In the Garden of Desolation

In the Garden of Desolation was a blog by alliterator about the Mother of Snakes. The main character, April Chase, wakes up to find herself in a vast desert, which turns out to be the Mother of Snakes' domain, the Garden of Desolation. It can be read here.

Summary
April Chase wakes up in a vast desert and finds a laptop and a bottle of water. Slowly, she wanders the desert, desperate to escape from it, even as her water dwindles and her hunger rises. She kills and eats a snake, then encounters a much larger repitilian creature (which she calls a "giant lizard-thing") and manges to kill it, too.

Later, she comes across another large reptilian creature who is hunting another person: Boyd Walker, who has had his tongue ripped out. April decides to save Boyd and that together they have a better chance of escaping the desert.

Boyd tries to tell her about the Mother of Snakes, but she ignores him. Eventually, their food begins to run out and when it finally does, April thinks that Boyd is going to try to kill and eat her. Instead, she attacks and kills him, then decides not to let his body go to waste.

Throughout all this, a person listed as "Desolation Angel" has been posting incidents from April's life where April ends up killing someone who was abusing someone else (the first incident being her father who abused her mother, the second was a friend's boyfriend who threatened to spread malicious lies, and the third a professor in college who tried to force April to have sex with him in exchange for grades). April always insists that she never killed them.

After April does kill Boyd, however, she uncovers a dune which turns out to be part of a very, very large snake. She decides to follow the snake. Meanwhile, the Desolation Angel reveals that on the night before April was brought to the Garden of Desolation, she was assaulted and raped and, after she got home, looked in the mirror and swore that she would do anything to survive. This is only to test that resolve, the Desolation Angel says, and reveals herself to be the Mother of Snakes.

April has followed the giant snake back to a lake, where she meets the Mother of Snakes. The Mother of Snakes asks if April truly wishes to survive, to live and April says yes.

In the last post, April says that she has shed her skin and that the Mother of Snakes has given her new skin, along with fangs and a tail. She loves it in the Garden now and does not wish to leave, but she has to. She has to return to her old life and visit some old friends, including her professor, her former friend's boyfriend, and her father. After all, a girl has to eat.

Trivia
The title of the blog is a line from the poem "The Garden of Desolation" by Henry Rutherford (the same poet who wrote "Hell's Yard" from Where My Eyes Remain). The full poem is written out in the post titles:

Under the sycamore she sat and slept

With nary a care for her sedation

But during her sleep she was swept

Into the garden of desolation.

Waking, she found she was lost

And rejecting thought of damnation

Over the desert she crossed

Through the garden of desolation.

How quickly time goes past

As she seeks her journey's cessation

When she finds someone at last

Amid the garden of desolation.

Still she goes forward with drive

Until she gives in to temptation

And takes what she needs to survive

From the garden of desolation.

Amidst the cracked earth and empty sky

She searches for her salvation

Losing herself as the days go by

In the garden of desolation.