The magic of the Appalachian was something old. Something not good nor evil. It just was. When Scottish and Irish settlers had crossed the ocean to make a home nearly three hundred years before, they'd found a familiarity in those mountains, but what they didn't know was that they did not claim the land - it claimed them. The Appalachian mountains were even older than dinosaurs, having seen the rise and fall of creatures large and small, the start and fall of entire civilization. They had stayed untouched .. unchanged as the Native American populations lived amongst it land. So when the settlers had come to America and claimed the mountain range as theirs - breaking it open to harvest the minerals that had laid beneath it's rocky surface, the land fought back.
The Whaley's had grown up in that darkness, seeing the way the mountain could give and take. The ways the laws of men were bent and broken, the mountains using shrouds of heavy mist to conceal what went on within it's rocky borders.
