@blakeagainstthemachine
Blake left her. Knoth left her. Murkoff left her. Each and every soul gazed upon her pale, immobile body and thought nothing more. Lynn Langermann was dead, another nosy journalist wiped off the Earth. But life stirred deep within her like a caterpillar wriggling to emerge from its cocoon. She wasn’t done fighting. The Heretics saw that. They would never leave Mother.
What remained of Val’s army ventured into Temple Gate after Murkoff took their leave. Most of the bodies were burned and the ones that remained would be picked up later for biological samples. The creatures didn’t care for the Temple Gate citizens or the wretched Sullivan Knoth, their former Papa. They only cared for the seemingly lifeless woman laying atop a torture device. Dried black blood stained her bare thighs and the wood beneath her, making it look as though the wood had decayed and rotted. The Heretics gathered her and returned to their underground dwelling.
For the next three months, a rough estimate as time was meaningless in the shadowy mines, Lynn was cared for, healed, and shaped by the muddy hands that surrounded her. At first, her fight or flight instinct went into overdrive, her need to escape overpowering any common sense until the pain became overbearing and dampened her spirits. She couldn’t run anymore. Not until her wounds healed.
While the radio towers were no more, brought to the ground by an unseen force, their waves collected in the mines, sunk into the walls like water to a sponge. There, the creatures fed off the static, the nightmares, reveled in the chaos as if they had known nothing else. In Lynn’s state, it was not long before the familiar sense of uncertainty, the sensation of her very mind unraveling, returned. With each passing day, she lost a part of herself, evolving into something greater, something better than mere Lynn. She became Mother. Mother of the Antichrist. Mother of the Heretics.
