Living root comes down as cables and sheets: single roots as thick as a forearm or a body, and further down, where many have grown together, whole walls and ceilings of braided root with stone closed around it. Living root is dark red-brown to black, smooth and slightly damp, cool to the hand and faintly springy, with fine pale rootlets furring its tips where it meets water or stone. It smells of wet wood and earth. When sap is rising a chamber with living root can be heard: a faint creak and tick, and the slow drip of seep along it.

The gloam is a pale, cold, grey-green glow, weaker than a covered lamp, that some living root gives off along its length. It lights a seep, a face, or a step, not a chamber, and is brightest where the root is youngest and wettest.

Dead root is another thing. It goes grey from the surface inward, dries, cracks into scale, and loses its spring; dead strands hang slack, and the fungus moves onto them (see Fungus Beds).

Living root runs from the floor of the Elderweald, through the root-mat, down into the upper hollows. Lower in the Roothollows it thins to dead strands and the stone takes over. Towards the Stonewake Deeps the old underforest still pushes down into the rock, and at the Rootstone Heartwell root has grown through stone and stone has closed around root, so that neither side can say where its ground stops; that meeting of root and stone is the stone-root. Above, the root-grown treads of the Sunken Stairs are still alive and still growing. Nothing is known of the root in the sealed upper layer.

The root follows the forest’s year. Sap rises in the forest’s spring and falls in its autumn, and seeps run fuller after the rains above. Air moves down along the root and through old fissures, so a chamber with living root breathes and a chamber whose root has died goes stale. Living root grows slowly and keeps growing: it thickens across stairs, widens into passages, and closes on what is laid against it.

The root carries load: a living ceiling of root holds where bare stone would fall. It brings air and water down from the forest. A body laid against the living root of a house’s root-chamber is taken in by it. Root answers Nature Magic, which can weave living root into a crossing or brace and draw sap through it (see Root Bridge and Sap Draw).

The root is as old as the forest above it, and the houses count their oldest living root in each root-chamber as the house’s own beginning. It dies from the tip back or from the wall inward when the tree above fails, when water drowns it, or for no reason anyone can find. A wall going grey can take years before it gives, and when it does the chamber loses its bracing and its air together.

The houses live by it. The root-year of rising and falling sap is their calendar, and most house business, from root-chamber namings to the renewal of water obligations, is set by it. In lean times living root is tapped for sap, and the tapping weakens it. Its gloam saves lamp oil. Root-cut basins in each house’s chambers hold the water it brings down.

The danger is its death. A house whose root dies loses its chambers, its air, and the fungus beds and dead that count in them; the small house of Sapfall, near the end of the Known Ways, is watching its wall go grey now.

Dark Elves name children and return their dead at the root-chamber, so the root is where a house begins and ends; to lose a chamber is to lose the dead in it, and the oldest dead of many houses lie against root beyond the Sealing bars. Laments for Ithaere the Drowned Mother are sung when water rises in the root-year. Many Dark Elves say the gloam is brightest over root that holds the returned dead; no one has shown that it is.

Dark Elf tales tell of houses that went beyond the Sealing bars to reach their dead and did not come back, and of the black water rising behind those who did.