A Strange Power in Those Riddling Words

Snippets again!  I was kind of amused by the responses to my Lookinglass post: I felt as if the snippets I chose as descriptive examples weren't my best, though they were adequate for the points I was making, but everyone seemed to rave over them!  I'm not complaining, I'm just questioning your sanity...  I'm still reeling from meeting my goal to reach 100,000 words on my manuscript and thinking that I'll plot another goal of 10,000 by the end of September.  Nothing happens in September, anyway.  But here are snippets!  I hope that, in your cheerily bizarre minds, you enjoy them as much as I do.  We can all be insane together.  And I must warn you in advance: having looked over these snippets as a whole, I find none of them very happy. 

September Snip-Whippets
Autumn lay like beaten copper over the land, beaten by the wind, enamelled by the faience-blue sky.Plenilune
“They liked me better for it,” Margaret said with hard, cold iron in her voice, “but I think they would have liked it better still if Aikin had not been just in time to save me.”Plenilune
The puzzle had much the same effect on the fox as it had on Rupert. He rose swiftly and backstepped as if from a viper that had been dropped suddenly in his path. It frightened Margaret to see his face unguarded—she had not known how guarded it had been before—and to know she carried a strange power in those riddling words and to not know what that power could do.Plenilune
With one hand on her shawl wrapped about her head, her other gathering her skirts about her ankles, she ran across the yard and ducked out into the face of the wind. The roses bunching and climbing up the yard walls were roaring like a storm-tossed sea of silver and green. The windbreak across the pasture was struggling at its job: the wind was in everything, roaring, thundering, buffeting, drowning out everything but the water-droplet notes of a blackbird who was perched in one elm, very high up, where the wind was tossing it about with reckless abandon.Plenilune
...through a few black bars of lettering, a dead theologian from an alien world had managed to thrust her awareness down, like a spade into dark loam, into a deeper world where things could be felt but not touched, believed but never seen.Plenilune
At the end she signed it, which was the hardest thing of all. A horrible confusion welled up at her out of the characters: her own surname seemed meaningless, detached from herself; she did not want the title ‘de la Mare,’ or even ‘of the Mares;’ to belong to Plenilune was a thing she did not dare assume, nor was she at all sure, even now, if she wanted such a place. She stuck with her thin, brittle little English name, whose Saxon overtones and history meant nothing now—but it was all she had.Plenilune
His touch was like the fire-glow of the autumn wind, cold, personal, searching in a horrible, painful way, wearing at her defences so that, even as she knew it was hopeless, she wanted desperately to loose herself from earth and fling herself into the grip of that crimson gale.But how could she, when the creature asking to carry her cross would not even crawl out of his own prison?Plenilune
In the end she chose a gown of pigeon-coloured velvet that purled back in places to let out the silky sheen of the ocean at sunset. With the muted flame of colour she moved across the barred light of the room, paused only to thrust her hair up and hold it in place with pins and sky-fire gems, before stepping out of her room, as one stepping out onto a battlefield that has already been lost.Plenilune
 ...a dog barked down the lane and the wind, changing direction for a moment, brought through the gloam the soft drub of hooves on turf and dirt. There was a momentary jink of light down the hill between hawthorn and wind-swept barberry. It was only for a moment, then it was lost again in the curve of the pasture; but it would reappear shortly at the end of the lane and come steadily toward her, horses emerging like wraiths from the night tide, travel-worn faces awash with the moth-shuttered lantern-light.Plenilune
As he turned the horses over to the hands of the stable servants and stepped into the full glare of the light, his hood falling back off the crown of his head, she saw the long road up from Darkling-law had left him very tired. And, as his eyes slid past her to Rupert, who had appeared with a soft breath of warm air from inside but without a sound, she saw in his face the unmistakable look of a man too tired to fight.Plenilune
She went, and they set her down between Aikin and Huw on the settle—it was a narrow seat, and she had to ram her feet against the floorboards to keep from slipping off—and handed her a horn cup of perry that was light and chilled but made the blood run hummingly warm in her veins afterward. Plenilune
What might he do next, she wondered, and might there come a time when he so changed that she would no longer know him at all? Plenilune