The Gloaming Mechanism
“The sunlight’s just as alive as any of us. It shines down like stars in the cave ceiling, then draws up into the sky above while we’re asleep. I sometimes wish we could ask it to tell its stories: the light’s the only thing that passes between us and the surface.”
SETTING AND PLOT
Long ago, a group of warlocks and scientists warned that the sun would soon stop shining but no one listened. Together, alone, they developed a replacement for the light and a mechanism for its rising and setting, from the caverns below to the sky above. There was one caveat: the mechanism would have to be triggered manually from the deep caverns each night. The warlocks and scientists settled in the caves, and as the sun flickered and died they initiated their own artificial sun.
After awhile, the underground settlement began to mutate. Either their sunlight solution or the caverns themselves had a monstrous effect on those who remained there. Attempts to return to the surface were met with horror and violence. Yet each morning they continued to trigger the sun on which they all depended. Since this time, they eventually figured out how to automate the daily cycle of night and day, but generations of monsters have created an underground civilization no longer interested in the world above.
Until a human child falls into the underground.