Episode 31: Season Three Prologue

Well, hey there, family.

If you love old gods of Appalachia and want to help us keep the home fires burning, but maybe aren't comfortable with the monthly commitment, well, you can still support us via the ACAS supporter feature.

No gift too large, no gift too small.

Just click on the link in the show description, and you too can toss your tithe in the collection plate.

Feel free to go ahead and do that right about now.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly.

Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

Fall is Crush Season in California Wine Country.

For a limited time, sip stay and savor crush-worthy getaways with up to 30% off and a bottle of local wine at destinations like Passarobles Inn, Abola Lighthouse Suites, Vespero Resort on Pismo Beach, and Sheraton San Diego Resort.

Each day celebrates harvest season with wine and exclusive savings.

Explore and book now at crushgitaways.com.

You can also enter to win a Lux trip to Napa's Silverado Resort.

Visit crushgitaways.com to start planning your Fob Crash.

That's crushgitaways.com.

And now, a next level moment from ATT Business.

Say you've sent out a gigantic shipment of pillows, and they need to be there in time for International Sleep Day.

You've got ATT 5G, so you're fully confident, but the vendor isn't responding.

And International Sleep Day is tomorrow.

Luckily, ATT 5G lets you deal with any issues with ease, so the pillows will get delivered and everyone can sleep soundly, especially you.

ATT 5G requires a compatible plan and device.

Coverage not available everywhere.

Learn more at ATT.com/slash 5G network.

This episode of Old Gods of Appalachia is brought to you in part by Sucrabay, a women-owned and operated perfumery unlike any other.

Sucrabay not only brings you the finest and small-batch perfumes, their website is a virtual treasure trove of stories and content, including Audling Tales, a podcast where they read you stories from the site.

Heck, they even feature another podcast called The Fearless Broadcast, featuring interviews with other women business owners.

And family, did I mention that Sucre Bay is also responsible for a massive indie marketplace, mostly consisting of other women makers?

If you look down in the show notes, family, you'll find a link to their vibrant Facebook group, as well as a link for a special offer for Old Gods family members.

Spend $25 anywhere in the store and add a dram of nightshade.

Scent notes include a big glass of whiskey, sandalwood, amber, and real Elang Elang.

Just use the code LoveGods, L-O-V-E-G-O-D-S, Sucre Bay.

Welcome to the dark side.

We smell awesome.

This episode's special deluxe benefactor, the good folks over at the Scared to Death Horror Podcast.

Nearing 150 episodes of demonic possession, hauntings, shadow people, black-eyed children, alien abductions, and so much more and so much worse, as horror lover Dan Cummins attempts to terrify his wife Linz with two supposedly true tales each week.

Linz gets back at Dan's with potentially scarier stories, sharing at least two listeners' submitted encounters with the paranormal, often the most disturbing part of the show.

So, family, if you need more chills in your life, if you don't quite feel twitchy enough, it's time for Scared to Death.

New episodes drop every Tuesday night at the stroke before midnight Pacific time.

Available anywhere you listen to podcasts.

You can also go over, search for them on YouTube, and enjoy the show there.

So, if you're looking for something scary, mysterious, and interesting to take your mind to a dark place,

check out Scared to Death.

Old Gods of Appalachia is a horror anthology podcast and therefore may contain material not suitable for all audiences.

So listener discretion is advised.

Oh Appalachia,

O home place and hearth, O prison and pride, we invoke your name this night with both love

and fear.

Your rolling shoulders swallow the setting sun, O Mother.

It is that fear that moves both heart and tongue to draw tight curtains so that we might let the darker hours pass unseen.

We hear you call in in the deepest night.

We hear you call to us in voices that belong to our dead and gone, and we know better, but we follow you into the darkened woods all the same.

Bramble and briar tearing at our clothes and skin, trying to save us from ourselves, but we push on.

Hoping to find somebody who knows our name and can show us the way out.

Oh, labyrinth of promised prosperity, kept by kings who would feed us to their own indiscretions.

No golden thread for us to follow through these dread halls built on this, the corpse of our mother, that wind deeper and darker until we meet much worse than Minotaurs in the middle.

And none of us have even come close to building wings.

We see you.

Oh, fallen tree father, lit by a half moon, parroting broken prayers at an altar you never meant to build, but you did.

Oh, bit back brother, fresh from the underneath, full-sooted from head to toe, lungs full of tomorrow's fresh hell and a voice, choked with the rasp of good money sliding down the sheet.

Eager to move on to greener grass and higher hopes, but found that the company owned so much more than just the town set guards on your family paid you in script and bloodied mouths showed you how much worse it could be

Until you found your words, but more importantly, your guns and then you spake forth with a fire that your will would be done on earth just as it was in Harlan, just like you did back on Blair Mountain and in Matewan and in Peyton Cabin Creeks and however many other hollers that nobody bothered to put up a plaque for.

No entry in the museum for the bodies they never found.

Oh, fire and forge.

Hard-hearted hammer that shapes and breaks us on the anvil of a god that no one really remembers.

So we make do with what we're told.

Oh, sweet soil.

Blessed for battle and burial, we bleed and kill

and die for you

even though you were never ours to begin with

and if this dark and bloody ground asks you for just a little bit more

you give it

you give it all

you give it your last until you have nothing

are nothing

hollowed out and waiting to be filled

waiting for the dark

to find you

These old hills call

for the blood of my body

a pound of flesh for a ton of coal.

So down I

go

into a dark hell waiting

where lungs turn black and hearts grow cold.

And I'll take to the hills and run from the devil to the dying sun

something

comes

and treads off my friend into these shadows where the old ones roam

in those hills we die

alone.

Now the Spirit speaketh expressly

that in the latter time some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and the doctrines of devils.

1 Timothy

4, 4

verse 1

Invincible, abashed, the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is.

John Milton

Paradise Lost

Beneath the new moon in the deepest woods between Harlan, Kentucky, and the Virginia Line,

a boy presses through the darkest night of the year in search of answers.

He clutches what he thought would be his granny's old Bible to his chest.

When he rescued it from their house before the bank nailed the door shut and cast him to the wind, he'd expected to find answers inside.

Now he wasn't much interested in the good news of the gospel within, but in the tangled roots and spidery lines of a family tree that adorned the inside cover.

A place where an orphan boy might learn the names of his folks kept from him from these many years for reasons unexplained.

Instead,

he'd found a list of other names.

And in the pages beyond, he found a testament of a different kind that had explained why he had never known his people, why no one would give him work, why the good folks that had helped so many others had turned their backs on him.

A record of hard truths that had brought him here

to speak with those who might be willing to barter

with one such as him

in the furthest reaches of West Virginia, there is a rock,

a rock mighty and tall and set on the edge of the only known naturally occurring lake in a place where the coal just don't act right.

In this place, that sweet black diamond comes out of the earth all soft and hot.

And if you try to burn it, well, you might as well buy the devil a birthday present and kiss your beehine goodbye.

For there is a strangeness to the land here.

The rock and the men who live there seem to dance to a different tune and answer to neither man nor God, ain't nor thing.

This is not a place for outsiders,

and you do well to keep on moving, friend.

That the men of the rock seek you out.

Pray that the green or the dark hide you well,

for their purpose is their own

and is usually not for others to know.

When you're a girl born neath a moonless sky, to a father whose very seed bore the taint of what sleeps beneath the grave, and a mother who was not but a cold spot in a house so grand and haunted that even the ghosts stayed away, darkness

is all that you know.

Some might say you were forged and honed rather than raised.

A sacrificial dagger to be worn on your daddy's belt and drawn when his will need be imposed upon the world.

You know what it means to stand in the deep places and see your daddy call forth those who have been

hollowed.

You have borne witness to the purging of the light in the eyes of men as they are twisted into new shapes to suit your family's ends.

You have come to love the finer things.

And why not?

You have earned them with every threat whispered in the halls of industry and government and every spine you ever snapped in the hill towns and hollers.

You have slept the sleep of the cold and soulless

and have been visited in dreams by those who who would promise you ascension, rebirth, and supremacy.

Why shouldn't you have all the pretty dresses and glittering rings?

Why shouldn't you have fine mirrors and cones to adorn your hair fashioned from the bones of those you have conquered in his name?

Your daddy founded an empire on coal and bones and blood,

tearing down mountains and carving whole civilizations out of the wilderness like some wraith-skinned god.

Bless your daddy.

Bless him well and anoint his head and his hands and his feet in tears.

Bless him and adorn his brow in dead roses.

Bless his sightless eyes that watch over us all.

Bless his ever-bleeding throat as he rests inside his fine black box, hung in the sight of those who sleep beneath.

May he forever hold their favor, just as you hold his.

Let the sheep organize and squawk about the power of their union, then watch them scatter when the hollow men come to call.

Let them wage their little wars and kill their own so their blood might feed the hungry earth of the mountain they sold themselves to.

Let the bean counters tremble at at your eldest brother's name,

and let the men down in the mines cower at your middle brother's ghost as they grind themselves to gray dust beneath the skin of the world.

Those wise enough and quick enough to have survived to become old men know that the bearer to truly be feared is old E.P.'s baby girl.

Yes, sir.

Precious as a pearl,

prideful as a peacock,

pretty as a picture.

And in the far reaches of a forgotten place that we cannot and will not name,

a prince has reclaimed his amber crown

and seeks those who would serve his court.

Once again, his great shadow moves through the deepest and coldest places where the sun don't never quite reach, and the mountain breeze always carries an edge of frost.

He waits for those who would seek his counsel,

those who would pay him homage.

He is, after all,

the very best

at waiting.

there are those who choose

and those who are chosen by the darkness

by smoke or by blood by fire or by blade they make their way into the lost places seeking to be found

They turn to the dusk for the dawn has failed them

and this season will carry their stories and those of many others

for the dark has power

that the green won't show

so as above so below family

when the fire don't burn

and the grass don't grow

And the good folks turn

from where the bad folk go

either seeking power

or by the lot of birth,

they find their way

beneath the cold dark earth.

So, what can you do

when help never comes?

When the beast speaks true,

but your people stay mom

The dark has powers

that the green won't show.

Cause as above,

so below.

Well, hey there, family, and welcome, welcome, welcome, one and all to season three of Old Gods of Appalachia as above, so below.

I hope y'all are ready because we're going to be journeying deep into the stories of those who have chosen darkness, who have chosen to walk within the shadow of the mountain and have shunned or been shunned by the light of the green and whatever else might be out there.

We're going to take y'all to some places we've never been and you might see a familiar face pop up here or there in the darkness.

I guess you're just going to have to listen and find out.

And family, this season it will be ever more important that you complete your social media ritual.

So head on over to godsofappalachia.com where you will find links to our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, the Discord server so you can keep up with all of our special announcements.

We're going to be popping up with some really, really fantastic things this season and we want to make sure you stay ahead of the curve of finding out when they're coming.

And we want to thank everybody who stuck with us on our Patreon.

You literally keep our lights on.

I know we say that all the time, but it is true.

You have changed our lives and we hope we can give back to you and make these stories and this journey into the inner dark as special for you as it's going to be for us.

If you would like to properly bind yourself to the family, head on over to patreon.com slash old gods of Appalachia.

You can get all your episodes ad-free and a day early, as well as access to exclusive storylines like Build Mama a Coffin, Black Mouth Dog, Door Under the Floor, special little things like Steve Reads and Cam Reads, and all kinds of neat little features and access to Discord live events, all for very reasonable sums to be tossed into the collection plate, patreon.com slash old gods of Appalachia.

Old Gods of Appalachia is a production of Deep Nerd Media distributed by Rusty Quill.

Our intro and outro music is by Brother Land and Blood.

Today's prologue was written and performed by Steve Schell.

Special thanks to this episode's D-Lux Benefactor, the Scared to Death podcast, for all your spooky needs of black-eyed children, folks possessed by demons, and other foul spirits, scared to deathpodcast.com.

Talk to you soon, family.

Talk to you real soon.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the the team today?

It was the new game day, Scratchers, from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question: Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly, must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.