A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words - Our Dark Goddess

This post was inspired by the amazing image below, created as a writing prompt in the Freewriters Community.

Enjoy !

SOURCE Pic is AI generated by @wakeupkitty for this contest

She descended from the stars, coming to us on a pillar of blue fire.

Our world was complex, sophisticated, industrialised. We thought we were the only planet in the galaxy to develop advanced life. Our rockets had visited a couple of nearby moons and barren planets, and we had spent decades listening to space through complex instruments.

We had heard nothing. So naturally we assumed we were the pinnacle of evolution.

What fools we were !

Our materialism had left no room for the divine and mysterious. No room for gods and goddesses, for faith.

Then she came.

Heart-crushingly beautiful. Perfect. Flawless. Ivory skin and raven black hair studded with jewels glowing like stars.

She glided into the Great Hall of our United Nations, where a group of grey men and ash-blonde but equally grey women had convened to have a routine summit on boring economic matters, how to control ordinary disgruntled people and dissident nations.

Everything stopped. Her eyes.... so bright... so blue.... so... hypnotic.

She said to our leaders, "I am your goddess. You will worship me. You will obey me. This is now my world, my plaything."

They said nothing; she hypnotised them, charmed them. They obeyed.

Her arrival had been televised. She had controlled every screen in the world to make sure of it.

We all fell in love with her. We adored seeing our unaccountable leaders humiliated, forced to obey her. A few of those leaders shook themselves to try to break the compulsion and stand up to her. We cheered her on as, with a simple gesture of her hand, she stopped their hearts. Seeing our tyrants fall dead was wonderful.

But.....

Then what ?

She willed a palace for herself into being. All silver, jet black and blue spires, with a throne made of the skeletons of those leaders she'd slain. Never mind that underneath it, crushed to dust, was the city of Algiers. Blotted out in a moment, with all it's people. Do we evacuate the ants from their nests when we build a house ?

She commanded peace. So all the soldiers went home. They weren't needed any more.

She commanded peace. Anyone who committed an act of violence dropped dead, the jewels in her golden armband flaring briefly with each death. They flared incessantly until people learned. The police disbanded, they weren't needed any more.

But our remaining leaders were terrified. They abandoned their posts, or froze into inaction.

We learned to say "No."

Pay taxes ? "No."
Come into work early, or at all ? "No."
Pay for what you just picked up in the shop ? "No."

It was like the whole planet had learned passive resistance.

She was beautiful, and we loved her. We had to. She'd kill us if we didn't, or if we were harsh to our neighbours.

Countless people dropped dead because their emotions got the better of them just once. More died of famine. All those unemployed soldiers, policemen, factory workers, civil servants; no work meant no money, meant no food. Stealing food was certain death.

We drifted like waifs on the surface of our own planet. All with beatific smiles on our faces and a kind word for everyone we met.

Inside, we died.

And she sat on her throne almost inactive, surveying her world, a world falling apart, with that enigmatic smile on her face.

This went on for a year, and more and more of us died. Starvation, bad temper, desperation, and more and more just curling up and dying seeing no reason to live.

Then, as suddenly as she had arrived, she was gone. A pillar of blue fire and she'd left us.

The few of us left alive would have to work out what lessons we'd learned. Try to rebuild a civilisation on her own.

Some of us even missed her, our beautiful dark goddess. And she never even told us her name.