Setting: Prairie

This is a random setting I created for my online class. Its a prairie or a desert. I got the idea based on an old song I recently rediscovered.

The sun beat down over the dry landscape, the rocky crags a dull orange against the blood red skies above. The wind whipped around, swirling dust clouds into life and howling eerily in the barren land. Hoof beets of cattle were an ever present echo off the rocks.  The dead dry plants that managed to survive in the harsh climate looked like they might spontaneously burst into flame. Painfully, the sun gleamed in an empty sky. It sank ever so slowly below the sky line each night ripping the heat of the world away and plunging everything in to darkness and cold. It was not an unusual occurrence to hear ones name called in the blackest of nights, the ones with no moon. It wasn’t even strange to see a ghoulish figure work its way toward you through the sandy air. But, the campfires that dotted the valley did a decent job of scaring them away. 

Coyotes screamed their terrible cry all too often in this place, as did the vultures that swirled overhead, scanning the mostly dead land for something recently dead. Many would say the place was uninhabitable, the storms that ravaged the land as well as the lack of the most basic human essentials: water and food. It was a wild beast of a place. The sand and dust in the air was nearly suffocating to living animals, and the bane of the dead ones. The dry heat ebbed some in the night hours, it bordered freezing in the winter months. At least, whatever winter could be without other change in the valley, other than the temperature. There was never any rain. No matter the season it was nearly unbearable; the winter was cold and dry, spring was cold and held the hope of a sprinkle early in the season, and fall was warm and dry and the summer was the driest and hottest of all.

Author's Note

This is another one of my submissions for my creative writing class, we had to create a setting. It should just be setting, no plot or anything. Tell me what you think!