Snippets of Writing

16.

The twilight faded from the sky as the dark rose all around the forest, the branches of the white long-dead trees reaching up to the sky like the fingers of a skeletal beast long dead. The hushed wind whispered through the forest, making the dead forest creak and groan. It whistled through the white bones of the old trees, shrieking in the early night and disrupted a colony of bats that fluttered from their roosts in the high branches of the trees and flew up into the sky, a fast-moving cloud of dark bodies. After the hundreds of years since the Catastrophe, these bats were the only animals that dared to live in this dead forest - and they were not normal bats. They were huge, with jagged wings and red eyes and sharp teeth that they used to feast on any creature that dared wander into the woods. The villagers who lived a few miles away speculated that they were not entirely alive. As the warmth and life left the earth with the oncoming of night and the chill grew to penetrate to the bone, a figure rose from the ground in a grove of trees where the wind did not whisper or shriek and even the bats did not dare venture. The figure stood tall, taller than a human, but it was not human. It was much too skeletal to belong to any creature alive and it had claws in place of fingers. Most noticeably, its eye sockets glowed with an unearthly red light. It looked to the east. A human had managed to get past the bats and through the tangle of dead white trees.

After a hundred years of starvation, it was time to feast.

from writing techniques portfolio: diction
freshman year english