Actually I believe its hot beans
I spilled hot sand all over myself watching the Normans assault the castle & a black-armored knight shouted ‘this miscreant eating hot sand’ & everyone intoned a Te Deum
How the British learned to cook.
I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and boiling hot… and it gets everywhere.
What does sand do at these temperatures? Is it essentially molten glass?
Ever get sand stuck in your clothes?
Imagine that at or near the temperature of boiling water.
Sand retains heat pretty well, flows quickly, and is a bitch to get out. Not only that, but it’s great at slipping in where its recipients wouldn’t want it - down the collar, under a mail shirt, through the visor of a helmet, you name it. You’ll be covered in serious burns, third-degree even, potentially, if you get caught under it, and sand is dirt-cheap.
That’s brilliant. I mean… awful, of course. But brilliant.
the fires they had were probably not hot enough to melt sand into glass without some additives.
Instead, it’s a fine particulate that can be heated way hotter than water, and because the grains are small enough they will disperse over a large area causing burns to people in a large area below
And it’s much easier and cleaner to keep around. Hard to store water in a bag, after all
How could we make sand worse?
All it needs now are sand fleas that can survive the high temperatures, and we have ourselves sand at Maximum Weaponization™
Hey Cuthbert, thanks for giving me the castle tour. Though… I caught something funny - I might have misheard… I think I heard you call the hole up there a ‘murder-hole’. Haha. It’s a joke right? Why would you call a hole a murder-hole? Lol (surely)
POV: you made the mistake of looking above you in the gatehouse
“Oh yeah that, no, it’s just a bit of a funny ironic name. We don’t actually murder people in the murder hole. We just burn them horribly with sand that gets everywhere. And then maybe sometimes we do a little murder, as a treat.”
