The Nome King
The hills where Reese and Waylon grew up are honeycombed with shafts and tunnels. The coal in those hills fueled the industrial revolution, and men have been mining there for over 150 years. Some old timers used to say there was mining even before that, though not by the hands of men. Waylon and Reese had a grandmother, now passed on, who used to scare them from playing near the old mineworks with stories of "the Ancients," who lived deep under the earth, whose mines came up from below to meet the deepest pits of the mines of men.
Sometimes after a few drinks, miners also talk about the Coal Trust like it was a living thing, a sentient and malicious deity down there in the dark that demanded tribute. Many of Waylon and Reese's people met their ends in the mine: in the war with King Coal in the 1890s, in the monstrous cave-ins of 1902 and 1911, or just in the year-after-year toll the mines took in blood and breath and lives.
Reese and Waylon's father, HomerBeulay, made the boys promise never to work in the mines. If the coal dust gets in your blood, the miners all say, you'll be trapped, you'll never get out, you'll be a miner for the rest of your days. As it turned out, working the mines was never an option for Waylon or Reese. The mines in Anderson County closed down in the late 1970s, right around the time Homer died. Yet until recently Waylon still lived on the spot he was born, as rooted to the hills as any coal miner.
Why?
Orichalka.
The Nome King was one of the Nephilim.
See Also
CategoryThing
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Page last modified on August 25, 2003, at 03:10 PM