The earth is saturated with blood as the wailing of the dead was heard. Elias Owen had a vague recollection of this as he lay in the dank room on Flat Holm Island where he had been taken with other colliers in 1805 by the Glamorgan militia. Elias was perturbed because he could remember little of what had occurred on Graig Du farm in the Rhondda where he, and the other colliers, had been blasting by a gnarled oak tree. The realization soon came to him that he was dying of a strange malady that would be known as radiation sickness over a century from his time. The visions he could not stop seeing, for they had uncovered something beneath the bole of the tree that had been concealed before the beginning of recorded memory. Could an event in the past foreshadow the future? All that Elias believed to be true would be questioned during those last days when he understood the truth of the old tales and that man has no understanding of what he truly is.