High Desert

The whole of the wasteland is most inhospitable, and yet there can be found signs of life in the more forgiving nooks of the large desert washed by the unflinching majesty of the sun at its most furious. Cacti litter the landscape, lupine entities find their shelter in the shade of outcroppings, the Suujali as well, not to mention the myriad bests that find refuge in the cool earth of the underground.

But in the high desert, there is no life. The boundaries of the high desert are detailed precisely by a neat ring five miles in diameter where the silica has ceased to be large conglomerate of individual grains of sand, but instead fused to form one large, flat disc of glass or crystal. At high noon the sun strikes the high desert in such a way as to provide illumination so blindly that it can be seen from orbit, and whose radiance overpowers sight to a range of nearly twenty miles.

Only at night is traveling across the glass feasible, and curious effects can be noted at this time. Where the rest of the wasteland will have dropped to freezing temperatures once the sun winks away beneath the horizon, the five-mile plate of glass retains comfortable warmth. Camping overnight is a foolish enterprise, for no sooner does the sun strike the glass plate than any life upon it is vaporized.

In the past fifty years, a culture was discovered amidst the sands of the wasteland, theorized to have originally splintered from the tribal cultures to be found living in the Shawnee. They attend to a mainly monotheistic religion that focuses on a central figure known as 'The Lighted One', whose magical number is 12. Cultural anthropologists emphasize the clear tie between the title of their singular deity and its magical number to the sun and the time it shines fiercest, at noon. They also like to point out that the migrate to the high desert once a year, at the autumnal equinox, where the interplay between the aurora valucreaus and the quarts crystal of the glass plate, make the skies lurid with color.