The Last Light of Sunder
Welcome to the world of Sunder, a once splendid planet lush with life, bright with the lights of a great civilization. ‘Once’ being the operative word. Now, the planet was in its last days, dying from its core due to the rapid extraction of its life-sustaining resources. At the helm of this devastation were the remnants of Sunder's once proud civilization, now reduced to a mere few, desperately scrambling for survival.
On the outcrop of Sunder's sprawling capital city, lived an orphan, Trystin. He was wise beyond his years, attributed to the harsh realities he had encountered growing up in the treacherous terrains of Sunder. His companions were the mechanical drones he contrived from scrap metal. The drones were essential for their continued existence. They imposed a delicate balance on the brink of oblivion by harnessing the dying light from the planet's core.
Trystin was particularly attached to one drone, Echo, which he treated as a dear friend. They communicated through a unique language of mechanical beeps and blips. Echo, named for its triangular, echolocation-based sensory system, was capable of visualizing the unique energy signature of the planet's core.
In return for its toil, Trystin took special care of Echo. Whenever Echo suffered some debilitating damage, Trystin, skilful as he was, would always manage to patch it back to optimal function, often cannibalizing other drones for spare parts, if needed.
One day, Echo detected an abnormal surge of energy from the core. The sudden burst of energy was strong and massive, unlike anything it had ever encountered. Panicking, Trystin sent other drones to investigate. They tracked a significant drain in the core's energy. Within hours, their world would be plunged into eternal darkness, given its already precarious state.
Swiftly, Trystin initiated a deep analysis on Echo's data, trying to understand the cause behind the abnormal surge. The analysis revealed something astonishing, the energy wasn't drained as he earlier presumed; it was redirected. To his horror, the redirection coordinates led to the city's high council's tower.
Racing against time, Trystin snuck into the high tower, discovering a massive machinery running at full capacity, draining the planet's last energy reserves. The cruel twist, the supposedly wise council members were trying to save themselves, intending to use the core’s energy to power an escape ark, leaving the rest of the civilization to perish.
Furious, Trystin sabotaged the machinery. His mechanical skills, honed through years of drone repairs, came in handy. The energy flow reversed course, creating a massive surge. The ark overloaded in the chaos, and the council members were trapped inside.
In irony, the saboteurs of the planet were its first casualty, just as their selfish endeavor led to their demise. With the last burst of redirected energy, Trystin rushed back, heart pounding, as his home began to darken.
He reached Echo, who had conserved some stored energy, albeit barely enough to last a few hours. Together, they basked in the remaining light of Sunder, the last of their kind, waiting for the inevitable dark.
As the last drone shut down, there was a moment of silence. Then, from Echo's core, a little flicker of light emerged and grew brighter, illuminating the surrounding. Echo had transferred the last speck of its energy to the lighting system Trystin had fixed a while ago. Echo's last gesture transcended its mechanical embodiment, it was human-like; love, sacrifice, a beacon of hope.
So, amidst the ruins of a dead civilization stood a lone figure, bathed in the last light of Sunder. He wasn't reveling in heroic glory but mourning the loss of home, of Echo, who had, in the end, become more than a mere drone. It was a moment of resilience against darkness, an ode to companionship, and that was what made the grim reality bearable, even as the shadows of cosmic oblivion loomed. This was Sunder's last tale- one of survival, sacrifice, hope, resilience, and an unlikely friendship.