Status: Short story of what happens when you don't do as you're told

Mother Knows Best

Part Two - Progenitor

The surface of the planet used to make her chest ache. To see what had been once a glorious, fertile land reduced to so much ash. Crumbling ruins teemed with the shadows and shades of hungry souls while the sharp wind carried the howls of hungry souls.

It was a wretched, gray scape of a life. Foraging in it had only served to steel her mind and heart to the reality of the plane. It was dying. Slowly, with the parasitic undead of its former souls crawling on its husk. Had she another place to go, another world to tend to, she gladly would have left.

But He would follow. So in a vein of true insanity, she tried to reseed the same desolate, damned world over and over. The Progenitor walked through a village that had once thrived. Memories, unbidden, surfaced and danced across her vibrant blue eyes. Children playing, laughing. Men working the field while horses led a plow. Women washing clothes in the steam that used to run where she walked. With a sad sigh of remembrance, she knelt in the ash of the now and used the memory to recall the sense of water. The fresh wellspring of water, the chill of it. The rush of life that would accompany the stream, how it had fed the crops, housed countless fish and insect, and fed the land nutrients from the mountains that had been reduced to smoldering volcano in the distance.

For a moment, light flared along her palm into the ground. The soot beneath her darkened and bubbled as water sprung to the surface then continued to flow down the path of the steam as it had before the death of this world. The Progenitor pulled a jar from her pack and collected the dirty water. It would do until she could get it back home and filter it.

Home.

The walk back was as bleak as the world itself. Through more ruin and acrid smoke that, were she human, would've seared her lungs. Instead, it was just a burning reminder of another thing to be fixed. Only once she went below ground was the air still and breathable. Where the wind didn't cut with gusting blows or the scorching sun blister frailer skin.

The darkness below was all consuming but was by no means a kindness. There were monsters here just as there were on the surface. She was largely ignored by the warped and mutated animals that had survived thus far. Skin and bone beasts that snarled but skittered away from her foot steps in the pitch black. They knew better.

Only it wasn't completely dark. Not entirely.

"They always get curious, you know," he whispered from the blackness around her.

The Progenitor stopped just as she saw the light of the Gate pouring out into the empty cavern. The decapitated body of her daughter lay cradled in the dim glow of the lamp light within, where her blood ran inky and cold over the stone.

She couldn't even summon hatred for him as he manifest next to her. A monster of wet, cracked skin. Too tall and odd angles, leaning over her like a shadow, though there was no light to cast him. His white, slit eyes watched her while a mouth, too wide with too many teeth, grinned. "They always open the door. Why don't you cage them?"

She continued forward, over the body of her daughter and into the safety of her haven. Before she moved to shut the Gate, the Progenitor glanced back at Him. He was still there, in the light, looming over her body with his grin. "They are not animals to be caged. This is my failing." She shut the door to his soft, humming laugh.
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The concept for the world just sorta happened and I let it go where it world. I liked the idea of a parasite, or a virus, for a god. One that infects a world, or a deity, and consumes all they touch but not necessarily them. So there's no use running from it as it slowly kills even the divine. SO. This was my take on that while tying it into the previous bit. I may add a third piece, but I'm not sure it's needed.

Hope you enjoyed!