It began with a loud, reverberating bang. The panicked faces of people I passed every day jolted around the streets. Some ran in circles; others, into each other. Fires erupted and gunfire exploded. Roars of artillery echoed through the buildings and into their hearts. In patches around the city the sand, superheated by whatever first hit the village, slowly cooled into glass. And it's how those of us who lived--either by escape, or by capture--came to remember it as El día de Cristal... the Day of Glass.

Fifteen years of wandering the wastes came and went agonizingly slow. The footsteps of my retreat are long gone, buried under sand and glass and bitterness.

Treading slowly to conserve energy, I crossed a long valley with sparse vegetation: small, thorny bushes littered the sides of a well-worn path. Even the evening tide couldn't completely bury the Half-Glass Path. Well past noon, the shine from the path still shined brighter than the sand surrounding it. I walked it for what must have been days, with little water.

How had it come to be like this, in such a short amount of time? The country of Ahnkora, while not exactly technologically or economically up-to-date with other nations, still had it's own quaint charm. If not for the Rohz Federation, Ahnkora might have turned things around eventually, given time and a little faith. But no, Headminister Rohz had Divine Right of the Land to Rule, and "offered" the Ahnkorans an assimilated life with the rest of humanity. His messengers were tanks. His letters, artillery fire. If Ahnkora surrendered, it would have been a life of work to serve a tyrant--and true enough, some decided slavery was more suitable to them. Some chose to rebel, among them some of my finest friends; their corpses now litter the wastes. I, among a handful of others, chose an exodus, finding the deathly hot embrace of the sands more comforting than the arms of the Rohz.

Ahnkora is not the first to have been conquered by them, and if logic serves, it won't be the last, either. The Federation colorfully refers to their actions as "diplomatic endeavors" and not as war. No one has the will to fight them; not even me. In every small village I've past since El día de Cristal, it's been the same way.

Who am I? I am Anastas, former citizen of Ahnkora, and this is my story.