Only 800 words, historical in nature, based on the global ramifications of a natural disaster that occurred some 1500 years ago.

***

LOST HORIZON

The land stood desolate as Jeshua wended south. Desolate and cold and dark as winter, with no sunrise to mark the coming of day, no sunset to mark its passing. Just darkness fading into deeper darkness. Cold giving way to greater cold.

There should have been new grass and new-planted fields and new lambs. But the grass and fields were buried beneath an endless snowstorm of choking ash; the ewes were dead and rotting, their lambs with them. Not even weeds, that always seemed to survive anything God felt inclined to hurl at them, could find purchase in this place.

There should at least have been the cries of birds. Carrion birds, if nothing else.

But there was nothing. Nothing but stone and ash-covered earth and skeletal gray trees reaching toward an unnaturally black sky, their branches like the fingers of Death grasping for whatever lost soul happened to stumble past.

And stumble past they did. Streams of them, wandering, gaunt, hopeless, with brown brackish rainwater dripping from strings of filthy hair, eyes sunken with fear and hunger. They shuffled aimlessly in all directions with no golden horizon to follow, no sign for as far as the land reached that there was someplace better to go.

 

And no, I don't think the last paragraph violates POV. All of this Jeshua can observe, even the aimless wandering. As far as "eyes sunken with fear and hunger" is this something that Jeshua shares with them? If so, you could probably add in "like his own", and that would bring it unquestionably back to his POV.

At least, I think it would, but then again I'm no expert on POV. Survivor? *G*

Susan
 

About the POV, I also think you're fine with this, and I agree with Susan that adding a statement 'like his own', bringing POV more tightly to your protag, would strengthen it.

Are you thinking Short Story, novel, or something in between?

[This message has been edited by Cathy Perdue (edited July 29, 2004).]
 

One thing that is really odd is that you have rotting carcasses and dead trees in a situation where there are lots of hungry humans wandering around. Also, these humans are all wet with rainwater, whereas the entire environment was previously described in terms that implied dry conditions.