The generator town of the Edge, the salvage markets, and the threshold everything from beyond crosses first.
What Lastlight Is
Lastlight is the Edge's one working town, and it works on its own power, literally: a settlement strung together on generators, fuel barter, and stubbornness, holding a pool of light at the exact point where the city's world ends. The name is the district's whole description. Coming from the city, this is the last light you will see. Coming from the dark, it is the first. Both kinds of traveler arrive tired, and the town is built around knowing which is which and charging accordingly.
The Texture of It
By day Lastlight is a market. The city's leavings wash up here for sale, salvage out of the drowned districts, scrap out of the ruins, goods that fell off the back of the Fringe, and the stalls run on haggling in three currencies, none of them the city's credit, which does not reach here and would not be trusted if it did. The traders who work the country beyond the Edge come in to deal, weathered people with wagons and river craft, buying salt and wire and glass and iodine, selling what they sell, and a wise buyer in Lastlight does not ask where goods come from, because provenance is the one commodity the market has agreed not to carry.
After Hours
The generators dim by rationing, and Lastlight after hours is what the pillar's one line says it is: lawless, which out here is most hours. There is no gang strong enough to bother holding it, no Watchdog contract that reaches it, and no law but the market's own, which is enforced socially, immediately, and without appeal. It is a rough peace, and it holds better than a stranger would guess, because everyone in Lastlight needs the market to open again tomorrow, and that need is the closest thing to a constitution the district will ever have.
Why It Matters
Lastlight is the city's ear to the dark. Every rumor about what lies beyond the Edge, the green country, the settlements that made it, the life outside the credit, arrives through this market, carried in with the trade goods and worth about as much per pound. The city calls it all fairy tales. The traders selling salt do not argue. Arguing is bad for prices, and Lastlight was never in the business of making the city believe anything. It is in the business of the threshold, and the threshold has never once been out of stock.
That is Lastlight. One pool of light with the whole dark around it, and everyone in the pool facing outward, trading.