Orwyn called for a stop. It was odd, but I wasn't about to complain. My body refused to sweat any more, refused to feel pain or exhaustion, it just moved until it got a chance to not. We had snacks, we had water, and we relaxed.

  "We" being everyone except Orwyn. He pulled out a monocular and looked to the south for a minute. "Fuck."

  We all looked at him stuffing his monocular back into his bag. The scowl on his face would have cowed a coubear. Olivia found her courage first and asked, "What's up?"

  "Storms ahead," he answered, "Volcanic storm ran into a magical one and they seem to be coming our way."

  Our group had yet to see the dueling storms of the Black Desert, and neither Borin nor Orwyn had explained how much worse the combination would be. I could feel the wind picking up from the south, however, and couldn't see more than a speck of a storm on the horizon yet, so I assumed very bad.

  "We'll cut into the Plains, straight west." None of us were happy to hear that, but he continued making it worse. "Once we hit the Plains we may need to adjust based on weather, but the plan is to tack south-west for a while and slowly veer back east to the Black Desert. Ideally we're back in the Black Desert before night falls."

  I felt like we were cursed: "may need to adjust," "ideally," a plan couched in conditionals, delivered with a grimace, and spoken with a shaky lack of confidence felt doomed to fail. But it was what we had.

  It felt even worse as this was only our second day in the wastelands. We knew there was a risk of needing to leave the Desert at some point, but ducking into the Plains so early in our journey felt like an ill omen. How likely was it to happen again? And how long before we could return to the Desert, anyways? The storm was moving north, so we hoped we'd be back in the black sand by night, but any number of problems could send us out further.

  We set a hard pace to the west, closer to a jog than a hike, and saw the Plains ahead of us in what felt like no time at all. In the meantime we could see the storm growing on the horizon, expanding from a speck to a cloud to an all-encompassing fog that consumed the whole world to the south, the air black with ash but punctuated with light reflecting off the innumerable shards of glass. It was almost like snow at night, a dark background with flakes of white flickering about.

  It would have been pretty if I wasn't associating it so strongly with impending doom. The flashes of lightning in colours I had never seen - and I mean that literally, I had no concept of what colours were arcing through that storm - did nothing to help.

  For all the fear driven into us about the dangers of the Plains of Shattered Glass, my first footsteps on the glistening sand felt anticlimactic. It was, as we saw before, practically a line in the terrain where the sand changed from black with ash to the normal yellow sand a person would think of, just extra shiny. It only took a few steps before I could feel the difference through the soles of my boots, however. The rugged glass formations of the Black Desert were replaced by jagged shards that pressed into my heel every few steps, to say nothing of how coarse and uneven the sand felt underfoot. I worried I would slip and fall with how the sand slid over the glass beneath it.

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  For all the difficulties these details caused us, they had little to do with the dangers of the Plains. We could already see another magical storm further west, the horizon sparkling with glass and sand, although Orwyn determined it was blowing away from us. Despite that, the winds from the multitude of storms in the area could gust enough to make me stagger.

  We angled south quickly, although neither of our experts were comfortable with going directly south. When wasteland storms collided the only sane option was to stay as far away as possible, and the black wall moving north was much too visible to provide them any sense of comfort.

  Eventually we hit a point where we were directly west of the joint storms, the nearest they had gotten to us thus far. They were far enough out that the large shards of glass were not whirling about in the air, but they were still able to shuffle about on the ground. The sand, on the other hand, was streaming into our faces, scratching at every inch of exposed skin and finding its way into every orifice and every piece of clothing. We had to cover our mouths and noses with cloth to continue breathing properly. Our eyes had little reprieve, our only option being to squint and stare at the ground as we moved. To avoid having the whole group blind, Borin had some sort of reinforced goggles that allowed him to look forward without any issue, and he took the lead as a result.

  I stumbled and fell a couple of times, as did Damien. The ground scratched at our hands, covering them in minor cuts, though we thankfully avoided the larger chunks of glass that would have sliced open a serious wound. One that we wouldn't be able to treat immediately and would end up filled with airborne sand, to boot.

  The size of the storms over the Black Desert were well beyond our expectations. As the sun lowered on the horizon and evening was upon us, we finally saw the end of the magical storm, leaving behind the simpler, but arguably just as ominous, black ash of the volcanic storm. That storm, to our dismay, seemed to continue on for quite a long time. While we could withstand a volcanic storm on its own if we were prepared, none of us was ready to march into one and set up our camp in the middle of it.

  At the very least, the winds from a single storm without the chaos of competing systems left us able to breath and look around without severe discomfort.

  Watching the storm as we walked along, I grew curious about its movements and asked Orwyn about it now that he had grown tired and fallen back with Damien and I. "The volcanic storm doesn't seem to be getting any closer. They normally come down the mountain driving westward, so shouldn't it continue on toward us?"

  "No, it's stopped by the Plains." His answer confused me, so he clarified. "The Plains are thick with mana. No one's sure why, a source has never been found, but it's why magical storms are so common and why the sand forms into glass so easily. It also has some weird side effects, like stopping most weather systems and driving animals away. The Black Desert basically exists because the ash storms can't go any further west, and the magical storms run into the mountains and can't go any further east."

  "Huh." There were very few regions of the world where mana was so thick that it could cause effects like that. Normally magic storms cropped up due to magical infrastructure messing with the environment, and in the wilderness they often indicated some sort of ruins from an earlier age, or maybe a spiritual beast or the grave of a powerful mage. There were so many options that I hadn't even considered that these magical storms were actually natural.

  The sun was on the horizon and sunset was fully upon us. Red light scattered across the Plains and made it look like we would be crossing a field of embers flickering in the earth. How much would this journey burn us before the end?

  "We'll stop here for the night," Borin called out. At the very least, the embers would be gone soon.