Howdy! Pirates of Appalachia is an epic absurdist satire releasing as a weekly serial. Think 2 parts Huck Finn, 1 part Slaughterhouse-Five, served with a punch to the face by A Boy Named Sue. This is a completed novel—not a work in progress. Learn more or start from the beginning via the buttons below. Happy pirating!.
Previously on Pirates of Appalachia… DroneStrike Season 7 is all the rage! People in Pittsburgh are filing into the DroneStrike arcade or signing in online to do their civic duty by turning Xioddarm women into doody.
Xioddarm ashlands, Nye
The morning of Deceiver moon, season of Molting sun
~ Four moons since the attacks began
She could hear the sky being shredded in the distance. It was so far away it was barely audible over the rustling of the wind and the cawing of a crow in a nearby birch tree. In truth, she wasn’t even conscious of the sound, but the second it scraped against her senses, she instinctively cowered down into the sea of wildflowers, trying to hide.
DztuGreev could hear her mother admonishing her to correct her stance and prepare for bloodshed. That she was destined to be a bloodbraid, the uniter of tribes, and she was honor-bound to protect her people. But DztuGreev could only tremble, her bowels loosing warm terror down her leg as the shredding transformed to whirling and grew louder, invading her consciousness with such brutal totality that it drowned out everything else, the wind, the birds, her heartbeat, even her mother’s voice.
Dragonfly had returned.
And its fateful buzzing vowed death to everyone and everything within earshot.
She froze, her mind trapped in quicksand as the dirt turned muddy around her feet. Ever since she’d first heard Dragonfly, it had haunted her every moment, like a bee trapped in earwax, threatening to sting. The wildflowers clawed at her back and face, mocking her paralysis, taunting her to charge. But the battle was won the instant she’d heard the beating of Dragonfly’s wings. Who was she to draw arms against a god? What weapons could even hope to pierce their armor?
Suddenly she was running! Sprinting through the wildflowers and away from the village as Dragonfly whistled fire down upon her home in a rapid succession of ground-shattering thunderclaps. Again and again and again and again, the land shook and bleated for mercy, but Dragonfly was relentless, and DztuGreev was sure that this time that the entire ashlands would crumble beneath its fury. The stench of charred flesh and burning feces raked over the hills, and although it was clear there was nowhere to run, no safe place in all creation, she couldn’t stop herself. She ran until her lungs ached. Until every muscle from heel to shoulder burned. Until the white tips of ancestral teepees were swept away by a tempestuous tide of rolling fields of purple, gold, and orange, black smoke swirling from its crests like fog.
DztuGreev jumped to a stop, slipping on flowers and crashing down onto her side. Panting for air, she rose to her knees, a new horror thundering in her chest: she had accidentally run to the Pillars of Heaven. Immense stone blocks with crude faces etched into their chests stood in a circle like elders hunched around a bonfire; horizontal blocks stretched across their shoulders like arms, creating a giant stone skeleton of a teepee. It was said that the pillars had once reached into the clouds, separating the gods from this world until the Blaze of Creation melted them down, allowing the gods to enter the ashlands and forging the Xioddarm in the embers. Now, the pillars weren’t much taller than the ceremonial Teepee of the Sun, and many of the blocks were toppled over. Still, this was a sacred place, forbidden to anyone except facewalkers offering a fire sacrifice. Thunder roared around her, pierced only by Dragonfly’s whistles. There would be enough fire offerings today, DztuGreev concluded—and forbidden land was perhaps the last safe place left to hide.
Pitted by anxiety, she stepped out from the cover of wildflowers and onto the yellow grasses surrounding the Pillars of Heaven. There was a shadowed area between two upright stones where a third had collapsed at their feet, creating a haphazard bunker. DztuGreev scurried for it, hunkered like a scolded dog as a humiliating lecture—part guilty conscience, part motherly enchantment—shamed her every step. But before her mother could finish, the pillars exploded, catapulting DztuGreev into the air! It felt like she’d been expelled from this existence into some weightless, breathless, timeless place brimming with only panic and tears. And through the flames, she saw it—the god of death had followed her to the birthplace of creation. Dragonfly hovered before her like a falcon on a breeze, its wings twice the length of a procession of camels, its many talons clutching spears as radiant and colorful as rainbows. It had a short tail spiked by horns twice as tall as her mother, two on top, one on bottom, and from its tip it wielded a mace so fiercely it ripped the fabric of the sky.
But for all its instruments of killing, the most dreadful was the cyclopic black eye bulging out of its silver neck like a boil. DztuGreev had heard tales of First War—of the gods laying waste to land and sea, about battles with no victors, only death, and war without hope of unification—but gazing into Dragonfly’s vacant, expressionless eye, she understood how utterly hopeless their plight was. The gods did not feel as they did, think as they might, hold to beliefs or customs like they strived to do. Dragonfly didn’t level villages and kill out of predation or rage, dominance or vengeance, prophecy or any concept they could appreciate: like a fire consuming the air until it created tornados of flames, Dragon consumed peace and tranquility until it sowed oceans of chaos because it was an after effect of its very existence.
Flames erupted from the base of one of Dragonfly’s spears and it screamed through the air faster than an arrow. DztuGreev blinked, and it was gone. Time lurched forward, dropping her to the ground and knocking the wind from her chest. She gasped for air, for life, certain she would find neither, that in reality both air and life had been the myth and that the ashlands had been burning since the beginning. Flames climbed the stalks of the surrounding wildflowers, casting torrents of grey-black smoke into the blazing midday sun, petals of every color and shape cascading through the haze like starlings turning the sky to waves. She expected smoke to suffocate her and the fire to claim her body, but as breath filled her lungs, she realized she’d been momentarily spared by being cast into a crater left by Dragonfly’s touch. The ground trembled, rocks shivering like frost-bit dogs. A quiet resignation, even resoluteness, set into DztuGreev’s pores, and she closed her eyes, yielding to death and breaking the bloodbraid code of fighting until the very last.
A hand touched her cheek, soft, warm, almost vaporous. She opened her eyes and found a half-formed arm of smoke, its sinuous fingers reaching for her neck. Then she heard a voice speaking to her as if from the crumbled stones. It sounded like her mother.
The pelts of the bloodbraids and warlords of the pyramid tribes clapped against camel thighs with such a distinctive bass and rhythm that even with half the village ablaze, ObscuredSun could tell RedMother was approaching.
The clapping stopped, and after a beat, the flap to the teepee flung open, and there stood RedMother silhouetted by flames, so large she looked like she could hoist creation upon her shoulders and flick it into the abyss with a shrug. “The Seventh Age is upon us,” she said, ducking inside and kneeling before the ceremonial fire. Even though she’d been in battle and had doubtlessly seen countless killed, her words were as unyielding and sharp as steel. She tossed kindling into the flames and blew a steady breath, a ritualistic offering that filled the room with a sappy-sweet fragrance. “When the Atlannaki spent their moons and suns building a castle so long it was said to reach farther than the wind, we laughed at their arrogance. And when Dragonfly attacked, we laughed again, mocking them and christening their great wall Rubble Castle. It is the way of gods to square circles and blunt the blade of perverse ambition, we crowed. But now Dragonfly lays siege to the ashlands and the descendants of the wing. It is even rumored to have struck the Pillars. This is not caprice or retribution: it is the coming of a new age, of Fallen moon.”
“You laughed,” corrected ObscuredSun, stoking the coals. Smoke curled around his wrist and slithered up his arm like a red-fanged constrictor, encircling his neck and face in an undulating mask resembling a person beneath cloudy water called a sakiburo. Only those blessed with the gift of facewalking like ObscuredSun could inhabit one without losing their sanity. As it took shape, the inside of the teepee was replaced by the seething sights, sounds, and smells of the Land of Eternal Twilight. Ever since Dragonfly had reappeared, every face he entered had resided in this unruly, malodorous land. He inhaled a lungful of smoke and coughed, “Facewalkers never laugh.”
“Remind me of that the next time you’re in possession of a pipe.”
ObscuredSun chuckled despite the circumstances; when inhabiting a sakiburo, he couldn’t help but feel the same emotions and sensations as its occupant, and in this case he was giddy, and a little gassy, from the effects of a herb far more potent than any in the ashlands. “What winds have Dragonfly blunted today?”
“We haven’t completed the count, but no doubt there isn’t enough kindling in the ashlands to light the bonfires owed tonight,” RedMother lamented. “The gods bring thunder, but no storm. Death, but no battle. I shot Dragonfly with an arrow, and it glanced off its breast like a stone across a pond. The outhouses on the northern and eastern flanks have been razed. Now our people squat in the fields like cattle, trembling as their bowels unwind.”
The sensation of unexpectedly being hoisted into the air dropped ObscuredSun’s stomach to his knees, and images of the Pillars of Heaven filled his mind, only these pillars were intact, pristine, glittering like fireflies, so plentiful and tall they stabbed into the clouds like battering rams pressing the gods so far away they could never hope to find land again. He could smell putrid, stagnant water, taste something so rich and sweet it made him dizzy, and hear a knot of countless voices clamoring at once, hurling insults and complaints in short, almost juvenile outbursts. He rose higher, growing queasier with each span, and he had to force himself not to lash out or scream into the void growing around him. “To the gods,” he said, straining to keep his composure, “we are but cattle in the field, so it is only natural for everything to be covered in manure.”
“And it is natural for me to wage war against them.” Even in a hypnotic state, he could feel the sharp edge of RedMother’s tone. “I’ve united eight tribes through my womb or by my blade, and it is my nature to protect them all. Gods, tribes, cattle—I will steal their wind, crush their squares beneath my heel and twist my sword into their bellies until their blood douses the flames. If it requires becoming the butcher god, then that is what I will do. Weapons—weapons win wars. With the clever Atlan—”
“It is forbidden…”
“The Atlannaki—”
“It is forbidden!” ObscuredSun snapped, the queer, irrational whimsies of the sakiburo and the revolting prospect of unifying with the Atlannaki overcoming him, breaking him from his trance. The smoke-mask unraveled and flicked out of the opening at the teepee’s roof, raptor-shaped embers chasing it into smokey day. “The Atlannaki have been our enemy since the First, and will remain until the Last.”
“I am the unifier,” said RedMother, rising so tall she rivaled the pillars in the Land of Eternal Twilight. “Is the moon forbidden the tide? To light the field? The Atlannaki have weapons, weapons we can use to fight Dragonfly.”
“When it rains, do we shoot arrows at the clouds?” ObscuredSun asked, regaining his wits. “When the ground shakes, do we hunt worms with our falcons? When Deceiver paints the night black with tears, do we unsheathe our swords? You cannot wage war against war itself, RedMother.”
“Then what do you propose?”
ObscuredSun stoked the coals and rolled his eyes back as he accepted a new sakiburo. “Hold it,” he croaked, a cockeyed grin and squinty eyes curling around his face. “Hold it for as long as we can.”
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