Wee Piggies of Radiant Might
Bill McCurry
Copyright © 2019 Bill McCurry
Wee Piggies of Radiant Might
First Edition, March 2019
Infinite Monkeys Publishing
Carrollton, Texas
Bill-McCurry.com
Editing: Shayla Raquel, ShaylaRaquel.com
Cover Design: Monica Haynes, TheThatchery.com
Interior Formatting: Rogena Mitchell-Jones, RogenaMitchell.com
Wee Piggies of Radiant Might is under copyright protection. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9848062-2-5
To Kathleen:the best dance partner ever.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Have you read Death’s Collector?
About the Author
One
(Fingit)
These days, Fingit announced himself when visiting the Father of the Gods, hoping to prevent awkward situations, such as the day he found the old fellow squatting naked in a ditch, giggling and weaving grass into his beard. One could expect eccentricity, especially since existence was so bad just now, but that kind of behavior was disturbing to see in the most powerful of all divine beings.
“Father!” Fingit walked down the tree-blemished hill. Although spring was well along, the trees looked poor. Not diseased, just washed out and puny. He squinted through his spectacles and wondered if he needed stronger ones already. “Father!” Fingit puffed on down the hill with purpose, his modest gut waddling.
The hill led down to a precipice overlooking an immense drab valley bisected by a meandering, muddy river. An ancient stone bench perched at the cliff’s edge. It was ancient in a profound way, since it dated back to the beginning of time as the gods understood it. Krak, Father of the Gods, sat leaning forward on the bench he had built, facing the valley.
Fingit frowned at the back of his father’s head. He’s ignoring me. Damn him. Typical. He wants me to scrape and kiss his feet, in spite of everything.
When Fingit reached Krak, he stood behind his father’s right shoulder and waited to be acknowledged. Krak did not choose to acknowledge him at that time. During the wait, Fingit examined his father. The old man’s hair looked thinner than yesterday, and not just white—almost translucent. His stubbly face did not appear noble and craggy anymore. It looked like crumbled stone in a worn-out net. Brown spots speckled his white sleeve.
Crap… his robe is stained. Is he that far gone?
Five minutes passed, and with supernatural force of will, Fingit managed not to squirm. He’s doing this on purpose! The vindictive old turd!
At last, Krak drew a deep breath and said, “My son. What do you want? I’m busy.”
“Um… busy with what, Father?”
“Contemplating the existence of my foot up your ass.”
“Huh. You should be nice to me, Father. Nobody else pays attention to you anymore. The worse things get, the more they forget about you.”
“The little thugs.” Krak leaned back and patted the bench beside him, and his youngest son stepped around to seat himself with a sigh of non-divine relief.
Krak glanced sideways at his son. “So, what are you here to tell the old fellow today?”
“Things are great. Better than ever. Trutch just sits under that dead tree and whines all day. Effla has been banging demigods three at a time, and Weldt doesn’t even care. He just drinks wine and makes up songs about lightning bolts and whales.” He paused, but his father just leaned forward and grunted. “Lutigan stabbed Chira’s flying moose through the heart—fourteen times—and then ran naked through the Emerald Grove, pissing on every fourteenth tree.”
“Anything else?”
Fingit cleared his throat. “Well… Sakaj committed suicide.”
Krak groaned. “How?”
“She stabbed herself through the eye with a thorn from the Tree of Mercy.” Fingit said it as fast as he could.
His father lifted his head. “That’s not so bad.”
Fingit glanced down at the side of the bench and brushed off some nonexistent dirt. Father’s perspective on “bad” has become skewed. Or maybe screwed up to holy hell.
“She did it just the one time?”
Fingit nodded. Sakaj had once committed suicide every day for a year, and she’d never employed the same method twice. She began with hanging, drowning, decapitation, and all the popular ones. Then she got creative. She crushed herself between rolling boulders. She called Lutigan childish names for fourteen hours straight until he chopped her into fourteen pieces. She threw herself under the Holy Bulls; she tore out her own hair and hanged herself with it; she chewed her hands off and bled to death. Of course, she was reborn each morning. She was a god, after all. But she certainly looked worse and worse every day, and her behavior disturbed everyone else in the Home of the Gods.
After her Year of Self-Annihilation, Sakaj stopped committing suicide and had never spoken to anyone since. She wandered through the withering forests. That was annoying behavior too, but at least one didn’t find parts of Sakaj scattered around when going to pick golden apples.
Well, they were tin apples now. As existence had grown sadder and less robust, so had the apples. When the crisis had broken, the golden apples became silver in a blink, sweet but no longer a near-sexual experience. Soon, the sliver tarnished, producing firm but unexciting fruit. The bronze apples came next and weren’t so bad, mealy but wholesome. Later, the bitter iron apples forced the gods to chew a lot to get them down, and the current tin apples left a film on the teeth and just tasted nasty. An industry of manic wagering had arisen speculating on the next apple degradation. The current favorite was stone, although a militant minority claimed that copper had been unfairly skipped, which would soon be rectified by the
