Ash Harbour

Once the seacoalers worked with rake and shovel to collect wagonloads of coal. They sold it in the city to houses and businesses, stoking ovens and forges with clean-burning coal. Today the vast factories, the steamships and smoke-belching dirigibles, call for far more coal than can be got the old way. Great steam-powered dredges now grind across the seafloor coalbeds, tide baffles and long nets sift the coal from the waves. Nerieds and selkies run the nets, dragging their own damnation from the waves while the starveling children of the seacoalers jeer at them from the shore as job stealers and scabs