The saying around the small mining towns of the Midlands was "pit and people are one and the same". Outsiders took it to mean that the local traditions and culture was so centred around the mines that they become as much a part of everyday life as breathing. This wasn't the case.
Some folk from the deeper coal mines were smothered in the black dust from head to toe. No amount of scrubbing seemed to clear their skin or the faint black cloud that hovered about their exposed skin. Their heartbeats echoed the drills beneath, always far too fast to be human and audible from two feet away. It's what made them so easy for outsiders to avoid.
When the miners are at work they are truly in their element, their movements fluid and precise as if they already know every inch of rock before it's even been looked at let alone touched. They forget to keep up the human act if there are humans with them and they begin to move in ways humans shouldn't be able to. They scuttle across the rocks as if gravity was nothing more than a word.
They consider death by a collapsing tunnel pathetic. What kind of miner can't feel the way the rocks shift and begin to crumble? No true miner dies by the rocks they were drilled out from, that's what they'll tell you. Of course to keep up their human guise they will plead fear if they can still reach the outside world from their rocky prison. It doesn't stop their kin from tunnelling to them and strangling them to death to rid the community of false miners.
Some folk from the deeper coal mines were smothered in the black dust from head to toe. No amount of scrubbing seemed to clear their skin or the faint black cloud that hovered about their exposed skin. Their heartbeats echoed the drills beneath, always far too fast to be human and audible from two feet away. It's what made them so easy for outsiders to avoid.
When the miners are at work they are truly in their element, their movements fluid and precise as if they already know every inch of rock before it's even been looked at let alone touched. They forget to keep up the human act if there are humans with them and they begin to move in ways humans shouldn't be able to. They scuttle across the rocks as if gravity was nothing more than a word.
They consider death by a collapsing tunnel pathetic. What kind of miner can't feel the way the rocks shift and begin to crumble? No true miner dies by the rocks they were drilled out from, that's what they'll tell you. Of course to keep up their human guise they will plead fear if they can still reach the outside world from their rocky prison. It doesn't stop their kin from tunnelling to them and strangling them to death to rid the community of false miners.
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