Reality Check: Your old prose sucks.

This is a snippet of something I think I began twenty years ago.  It's really bad.  There's a smidgeon of good stuff mixed in there, but, really, it's pretty awful.  Enjoy!  Don't laugh yourselves sick, now!

(The moral within the reading of one's old and pie-in-the-sky writing is that you were never as good as you thought you were.  And you likely aren't now.  So, word to my inner writer: be humble.) 

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There was a gathering of black on the horizon, clouds bearing more than rain.

"We should be leaving soon. The Stormbringer rides this weather. The pass will soon be all over ice."

Niella turned wearily toward her windbrother.  "True, Kellis, but we cannot leave the flock."

The foss’ snort and fleered lips were his reply.  He shook his head so his knotted mane flew, stinging Niella’s half-frozen face and hands, and sat on his haunches beside her, the furred tip of his tail stirring restlessly against his forepaws.

Niella ignored him. Hands on hips, she surveyed the bedraggled remnants of the trefix herd, huddled out of the rising wind in the lee of the herder's shack. She and Kellis had come upon it three days ago, and the remains of the herdsmen, fifteen clansmen with the marks of clan Treilligor on their gear, butchered and half-eaten by graalvina… They were too badly mangled to identify, but more than one bit of mujir on a clan knife she recognized.

The humans and brethren they had burned, and the remains of the mangled tref, hands of hands of them, were pitched over the cliff at the valley's end for scavengers. The remainder they'd treated as best they could, with no healing skills and the handicap of Nialla's back, still twisted from the wrench to her spine that was her worst injury from the war...

Her back ached anew at the memory of rigging a drag for the bodies.< Of the necessary and nearly fatal search for and killing of the graalvina that had wreaked such slaughter.  Of the difficult calling that healed the breach in the kraeldrin which had fostered the graalvina's nesting here.

She was tired, so tired.  It was the long and drawn out battle through the winter.  That, and the injury to her spine. That final melee had left her wounded and separate from her fellow clansmen, left behind and thought dead, no doubt, to recover sufficiently and straggle homeward over the mountains on her own. Thank the gods for her Windbrother, who had found her on the field of battle, dragged her to safety and nursed her while they were cut off from their own.<>Without Kellis, she would not have made it this far.