I’ve never seen a real desert before, but despite all the grumbling I hear from traveling merchants, I guarantee Forlance is worse. Deserts are just yellow sand and sharp plants, but here there’s sand and salt white as bleached cloth. Miles and miles of blinding bright dunes from the city to the foot of the Rotting Mountain. The grains will get into everything, even your eyes, burning every cut on your skin and leaving your mouth tasting like the ocean.
Men may hope for an oasis in a desert, but there are no havens in the Salt Marshes of Aynor. The water that pools here is prevalent, but filled with a mineral tang like that of sea water. It’ll only kill you faster if you’re foolish enough to drink it, and many young Dunecasters have fallen prey to it. Their shriveled, mummified corpses can sometimes be seen half-buried in the dunes that will eventually turn them to salt, luring more poor lads to this place in an endless cycle of reaping and sowing death.
Hmph, “Dunecasters”. What a pretty word for slaves and salt miners. Some people come to these wastelands hoping to get rich on a deposit, not realizing that by the time they find one, they’ll already hate the blasted stuff so much that they’d rather burn it than sell it. Those folk don’t stay long. No, the ones that stay are the ones that don’t have a choice, casting themselves into this white hell over and over to pay their debts or scrape enough coin together to buy slaves to do it for them.
What I’d give to live in a desert paradise.