By mid-afternoon of the sixth day, the red iron dunes suddenly flattened into a vast, blinding white expanse that stretched to the horizon like a frozen ocean.
It was the Great Singing Silt Basin. A dry lakebed forty leagues wide, formed from the calcinated settled mud of an ancient inland sea that had evaporated ten thousand years ago. Just then, the First Astral Star fell into the land-wide crust. But unlike ordinary salt flats crusted with rough halite or white chalk-stone crystals, the floor of this basin was composed of billions of uniform, tiny quartz crystals, ground to fine flour by hundreds of years of relentless, circular wind.
The visual glare was brutal. The bleached white quartz sand reflected the afternoon sun with over ninety percent smooth speed. That turned the desert floor into a blinding, mirrored plain that burned the eyes even through tightly squinted eyelids. Mirages danced across the flat in shimmering ribbons of turquoise and liquid silver. That created phantom cities of hanging towers, inverted palm groves, and illusory lakes that vanished whenever a traveler blinked. The air above the white crust was fully dry, devoid of surrounding moisture, tasting of pure quartz dust and scorched ozone.
