Aziel's gaze drifted forward, and his breath caught for a moment.
What stretched before him was not a landscape, it was a graveyard made of glass.
Thousands of crystalline figures stood scattered across the vast field, glinting faintly under the pale light.
They sprawled in uneven lines, embedded into the ground at random intervals, spreading outward like colonies of frozen ants that had once been alive and moving.
He narrowed his eyes, focusing his senses, scanning each figure carefully. The silence around him deepened.
As the details sharpened, a chill crawled down his spine.
Every single one of them, every frozen shape, was human.
And stranger still, they all wore the same expression.
Faces locked in that exact, fleeting moment of shock, the kind of startled worry people made when something unexpected appeared before them.
It wasn't fear.
It was surprise, disbelief, confusion, captured forever.
