groaning as though it might shatter entirely. They dragged Kerrick out as the ceiling gave way behind them, and outside, in the fading light, Rorak made the hard call to take the miner's crystallizing hand off at the wrist rather than let it climb further. Cally's healing magic closed the wound and steadied his failing pulse.
Behind them, the southern entrance collapsed in a slow avalanche of glass and dust, sealing the hungry figure inside the ruin it had claimed. Rorak stood watching the settling debris for a long moment before speaking what both of them already knew: there were more like Joren and Kerrick out there, and the city wasn't finished with anyone who wandered too close. They made camp that night at a desert seep with the unconscious miner between them, the glass spires glinting cold and patient on the horizon, and agreed that dawn would take them back to Dusthollow, not to abandon the city, but to prepare to return to it.