From ashes to dust

Prairie Wetlands

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Back then life was abundant. So many animals, so much life. If anything an over production. For August Mirken was born in the wet lands in the time before the mid west became a ever growing spreading desert as it is now... The snow of this time was so pure people would melt it and seal it in mason jars to clean wounds with and as water for babies. August Mirkin's great grandfather was a full blooded Elf. He knew nothing of this until he was forty seven and it happened to come up in a family conversation. Mixed species marriage was still a shocking shame to the conservative prairie people. Some of the other kids in grade school bragged about being one third or so Elf because it was cool to the kids to be part "Savage magic wielding blood lined. Young August Mourned that he wasn't part Elf too. Turns out he was but it was hushed and his parents lied when he asked them about it. Elves are damned for being a different species. Only Humans go to heaven.

Back then spring exploded like a fire cracker. Sudden bursts of bright colors. Baby animals every where. The air heavy with floating scents. It seemed every other year brought the over abundance of some animal or other. The grasshoppers came one year as a solid green exoskeleton sheet. They ate all the crops. The invaded the chicken coop and ate all the birds down to bone. There was not enough gasoline to burn them. Not enough time and energy to kill them manually. They fled. Many would get inside. You could hear little mandibles working, trying to chew their way in.

• Magic and Danger

It was a boring life on a prairie farm so August would often walk over the wooden bridge and down the street a ways to his Grandma's place to hang out with his Hippy Uncle. He always seemed to have Elvin wine. Enough to share with his hippy friends. A drop in a glass of kool aid and they where laughing and buzzed. He walked all around the area gathering transnational Elvin buzz plants like "Elf berries". You could eat them, a bitter sour taste. August knew what they where because adults like his father's Mother would stomp and twist her feet to reduce them to shreds with a angry righteous look on her face. The older folks seemed to think the Elves had created these drug plants. You don't see any of them around here anymore. Poisoned and tilled into oblivion.

But true God fearing Americans would march in the street with rifles and shotguns. August saw them when he was a little kid. They terrorized him. Ropes and cloth masks hid their identities. News stories of midnight raids by groups of these roped Men attacking the homes of minorities. Murder ad rapes. Sometimes as many as seventeen killed in one bloody night. None of these Men where ever caught. They where a widely located by loosely affiliated group known as God's Sword. They wanted to bring back a time of violence and suppression of other races and any white sub cultures that was different then themselves. God's sword was formed during the great Elf purge some seventy years ago. They had another major wave as a reaction to the Elf influenced counter cultural period. They attacked the hippy commune outside of Maize and torched it. Several hippies where raped and or killed. August's family would drive by this burnt little hamlet on the way to Ockberg Plains, a small town where they liked to get groceries. August's Hippy uncle once took him there with a couple of his weed head friends. there was still human bones scattered about in the buildings back then. Choice parts like skulls where already missing. Lots of young people made hippy finger bone necklaces for good luck. Bone wind chimes clacked from door ways. Many years later at a family reunion August heard his uncle Barny Toolugs laughing about how he was on the high school foot ball team and was there when the commune was burned down. He boasted of his rape of a hippie chick. Uncle pulled his cigar out of his mouth with a pop as he delivered the punch line. "What are you screaming about you hippie chicks go for free love!" Barks of laughter among the religious shaking bellies.

• Branding

• The Dawn of the Drought

It had not rained for seven months, now it was deep into a scorching hot dry mean summer. August Mirkin was nineteen when the dust bowl began...The superstitious farmers thought it a curse of the Elves who had been slaughtered to clear this land for crop growth. The economy was drying up and many farmers borrowed from the banks to keep going another year for the harvest to make things right. But things where less and less right. Crop prices falling while the dry fields produced less yearly until nothing at all was grown. The people started thinking witchcraft was involved. People who valued the Elves working spells to get revenge for a exterminated species.

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• Into the sickness

August felt tired and bad all the time. His stomach acidic. Nose bleeds waking him from fitful sleep. He dealt with this and carried on a few months as the conditions got worse. He was missing work and in danger of getting fired. He finally went to see a doctor.

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Masked roped racist members of the shalters sect marching openly in the streets with guns. Proclaiming this is God's country and it shall be reclaimed with Gods sword.

dust bowl and witch hunt cursed midwest from the elf purge

protag is part elf but don't know early on cause its a dirty family secret. Protag born too late some fifteen or years years after a great Elvin culture influenced uprising of youth. A grasp at utopia that ended with a severed hand.

burned out area of blackened shacks reduced to skeletons, a once hippie commune the town rose up and burned killed and drove out. Raping hippy chicks "Whats she screaming about these commies are supposed to be into free love"

floods over populations of snakes grasshoppers rabbits then a great and horridible droughto. Protag born too late missing a shamanic uprising some ten years earlier, a revolution now dust.

Pagan Kansas-magic and danger

childhood in a wetlands of life abundant. So much life and visiting cousins killing the fuck out of as many animals as they can "that's what there for" special shotguns to blast over a hundred birds out of the sky with just one shot let em fall and rot young protag collects beaks to make a wind chime. . Pond bombs to kill all the fish in one massive explosion big fun jock raids on other schools

"Branding". A way of shaming mentally scaring other kids into submissive loser roles. Jock's parents teach the kids this early so they can break the other kids wills.

The couch has the right to kill bad kids, as long as they are of the lower social class. He is a waste not sort of guy and he takes them to a shelter belt and rapes them before making them die. He sometimes can't resist killing a girl because they turn him on. The jocks and others learn about the location and sometimes they hide and watch the fun. A girl protag has a crush on gets killed this way. ⤓

wind storms. A eerie screaming howling moaning wind like angry spirits. The winds make a thin scribble of lines across the dirt that sometimes form words or sigals these are called "Devil scripts". Adults quickly brush them away with shoes

Hippie uncle and his friends go with August to a sacred spot of the Elves. But they get chased off by a angry man saying his grandaddy killed the Elves to the right to this land and no fuckin hippies are going to dirty it get out, I'd shoot you if there wasnt a kid wit ya. Hipple uncle uses some local Elf highs like "Elf berries".

Protag one of so vary many to have a disease uncurible and fatal in less you take your meds. See you doc once every three months or he will stop your meds. Turns out there is a cure and it is illegal. Treason to use. Protag gets a fix but gets discovered and arrested. He shall get death penalty for illegal law breaking and a half. But he escapes and is chased by an angry mob to the doomsday temple. God comes by a certain date or the religious town folk plan to set off there own end times to help things along. Protag sets off the doomsday device and blows the town to shreds. Himself included, but hell he was going to die anyway to whatever.

Inspirations, grapes of wrath, the empire of the summer moon and the worst hard time.