The Matriarch

The Matriarch is a quasi-humanoid creature who controls Maudling society and creates new Maudlings by mutating them from human captives.

## Biology

There is some debate over whether the Matriarch is herself a Maudling. At approximately eight feet tall with an elongated torso and six breasts, she is morphologically distinct from the sexless Maudlings. Her function within the show is similar to that of a queen in an ant colony or beehive; some argue, however, that nothing she does is tantamount to reproduction and that the Maudlings serve more of a function of mind-controlled slaves than of children. The process for creating a new Matriarch is unknown. She spends most of her time breast-feeding shifts of Maudlings and pre-mutated mind-controlled humans. Mind-controled humans experience painful withdrawal symptoms without access to her milk, whereas fully mutated Maudlings will die if deprived of it.

## Personality

While the Maudlings are not her biological children, she adopts a motherly role towards them. She communicates primarily through cooing noises, though she is able to speak in sentence fragments. She treats Maudlings in a generally loving manner, cooing and stroking their hair as they breast feed. She often inspects the Maudlings by sniffing them. If a Maudling fails a sniffing inspection, she will push it away and refuse to let it feed until it dies from a lack of milk. It is unclear what causes a Maudling to fail a sniffing inspection. The Matriarch is responsible for designing all Maudling technology, constructing advanced devices with human debris scavenged from the scrapyard and landfill. Once she has whispered instructions to a Maudling, the Maudling is able to build such devices with no supervision. However, the perpetual motion devices used to power each piece of equipment can only be constructed by the Matriarch by hand.

## History

Prior to the events of the show, the Matriarch arrived somewhere near Devils Lake through what Deemlind describes as a tunnel, likely referring to a wormhole or similar portal. The Matriarch's arrival was heralded by a string of missing persons from Devils Lake and surrounding areas, all of whom were likely transformed into Maudlings (though some later disappearances were a result of the Creel Bay Drownings). Because the first disappearances occurred near the scrapyard, it's likely that the Matriarch found her way to the scrapyard prior to construct devices to facilitate the capture and mutation of humans, such as the paralysis wave. Later, her Maudlings and she relocated to an abandoned warehouse outside of Devils Lake that would become the Maudling Compound. Once the compound was secured, the Maudlings began construction of the Apex Device at the Matriarch's direction.

## Death

When the Maurisuvius rift opens in the sky above the Compound at the end of season 4, the Matriach makes no attempt to flee, but continues with her usual breastfeeding routine, comforting Maudlings who are becoming increasingly distressed by the rift. In the minutes leading up to the annihilation of the world, the Maudlings bring her the Seeing Box and hook her up to it. She stares into the box and smiles, then bleeds from her nose and collapses (as all Seeing Persons do after using the box). The final image she sees in the Seeing Box is of a black egg sitting on a plate next to a white cube.