Golden tinged light descended and laid its hands across her side, a new day. A new adventure. She began slinking through the passages still untouched by the sun, much like the various ivies that wrapped themselves around the neglected and forgotten lamp posts. It had been long since the last bullet had been fired but Dyna knew the importance of caution, the people were gone but the things they made were left behind and now roamed the industrial-sized maze of a city. Dyna tried not to think about them, the memories attached to them made her soul ache and twist. All her friends. All her family. All gone. Dyna let out a broken sigh and her shoulders dropped as she reached the overlook, the building was the Earth's stone arm reaching out of an ocean of rubble and grasping at the heavens, desperate to leave this forsaken hellscape. An intense feeling of coldness blended with emptiness enveloped her and cut through her fur trying to settle in her heart. Along with the feeling came the questions, they flickered endlessly in her mind, was there any point going on? Why does tomorrow even matter? Why am I afraid of dying if I'm already living out hell? Dyna knew the feeling well but couldn't get used to it. She was truly alone.
The night sky chased away the day as an explosion of fiery shades clawed at the darkness as if trying to fight back. Below a network of nightmarish constructions of metal and mechanical horrors patrolled the concrete labyrinth with sweeping dim red lights. The machines covered the ruins far into the horizon creating an impossible deathtrap. Dyna knew the machines would take a while to get up there, tomorrow she would retreat to another spot, and do the same thing the next day. Her life was a song stuck on loop, and if you listen to a song too much you begin to resent it. For Dyna resentment was an understatement but the principal of not falling to the machines kept her going, she despised them with every fibre of her being so she carried on anyway despite the urge to just give up.
Dyna was violently ripped out of her peaceful realm of unconsciousness by intense metallic screeching. Sinister red lights flashed over her face. A flood of adrenaline rampaged through her veins. Her ears flattened back and her hair stood on end. Dyna lept backward in an attempt to escape but impacted machined hydraulics, they had surrounded her. The very things this country had created to protect themselves had destroyed it and called the remaining wasteland their home. Her home. Their home. A tin sounding mishmash of radio samples droned out from a small speaker on the faceplate of the steel bipedal "Feline Comfort Unit 81-88, please report to maintenance at once.". In terrified confusion she looked down and peered into a small pool of dark liquid, two red led lights stared back at her. Horror stabbed deep into her, through skin, through flesh, through metal, through wire. Right into her heart. Just like that, she was broken. No amount of maintenance could fix her new pain, She felt as though she'd betrayed herself. Her gaze floated back up, She saw the robots and they felt sickeningly familiar to her. The edge of the overlook beckoned her as a gate out of her fearful nightmare for the hundredth time, but this time with her newfound self-hatred she took its hand and disappeared over the edge. She slowly shut her eyes in a slow embrace as the dusty brick left her four paws, and for a short while she flew. Then she was free.
