Descriptive Settings: A lake in the rain

The lake stretched away, fringed by steep rocks and dripping greenery, surface pricked by the rain, flat and grey as far as the eye could see. Logen's eye couldn't see too far in this weather, it had to be said. The opposite shore could have been a hundred strides away, but the calm waters looked deep. Very deep. Longen had long ago given up any attempt at staying dry, and the water ran through his hair and down his face, dripped from his nose, his fingers, his chin. He closed his eyes and felt the rain patter against his skin, heard the water lapping on the shingle. He knelt by the lake, pulled the stopper from his flask and pushed it under the surface, watched the bubbles break as it filled up. THE BLADE ITSELF, Joe Abercrombie

Action: A Siege Catapult

There was a deafening crash as a section of parapet was ripped apart nearby, sending out a cloud of dust and flinging chunks of stone into the air. Splinters whizzed around them. A soldier not ten strides away was neatly decapitated by a flying block. His headless body swayed for a moment on its feet before its knees buckled and it toppled backwards off the wall.

The missile crashed down somewhere in the Lower City, smashing through the shacks, buncing and rolling, flinging shattered timbers up like matchsticks, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Glokta blinked and swallowed. His ears were still ringing, but he could hear someone shouting. A strange voice. A Styrian accent. Cosca.

Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie

Descriptive Settings: An Exotic Room

Magister Eider's dining chamber was fabulous to behold. Cloths of silver and crimson, gold and purple, green and blue and vivid yellow, rippled in the gentle breeze from the narrow windows. Screens of filigree marble adorned the walls, great pots as high as a man stood in the corners. Heaps of pristine cushions were tossed about the floor, as though inviting passers-by to sprawl in comfortable decadence. Colored candles burned in tall glass jars, casting warm light into every corner, filling the air with sweet scent. At one end of the marble hall clear water trickled gently in a star-shaped pool. There was more than a touch of the theatrical about the place. Like a Queen's boudoir from some Kantic legend.

Magister Eider, head of the Guild of Spicers, was herself the cetrepiece.

Source: Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie

Descriptive Settings: A Waterfall and Forest

Thirsty, Torak made his way along the bay to where the waterfall tumbled down the cliff and over a bed of boulders towards the Sea. Here the Bay of Seals was more lush than it had appeared last night. The grass was studded with yellow suncups and purple cranesbill, and the lower slopes of the cliffs were bright with rowan and birch.

Source: Spirit Walker by Michelle Paver

Descriptive Settings: A Snowy Forest

Vimes wasn't good at forests. They were things you saw on the horizon. If he'd thought about them at all, he'd imagined a lot of trees, standing like poles, brown at the bottom, bushy and green at the top.

Here there were humps, and bumps, and dark branches weighted and creaking under the snow. It fell around him with a hiss. Occasionally lumps of the stuff would slide from somewhere above, and there would be another shower of frigid crystals as a branch sprang back.

Source: The Fifth Elephant by Sir Terry Pratchett

Descriptive Settings: An Inventor's Room

There was a large attic room beyond, suddenly airy and bright and cheerful with sunlight from the windows in the roof. It seemed to be a cross between a workshop and a storeroom. Several bird skeletons hung from the ceiling and there were a few other bones on the worktables, along with coils of wire and metal springs and tubes of paint and more tools, many of them probably unique, than you normally saw in any one place. Only a narrow bed, wedged between a thing like a loom with wings and a large bronze statue, suggested that someone actually lived here. They were clearly someone who was obsessively interested in everything.

Source: The Fifth Elephant by Sir Terry Pratchett

Descriptive Settings: A Beautiful Room

Every inch of wall and ceiling was carved in the most minute detail: geometric patterns of frightening intricacy wound round scenes from Kantic legends in life-size, all painted in glittering gold and silver, vivid red and blue. The floor was a mosaic of wondrous complexity, the long table was inlaid with swirls of dark wood and chips of bright ivory, polished to a high sheen. The tall windows offered a spectacular view over the dusty brown expanse of the city, and the sparkling bay beyond.

Source: Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie

Descriptive Settings: A Market

Over everything Glokta could hear a rattling din, like a battle in the distance. It grew louder as he dragged his aching leg through the Upper City, and reached a furious pitch as they emerged into a wide square, packed from one edge to the other with a bewildering throng. There were people of Midderland, and Gurkhul, and Styria, narrow-eyed natives of Suljuk, yellow-haired citizens of the Old Empire, bearded Northmen even, far from home.

"Merchants," grunted Harker. All the merchants in the world, it looks like. They crowded round stalls laden with produce, great scales for the weighing of materials, blackboards, borrowed and bartered in a multitude of different languages, threw up their hands in strange gestures, shoved and tugged and pointed at one another. They sniffed at bozes of spice and sticks of incense, fingered at bolts of cloth and planks of rare wood, squeezed at fruits, bit at coins, peered through eye-glasses at flashing gemstones. Here and there a native porter stumbled through the crowds, stooped double under a massive load.

Source: Before They Are Hanged, by Joe Abercrombie