The Desert of One Million Shards is the scarred remains of The Scorching of Clueanda, a catastrophic breach of the Yolus plane approximately 25,000 BSD. Three Infernals—building-sized entities of pure fire—emerged from the breach and walked the land for weeks, their passage incinerating everything in their wake. The oasis kingdoms that once flourished in this region were utterly obliterated.
In desperation, fire mages attempted to redirect the overwhelming heat to prevent further devastation. However, their efforts only spread the destruction wider across the landscape. The concentrated and dispersed heat fused vast stretches of sand into glass for hundreds of miles in every direction. Over the millennia, this glass has been sandblasted and fractured by winds and weathering, creating immense fields of jagged glass shards that give the desert its ominous name.
The deepest shards still harbor echoes of that ancient catastrophe—Cinder Swarms occasionally emerge from the fractured glass depths, drawn forth by heat and flame-magic, serving as a grim reminder of the Infernals' terrible passage.
Rocs in the nearby mountains now hunt large prey by lifting them up into the sky, and dropping them on the desert to break their bones before bringing them back to their enormous nests in the mountains.