I woke up in the night to the sound of heavy rain splattering on my tent. It took a few seconds of confusion for me to remember that there was no rain in the Plains of Shattered Glass, only sand and stone and glass.

  There was little chance of me falling back asleep, but with sharp debris flying through the air I could not step outside. Instead I lit a candle and spent an hour cleaning up my papers and organizing my notes. Some notes I thought flowed brilliantly, some were simple, choppy sequences of events, some I wondered what the point was. Who cared about the economic conditions of horxen ranchers in Leuthernia's most remote villages? I certainly didn't, so I tossed those papers aside. What a waste of weight.

  By the end of the hour the false sound of rain faded to nothing. I stepped outside expecting it to be the middle of the night, but the red on the horizon indicated that we were nearing sunrise. Borin emerged from his tent just after me, gave a big stretch, and nodded in my direction. "How're your muscles treating you?"

  Poorly, I thought. Out loud, I replied, "A bit sore. A bit more sore than yesterday, in fact."

  "Ha, well, they'll get used to it. As long as you're only calling it sore it's not a problem." I doubted it, instead thinking I was going to accumulate pain until I keeled over, but Borin's take was preferrable to my cynicism. He pulled his sleeve down over his hand and used it to brush the sand and glass dust off of his tent.

  I started doing the same as we chatted. "How did you build up your strength, anyways? I didn't realize at first because I had only compared you against Drifter, but you're rather monstrous yourself."

  "Oh, it's nothing special, really," Borin stated as he came across an inch-long chunk of glass to pull out of his tent, "I practised with the militia in my village until I could beat them. Then I practised with mercenaries we worked with until I could beat them. Eventually I was able to beat up most people."

  "I was more thinking about your endurance, actually," I said, gesturing to his stocky lower body, "You're probably carrying twice as much as me, if not more ("Definitely more," he chimed in), well beyond a normal pack for a traveller. Yet all yesterday you hardly broke a sweat, and today you're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed like we haven't been harassed by the worst of nature over the past few days." I found my own shard of glass to pull out of the tent, this one carving most of the way through. "Is this a problem?"

  Borin came over to look. "No, it should be fine, the inner layer is pretty solid." On his way back to his tent he thought about how to answer the rest of my question. Eventually he settled on a simple answer, one that I found entirely unsatisfactory: "Grit, probably?"

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  "Grit... gods, I understand why you and Drifter get along so well." He laughed, predictably.

  The rest of our party was up and milling about by the time the sun finished rising. We were well-practised at packing up our hefty tents at that point, but it was still an ordeal when we were exhausted from the day before. It was doubly onerous as we had to examine the leather of our tents and make sure it was intact enough to survive another storm. Drifter's turned out to have a hefty tear right through it, revealing that he had dodged a foot-long shard of glass in his sleep.

  Even Orwyn was shocked by this. "I could have sworn it wasn't that serious of a storm. How the hell did that get mixed in?" Drifter only shrugged. It missed, after all, what did he care? I helped Orwyn repair the tent, holding the leather in place as he glued and patched the damage.

  We ended up setting off about an hour later than usual, although we weren't too worried about the delay. We could see a storm brewing over the Blasting Mountains, which meant we would need to travel through the Plains for longer than we'd hoped, anyways.

  At the very least we were not racing storms from multiple directions that day, so we could set a more sustainable pace without too much worry. The risk in the plains made us want to leave, especially with the confirmation that our tents were very much not invulnerable, but right then the Black Desert held the more immediate danger.

  Olivia, bored now that her stress was less extreme, posed a question that I had been wondering myself. "Why is this part called the 'plains' and not a 'desert' anyways?"

  Unfortunately, silence was her only answer. Orwyn looked back after a bit and said, "I've always wondered the same thing. Keep forgetting to find out."

  I recorded this exchange in the hopes that I would remember to find an answer to include in the final version. Alas, I also kept forgetting.

  Around noon we noticed a storm forming behind us. It was interesting to look back now and then and see the progression from sporadic gusts of wind to a sustained gale, then to a weak twister swirling sand in the air, and finally to an enormous tornado spread across a large chunk of our vision. It was heading east to the Desert, looking like it would run into a volcanic storm coming down from the mountains. Borin commented that it would be another night on the Plains.

  Shortly after that we ran into a remarkable, if terrifying, development: diamonds stuck in the sand. They were enormous, the size of a foot, and they tracked from east to west across our path, spaced a couple of feet apart.

  They were the footsteps of Durin the Heavy, the mad master of gravity magic. His magicks were out of control, his footfalls so harsh on the earth that the sand formed into gems under the extreme pressure. We stopped for a break so Borin could examine the tracks. Unfortunately, the diamonds were driven so deep into the ground that we would need proper mining equipment to dig them out, but we hoped to determine how recently Durin had passed by. The diamonds could be decades old, for all we knew.

  "Fuck." Borin held up a piece of fabric, still wet with blood. The tracks were very, very recent.