Caeldon Early Contact

Overview

Early contact on Caeldon is the first great age in which peoples met one another and could not let go: the age of the verge wars, the drowning of the deep world, and the rise of Humans among older and prouder neighbours.

Early Elves and Dwarves

The oldest lasting meeting of peoples on Caeldon forms between the early Rootcrown Concord and the first Dwarven holds of the Ironspine.

It is a border of slopes and springs. Dwarven miners drive adits into hillsides whose streams feed Elven groves; Elven wardens cut the props and burn the sheds; hold axe-bands come down to fell the thickets that hide the archers. Over long ages those raids help split the Elven world itself. Each side keeps its heroes and its monsters of the verge wars: Dwarven tallies name the Elven warden who burned a whole gallery with its crew asleep inside, Elven laments the axe-band that felled a sacred grove in a single night, and both remember the hunters, archers, and axe-bearers who held a spring against the other for a lifetime.

The Deep-World Rupture

The oldest underworld history gathers around The Roothollows and the catastrophe called The Drowning Bloom.

When that disaster floods and severs the upper underworld, the Dark Elves who survive below become the Gloamroot Covenant. The older Stonewake Compact, long settled among the deep holds of the Ironspine, is tested and hardened by the same flood.

Below, the fight is for air, water, and a way out. At places such as The Rootstone Heartwell, refugees, tunnel-holders, and the keepers of holy wells fight over the same dark halls with raids and ambushes in the tunnels, and the place where a people survived becomes the place it would kill to keep. The raiders of those tunnels are the first heroes of the deep, and its first villains, depending on who tells it. The Roothollow-Stonewake border is one of the oldest in the setting where the right to hold a place and the means to survive in it are the same fight.

Human Rise and Wider Contact

Much later, Humans appear and rise through the basins and foothills of The Confluence Basins and The Headwater Marches.

The first great Human people, The Confluence Marches, grow from rich basins and a hard frontier. Hard bargains with the Dwarven holds of the Headwaters turn Human growth into roads and held crossings, guarded against brigands and winter. At the same time, settlers pushing into the Elderweald margins start the first long Human-Wood Elf war, fought with axes, fire, and arrows over clearings, water, and living land. Settler villages tell of Elven archers who came out of the trees at dusk and of wolf-years when the forest seemed to fight beside them; Wood Elf groves tell of burned stands and of raiders who came back each spring with more axes. Both sides hired sellswords and beast-hunters before the war was old.

Historical Significance

This first age of contact is where Caeldon's peoples stop growing apart and start growing against each other.

Forest, mountain, basin, river, and underworld stay distinct, but none of them is alone any more. Elf-Dwarf hatred, Dark Elf memory of the flood, Dwarven pride in what they build and hold, Human road-building, and High Elf-Human rivalry all grow in one shared, crowded, fought-over world. From here on, Caeldon reads as a world with a history rather than a planet with peoples placed on it: a world of wars, feuds, raids, and grudges, and of the ruins, treasure, and restless dead they leave behind.