The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Last 
by Rie Sheridan Rose

The world is a desolate place now. Ash and agony are all that remain. I watched my fellows slip away one by one…succumbing to plague or pestilence or merely stubborn pride. Anyone who could afford to took to the colony ships and left this wasteland. My mother begged me to join her—even as she backed up the gangway and deserted me.

But I felt a duty to this place. This land of my birth and home of my ancestors. Despite the burning hell it had become, I remembered the lush green paradise it had once been, and I believed with all my heart I could make it so again.

That dream is gone. The moon no longer eclipses the sun, but channels it. It sits in the perfect frame of the archways that used to give onto…