The Glass Wastes were beautiful in the way that things built to kill you are sometimes beautiful.
The crystalline sand caught every angle of light and threw it back in different colors, so that walking through the desert in the late morning was like moving through a slow, enormous prism. Dunes rose and fell in formations I had asked the terrain team to make feel geological rather than procedural, and they had done good work: each one was individual, shaped by wind logic I had imported from a fluid dynamics library, and no two were exactly alike.
I had never seen them at ground level before. The development dashboard had given me an overhead view, a map perspective, the god-mode flight between waypoints. Standing inside the terrain I had built, watching it process light in every direction
