short piece

[Phoenix Red]

So I'm taking a writing class in school, basically it's a workshop with a few grammar lessons and loosely guided assignments (this one was start your brainstorming with a place you know well, that's the extent of our restriction). I'm using it as a means to have deadlines, so I'll actually write things. I'd like to share this one.

Inevitable

The sun touches the trees, soaks their bare branches into itself and makes black on gold silhouettes etch fractures into the sky, and black trees reach back, standing with the shroud of gold apart from it. Black on gold landscape, where the molten sun bleeds, and colour shrinks away from that brilliant richness leaving black. A breeze gusts, raises the hanging leaf like a sleepy head, to look around, perhaps to speak quietly to the other leaves in a rustling rasp, before settling down to its slumber once more. Orange and brown leaves, crumbly imitations of black on gold.

Black branches, black trunks, black bark weathered and tough and raised and recessed, gnarled and swallowing scars beneath that twisted pattern infinitely more mutilated than a scar could leave it. Shoots suggest strength, evidence of youth lingering somehow beneath the decrepit, but they are brown, leaves fallen or dried hard. They may burst forth again and prove a core of life resides yet within those stolid husks, but those that did last are killed and hang under their own weight, to be lifted only in the wind.

Black piles of soil, all jumbled and dug and tossed about, stirred together with piles of leaves that are soft and wet and half decayed or more. The distinction between dirt and debris blurs. Black stains on all not black enough to hide them, made with black filtered from the rot, cover whatever dares jut from the earth. Wafting from the compost is a rich and foul scent, the regurgitated life that the dead is releasing as it loses what it was.

Shadow is nearer the ground, where obstruction has sucked the brightness and the vibrancy from the gold, after richness is squandered. Dappling purple and grey layer and create a maze of non-light like a scum, a taint. Dappling purple and grey steal the source from the light and make illumination a pallid ambiance. Shadows nearer the ground, but not confined to it. They thrive like mould on rotting stone, climb the lifeless dimness they reflect and drifting slowly from the ground in parody of beams of light.

Pale, unclean, what should be white but is not pure, what should be bright but has no means. Towards the sky are flecks of gold, but they are obscured by black, they are unreachable. Writhing branches are webbed with shadows; writhing branches filter away the gold leaving only evidence, no truth. Shadows drink away the gold, feast upon it, gorge themselves on the shafts so saturated with power and vitality. They are strengthened, and replace the gold with their dimness and their maggotâ??s breath.

Wind tries again to breathe and is quelled. The rustling is dry and dead, rough and hard. The harshness of the quiet sound brings awareness to a sense lying dormant for lack of use. No sound, even at the edge of hearing, and no movement to make it.

Still.

Quiet.

Dark.

Loss throbs here, where gold cannot reach, where the
sun is shunned and light is remade in the image of black.

Still.

Quiet.

Dark.

Death throbs here, where life rots away, where new is wont and strange.

Still.

Quiet.

Dark.

Ends wait here, where all things lead, and naught begins.

Still.

Quiet.

Dark.

edit: phpbb is the bane of formatting!!1

[Top Gun]

Damn...very good. It almost reminds me of Tolkien's style of description at some points. Very deep and detailed.