The Cutter

It’s dark here and a haze rests around the bases of hulking shapes that rise like the broken walls of a valley. The silence is complete and the hanging wisps are moved by no wind.
A slight glowing is perceived slowly beyond the end of the path formed by the shrouded figures to the left and right. When the silence is at last broken, it is by the scrape and thump of dragging feet. A figure appears on the path. It is a small figure with features unseen in the dark. It scrapes and thumps along until it finds what it is searching for. Then all is quiet again for a moment.
When the silence is broken for a second time it is broken by the harsh fast grinding of metal. The darkness is broken also. A light flashes with the sound and illuminates the face of the figure. Large half-spheres as polished as silver catch the light and throw it into the mist. The rest of the figure is a chaos of wires and grime in the quick light.
The light comes again and again like lightning accompanying the small clashing thunder. Something catches in the dark and the clashing becomes continuous for a moment before settling into a popping and clicking dirty whir. Metal hits metal and sparks are thrown to the ground where they glow or are swallowed by cracks in the hard, brittle surface.
The sound is thrown off of the walls of the hulking structures on either side and grows. All other senses are overwhelmed and drowned and there is only the sound until the darkness is cut by a spray of sparks. The spray seems to be the que. The sound is multiplied tenfold and the blinding light from the sparks cuts everything else from vision. For a time, there is nothing else in the world but the sound and the light of this strange event in the dark.
Then- more abruptly even than it started- the sound is gone and the plume of sparks fades, leaving only its ghost in the senses. All is quiet again.
The silence is cut a third time by the grating protest of metal pushed past its limits. It groans and screams in the dark and finally gives to a rushing of cleaved air and a sudden violent meeting of hard surfaces.