soyonscruels:

• it has been raining every day for twelve years.
• the coastline is littered with holy places which god has left behind. when the vikings came, they burned, and the smoke curled up into the sky, leaving it still grey a thousand years later. what remains of the buildings, too, is grey, and empty. this is a land forsaken, and the golden age is gone. and because they will not tell you: do not go to lindisfarne. as they discovered, as we who live here already know, even vikings can drown.
• once, there was a woman in the south, and she was angry, and vicious, and unkind. some called her evil, and some still do. she is cursed deep into the earth of this place, and when she died, we did not mourn her. the banners were called and the banners were raised, and they were red, as every banner is that matters. we did not win, but we fought, and we suffered, and that deep earth waits for us, as it waits for us all. there is no more coal in newcastle. now there is only one way into that deep earth. we did not win.
• you smell the river wherever you go. if you do not smell the river, you smell the sea. you are many miles inland. you have not seen the river for days. it does not matter. this is the land of the god tyne, and he knows what is his.
• there are so many bridges. steel upon steel, when steel and coal and might ruled the world, built on irish bone and irish blood. your ancestors lost limbs to those bridges, their lives and their loves and their minds. do not ask where the bridges will take you. you do not want to know.
• the north has risen so many times. once, it was for burning, words of stolen latin on lips seared and left screaming. there were priest holes and fury and rebellion on the air, and you lost. you always lose. once, the conqueror rode here to take what was his, or so he believed. once, those banners were red, and it was the words that burned, truncheons against knees, headlines seared across the back of your eyelids like a brand. patterns emerge: there is always burning, there is always blood. you always lose. no matter what, you always lose. but, too: the north will rise again. it always does.
• it has been raining every single day for thirty seven years. 
• the men die in the mine. it is 1835. it is 1862. it is 1880. it is 1909. there’s no smoke without a fire, and fire, you know, is a recurring theme. they choke and they burn and they bleed, they’re crushed and they’re blown to smithereens and they’re found with their caps in their mouths. fire in the hole. the men die in the mine because that’s what men do. the men die in the mine because that’s what mines do.
• war came to the north instead of the north to war, and, briefly, there were bombs instead of rain. (this is not true. there is always the rain.) beneath screaming skies women built warships destined to end thousands of lives, and children played with shrapnel in the dust. the steel and coal which made us great made us a target, and they came for us in the night, and came, and came, until the day they came no longer. the north endured. the shipyards did not. 
• across the lawless hills in the dark, the border reivers rode. we were not of england and not of scotland, a borderland ruled by no one and which wanted no rulers, where the only law was the sharp edge of a sword. all trace of them is gone but their ballads, still sung in tiny villages where men made of straw are burnt at solstice, observing rituals older than the god even the vikings turned to, in time. this is a land of gods, and of none. a land of no one. of nothing. this land belongs, ultimately, to the land itself, a fact even the romans knew.
• and they did, for the romans called this the the end of the world. they reached here and stopped, and built a wall almost a hundred miles long, because it is easier to draw a line stark across the map than to think about what might be waiting for you, out there in those hills. whatever was there when the romans came, it’s still there. it’s still waiting, as eternal and immortal as the rain.
• it is raining now.