Three days after leaving the message at the monument, I was back in the Glass Wastes.
Not the direct route to the Mirage Temple this time. That crossing I had already mapped, already survived, already annotated on the parchment in block letters that tried to be as useful as Jake's had been. This was the northern reach of the zone, terrain I had designed but never needed to cross during the temple run, where the dunes gave way to formations I had named during a late-night world-building session and then largely forgotten about in the press of launch preparation.
The Singing Towers appeared after an hour of deeper desert than I had previously walked, a cluster of glass spires rising from the desert floor like frozen lightning, their hollow chambers producing tones as the wind passed throug
