I composed this work spontaneously, and want to have my writing style criticized. Please be honest about things you like or hate about my prose. Try to refrain from any fine points such as grammar, spelling, etc. Instead, hone in on the WAY I write, and try to give me worthwhile advice.
The coarse yellow sand was a sad blue in the moon’s gleam. Syph lay prostrate in a folded dune that wrapped his body. In sleep, his fingers clutched handfuls of the blue grains, and his eyes batted behind closed eyelids. Warmth ran in streaks over the hilly landscape, followed by a black cold. Syph breathed the black gusts without knowing. An intruder ascended on his dream.
A skirted figure stepped over Syph in the dead black. Gray rags fluttered over his closed eyes. A whiff from his nose brought a smell like blood. His eyes crashed open, but only unto dream space, and he fumbled for his staff. No staffs in dreams.
She shook sullenly and gazed with black eyes in a white face through to his soul. Bald, with fangs, she knelt by his side and spoke gibberish. Immediately, the confused speech affected him, causing drowsiness. Syph rolled away from the demon.
She cried and laughed and screamed. Time quickened, and a battle of strength ensued. The demon had the power of eight men. Syph’s only goal was to awake. With every infliction in the dream, the she-spirit was rewarded another moment of Syph’s sleep. Normally, being hit in a dream would wake a man, but not when hit by a succubus.
“Sleep. Sleep, prophet. Sleep. Rest in our embrace.”
Inhumanly, she threw him to the ground and pounded his chest. They wrestled in the folds of the coarse, blue sand.
“Be ours. Be ours. Be ours, prophet. Sleep.”
Syph wriggled an arm out of her tiring embrace and beat her head repeatedly. She was unaffected. The longer she held Syph, the longer he was asleep. Must… Escape… Embrace…
Instead of a punch, Syph shoved her away. She landed in a torrent of upraised sand. Her thin body produced an immense depression from the weight of the multiple beings inside her. She screamed, and Syph reached to his right.
The succubus pounced, but Syph was already awake with the staff in his hands. She looked much the same in reality as she did in the dream. Waving it left and right, Syph gripped the staff so hard that his knuckles turned white.
He stood from the depression in the sand, to ward her off. Quoting Scripture profusely, from morose Psalms to scolding Revelation, Syph was able to push her back without a single touch. Her ragged skirt whipped in the wind as she called for her sisters.
Syph listened to the names, knowing that it was three names to each succubus. There would be no sleep tonight. Syph uttered a “glean light” spell. If anything could deter the desert demons, it was light.
Syph did not work in witchcraft or sorcery, but rather in redirection- a way of toying with dimensions. Redirection was commonly known as a sinless form of magic. Prophets were those who pledged to refrain from all summoning, and to commune with God. It was not a leisurely way of life.
Pale and desolate, the dunes gave way to valleys, then hills, then dips and curves. Finally, rifts of sand nearly five hundred meters high nudged their way into Syph’s vision. Towns were usually built between two intersecting rifts. But not out this far.
Light waning, darkness still retching and cooling the dry air, the desert soon howled with demons that pursued the prophet- a worthy kill for those wretched spirits. Syph followed his gut into a U-shaped space between two looming rifts. Here, he strengthened the “glean light” spell, and a forest of eyes was illuminated.
“Back! Leave me! Ha!”
Syph flailed his staff back and forth. He would do this all night by continually renewing the light and waving his staff. The demons were inhumanly patient creatures, though. Several of the stronger ones prowled closely to the edges of the light, and as it waned, they came closer and closer. In all, there were about fifty.
A few of them were naked. Others, such as the succubus who attacked Syph in his sleep, were clothed in rags taken from travellers. Several of those vile creatures covered their eyes with the rags and leaned into the light, trying to feel their way to Syph. He would hit them mercilessly with the staff, cracking bones and drawing blood. They were, after all, just possessed humans.
Some of them he managed to kill, whereupon the demons in the body would leave, and the body simply rot and sink into the sand. The assembled devils wanted only to hold him down somehow and possess him, but Syph was too stubborn. Whenever the light waned too far, he would strengthen it once again. Any demons that came too close were hit furiously.
This carried on for eight hours between the two giant rifts. Overhead, the moon drearily sunk into the horizon. Then came a few rays of sun. They yelled and howled in unearthly pitches out of fear for the light.
Syph cried out sorrowfully, “Deliver me, O’ God. Have mercy… according to your unfailing love.”
The demons did not leave, and Syph knew they could only stay for another hour, yet he was weary. The sand seemed to pull him in. The smell of the dead lingered around him. Several of the demons were panting from their nightlong effort.
The succubus who had attacked him earlier sneered. Her fangs dripped with venom that could make a man sleep for days on end. Her body trembled with hatred and lust. Syph strengthened the light to a higher degree, and the demons backed away.
Weariness settled in, and Syph knew the demons would outlast him.
