Revelation at Tikal | Literary Adventure Fiction Podcast

Revelation at Tikal is a literary adventure podcast that releases full, unabridged chapters of a character‑driven road novel with a strong mystery spine. Follow Cutty Braughn across Central America and the Caribbean as he chases clues about his missing sister through Mayan ruins, jungle towns, and back‑room cantinas. If you love immersive travel stories, slow‑burn suspense, and smart, voice‑driven fiction in audio form, this show lets you listen to the novel one chapter at a time.

Revelation at Tikal | Literary Adventure Fiction Podcast is a fiction podcast hosted by Cutty Braughn, with 26 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Cutty Braughn hosts Revelation at Tikal | Literary Adventure Fiction Podcast, a fiction show with 26 episodes published.

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  Episode #25

  Book 1: Revelation at Tikal — Ch 23: A Possible Future

  Aug 12, 202613 minS1

  Rene has friends behind every desk in this dusty Nicaraguan town, which turns out to matter more than an American passport when six hundred stolen dollars needs chasing through a rubber-stamp bureaucracy. Cutty walks away with an eighty-dollar emergency advance and a promise to forward the rest to Panama City. Every stamp cost an hour, and somewhere south, the white van spent those hours moving. Costa Rica, the one country in the isthmus that fired its own army, waves them through the border in minutes, and for one glorious hour a smooth stretch of Pan-American blacktop turns the BMW into something close to a rocket, Paula welded to Cutty's back and whooping into every curve. Then a trench swallows the front wheel, the windshield snaps off in Cutty's hand, and a chase that felt, for sixty miles, like something he could win becomes, again, something he could die finishing. A storm chases them into a roadside trailer park outside San Jose, where a BMW-riding expat tries to sell Cutty leathers off his own arm, and two American retirees named Bad Henry and Old Paul walk him straight into the road's actual ending: a chain-link cantina on a hill, bare bulbs, guaro poured like gasoline, and an economy of pensions and much younger local women that Cutty recognizes, uneasily, as the same machinery running his sister's cult, wearing a friendlier hat. Paula makes him say the number out loud before the night is over: thirty hours lost to bank windows, border stamps, and other men's ruined retirements, thirty hours the van never had to spend on anything but driving. Cutty finishes his last swallow of guaro and asks the only question left that matters: how early does the border open. IN THIS EPISODE - Rene's rubber-stamp diplomacy, and the true price of a stolen six hundred dollars in a country with no fast way to get it back. - Costa Rica's soldier-free border, and the strange calm of a checkpoint with no rifles in it. - The pothole that nearly ends the chase, and the windshield that snaps off in Cutty's hand at ninety miles an hour. - A trailer-park lobby, Charlie's Angels dubbed into Spanish, and a leather-jacket salesman living on borrowed glory. - Bad Henry, Old Paul, and Cantina Agua Caliente's quiet economy of pensions and young women. - Paula forcing Cutty to count the cost out loud, and the question he asks Bad Henry when the guaro runs out. A LINE TO CARRY OUT "Not that she was bought. That the buying had gone deep enough she couldn't tell it from kindness." ABOUT THE SERIES Part of the Cutty Braughn literary-thriller trilogy, one man, a motorcycle, and a hunt across Central America, 1977 to the 1980s, where the deadliest thing on the road is a polite instruction typed on a distant desk. Content note: depictions of transactional relationships between older American men and much younger local women, and themes of economic coercion.

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  Episode #23

  Book 1: Revelation at Tikal — Ch 22: Dancing With Saints, Chased by True Believers

  Aug 5, 202618 minS1

  A rustic albergue off a back road in Honduras, a guancasco spilling out of the church square, and for one night the road stops chasing anybody. Cutty Braughn parks the BMW inside the beach bohio like a man who's done it a hundred times, and Paula pulls him into a crowd thick with trumpets, fireworks smoke, and saints nobody bothered to introduce. He dances. He almost forgets there's a reason not to. Then a stranger in a straw hat mentions a white van, and the ground shifts. Somebody has been asking after a gringo on a big German motorcycle, and the description is too specific for coincidence. Cutty has spent the whole trip hunting the van that took his sister Floey south. Tonight he learns it has started hunting him back. South through Nicaragua, past a Guardia checkpoint that lingers a beat too long on the bike, the road delivers Cutty and Paula to a lakeside trailer park on Ometepe's shore, where a bartender named Rene knows exactly which questions tourists never ask. What starts as small talk about a volcano-top religious camp turns into a name Cutty has heard before in a different country: a foundation, a freight account, and the same slide projectors and city-clothed men who never sweat. El pulpo again, the octopus, with an arm all the way out on the lake. The night ends with a theft that isn't really a theft, a passport and papers left behind with the precision of a man who wanted Cutty moving, not stopped. The one thing he can't get back is the film, every face he's photographed since Chichi, now in the hands of the people it will hurt most. IN THIS EPISODE - A guancasco in a Honduran church square, and one uncomplicated night before the road turns hostile again. - A straw-hatted stranger, a white van, and the moment the hunter realizes he's also being hunted. - The Guardia Nacional at a Nicaraguan bridge, and a sergeant's glance that lingers a beat too long on the bike. - Rene, the lake, and Ometepe: a volcano camp running on foundation diesel and the same slide carousels as everywhere else. - El pulpo's reach, from a 1954 coup to a freight account on a lake, and the con wearing a new hat on this hill. - A jacket gone missing with surgical precision, and why a man who returns your passport isn't your friend. A LINE TO CARRY OUT "A man who returns your papers and keeps your camera and film isn't a thief. He's an editor." ABOUT THE SERIES Part of the Cutty Braughn literary-thriller trilogy, one man, a motorcycle, and a hunt across Central America, 1977 to the 1980s, where the deadliest thing on the road is a polite instruction typed on a distant desk. Content note: depictions of surveillance, theft, and the lingering threat of state violence.

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  Episode #23

  Book 1: Revelation at Tikal — Ch 21: Magician at the Border

  Jul 29, 202620 minS1

  The road south of San Miguel ends at a wall of sandbags, a platoon of soldiers, and the regime's informers — las orejas, the ears. Two men lie wired at the shoulder. A third is staked to a fence post as a warning. Cutty Braughn brakes, spots a footpath into the jungle, and runs for the frontier before anyone can decide he's a problem worth a phone call. What follows is a night ride across a country that has quietly decided its own atrocity is simply the way things are now: El Salvador under permanent state of siege, a slogan dripping in red on a shuttered pharmacy wall, and a stalled village of trucks waiting to cross at El Amatillo into Honduras. When Cutty and Paula finally reach the closed border, the only currency that still buys passage isn't paper or a bribe. It's sleight of hand — a deck of gray cards, a forced two of clubs, and a table of bored, armed conscripts chanting Maestro, Maestro while a hand-written visa dries in the dark. This is the chapter where the trilogy's real machine shows its reach: el pulpo, the octopus, the same quiet hand that touches a ministry office up north and a colonel down south. Cutty can palm a card off the bottom of the deck. So can they — and their deck is stacked the whole length of the isthmus. His sister Floey is already a week ahead of him in the back of a van, being steered toward the same lie. IN THIS EPISODE - A checkpoint that isn't only army, and the price of having "witnessed" it. - The B-movie playing in Cutty's head, and why it isn't only in his head. - "SEA PATRIOTA. MATE UN CURA." What a painted wall says about a country that has been practicing. - Father Rutilio Grande, the cane fields, and the men who taught campesinos to read the land deeds. - The card table at the closed frontier, and the difference between a bribe and a visitation. - Three clocks still running: the hunt, the money, and the flip. A LINE TO CARRY OUT "You and me, we're the trick. The rest of this is misdirection." ABOUT THE SERIES Part of the Cutty Braughn literary-thriller trilogy — one man, a motorcycle, and a hunt across Central America, 1977–1980s, where the deadliest thing on the road is a polite instruction typed on a distant desk. Content note: depictions of political violence and wartime atrocity.

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  Episode #22

  Book 1: Revelation at Tikal – Ch 20: Old Memories, New Directions

  Jul 22, 202626 minS1

  Cutty Braughn wakes in Chichicastenango, in the church outbuilding where his sister Floey painted her Popol Vuh murals, and finds her last message waiting on a fogged mirror, written in soap: a riddle pointing south and a warning about a man in a linen suit. As he decodes it, the pieces fall into place. "Cloud people wait where the sea stitches itself to the sky" means the San Blas Islands of Panama. "Barry's wings are metal" means their missing brother wasn't taken by flying saucers but died in an airplane. And the linen suit is the Foundation's man, the same figure the K'iche' mothers name to call their children inside at night. Cutty learns the Fundación La Senda Luminosa is paying Floey a monthly retainer, the quiet leash of an artist they mean to keep painting their lie, and that she's taking the money to buy back the two children she lost to her ex-husband Eugene Carl and the courts. He sees the Foundation's forged pamphlet, Floey's jaguars reprinted beneath a painted saucer, and hidden inside it, in her own hand, the answer she left for him. Reverend Zeek rides north with the pamphlet, the cable, and the catechists' death lists, aiming a letter at a man in Washington who could ask the one question that unwinds the machine. Cutty and Paula flee as a bought priest tips off the police, and three timers start running down at once: the hunt closing behind him, the money that can be turned off the moment Floey stops being useful, and four patient believers in a closed van, talking his sister back toward the stars. He drops a gear and opens the bike toward Panama, racing to reach her before they talk her out of it.

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  Episode #20

  Book 1: Revelation at Tikal – Ch 19: Chichi, Two Days Late

  Jul 15, 202617 minS1

  Cutty and Paula roll into Chichicastenango with the last of the daylight — road-drunk, relieved, and almost hopeful. The town sits at altitude, half-wired and still half-dark from the '76 quake, its vast outdoor market bowing them under low cloth roofs of safflower and colored corn, right up to the steps of the Church of Santo Tomás. There a K'iche' cofrade swings a copal censer through the smoke while a knot of boys argues whether a Harley or a BMW is the greater god. Cutty has come for the priest and for the walls his sister Floey was painting. He is two days late. Inside the monastery courtyard the noise drops away and the walls come alive. The Popol Vuh runs around the stone in painted panels — hero twins, jaguars, maize, feathered serpents, the lords of Xibalba — Maya and Catholic fused in Floey's unmistakable hand. But on a second pass he sees what isn't there: no saucers, no silver men, no ancient-astronaut machinery in the sky. In Pasadena she'd preached it; here, where the K'iche' actually live, she stripped it out. A decision, not an oversight. And one panel quietly maps the artifact tunnel under Tikal onto the descent of the hero twins. Then Reverend Zeek — a broad-shouldered, camera-carrying preacher out of the Georgia–Carolina lowcountry — has seen the men who come photographing these walls for the Foundation: always in pale linen, always asking whether the artista painted the sky teachers. And the ancient Father Felipe, a young priest in 1954, lays out the architecture underneath it all. This was never about paintings. Whoever owns the brush owns the wedge — a manufactured gospel to split a landless people from their own history, with jade masks and a Tikal stela logged at the excavations and never arrived in the capital, and a line that runs all the way to Panama. The comfortable version comes apart in Cutty's hands. They weren't chasing a runaway artist. They were collecting their new prophet — and a man on a motorcycle is two days behind her, going up against something far bigger than he'd let himself imagine. A quiet, chilling chapter where the chase stops and the scope of the conspiracy opens up. The arrival that isn't. New in this chapter: Chichicastenango and the Church of Santo Tomás, the K'iche' cofradía and the copal ceremony, Floey's Popol Vuh murals in the monastery courtyard, Reverend Zechariah "Zeek" Kestrel, Father Felipe, the 1954 Guatemala coup, and the missing Tikal excavations.

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