The Crownbough Courts

Overview

The Crownbough Courts are the first major enduring High Elf civilization on Caeldon, seated in The Crownboughs. They grew out of the older Wood Elf world of The Rootcrown Concord when one part of it pushed towards refined magical shaping, courtly hierarchy, and deliberate civilizational design. They are not a separate people but Rootcrown Elves grown proud, ranked, and lofty, living high among the boughs of trees their ancestors bent into halls.

The courts' religion is The Ordered Bough, a faith of tending life towards its intended form. Its most powerful and most contested patron is Saerith the Mirror-King, the god of prestige, lineage, and perfect form, whose image few can match and whose favour few survive losing.

How It Holds Together

Where Wood Elf groves live within growth as it comes, the Crownbough houses bend it to their will. Their halls, galleries, and garden-walks are grown, coaxed by magic and centuries of patient shaping into forms no forest makes alone, and in later ages finished with shaped stone and metal as well.

The temperament that goes with this is sharp. The Courts value refinement, memory, and durable excellence, and incline towards condescension towards shorter-lived peoples and towards anyone they regard as less finished or less disciplined. Like all Elves they let a young one come into themselves slowly, but a Crownbough house expects them to arrive polished, and does not easily forgive one who does not.

Daily Life

For house life, the tending of halls and family groves, and the staged growing up of a High Elf child, see Ordinary Life in the Crownboughs. What the Courts add is the moment a house meets them.

• Presentation. When a young High Elf has grown into adulthood, a house of rank presents them at court in the court season.
• The tender's word. A tender who has watched the child may say not yet.
• Rank. A house's place is read at each court season in its hall, its gardens, its people's composure, and the heirs it can show.
• Return. The dead go back to the family grove under the Bough's rites, and the court sends one of its own only for the great houses.

What a house fears most is its own hall. A failed house leaves rooms where Saerith's silver mirrors still hang, showing the viewer a better face, and some who look too long never come away the same; such haunted halls are the danger every house fears it will become. A lesser house that sought perfection through Imago's chrysalis may have let out an Ill-Hatched thing that once was its heir and now lurks in the understorey, a monster the house is bound to hunt down itself. Below the boughs, brown bears roused in spring kill gardeners on the forest floor, and hall canker can rot a great hall from the cut inward until it falls in a storm with its household inside.

Medieval Role

The Courts are the oldest enduring power most cradle-web Humans and Dwarves deal with face to face.

• A court may receive a Human embassy with every courtesy and never rank it above a lesser house.
• A great house may sponsor a Human household's child at court, and gain a debt worth more than the child.
• A lesser house may spend a generation's shaping on one hall to keep its place, and quietly sell its grove's fruit to do it.
• A basin lord may copy Crownbough gardens, protocol, and gold-painted faces, and be thought ridiculous by the courts he imitates.
• An Ironspine envoy may be offered the best seat in the hall and the worst reading of his hold's history in the same evening.
• One house may hire Human hall-breakers to bring a mirror out of a rival's abandoned hall, and will not ask how many went in.
• A lesser house hunting its own Ill-Hatched heir goes down to the forest floor by night and without lamps, so that the court will not see, and its hunters come back up in mourning whether or not they found the thing.
• A house may hire a Human sellsword company to guard its embassy road through the understorey against bears and thieves, and never let one of the sellswords climb above the lowest walk.
• A great house may send its sword-champions down after a beast loose in the understorey, and sing of the hero who kills it for a thousand years.

The houses keep long memories, and put their children to sleep with them: the heir who walked into a hall of mirrors to bring out her drowned brother and came back with him and without her own face in any glass; the tender who held the Verge Stair alone against a brown bear roused from its spring hollow. Duellists touch a bare bough-stub on the garden-walks at Amberbough before they draw, where a champion of a forgotten house is said to have fought on with his sword-arm broken, and the names of champions whose houses are long gone are still given to sons, as a blessing and a dare.

History

The Courts' roots run through the rooted Wood Elf world of the Elderweald, in The Rooting of the Elderweald (c. 490,000-c. 470,000 BR) and The Founding of the Rootcrown Concord (c. 490,000-c. 460,000 BR). The High Elf branch rises in The Rising of the Crownboughs (c. 398,000-c. 390,000 BR), and the courts are founded soon after, in The Founding of the Crownbough Courts (c. 390,000-c. 375,000 BR). The wider pattern is told in The Elven Branchings.

Inside the Courts, the Elven question of how far living reality should be shaped becomes sharper. With Dwarven powers it turns into rivalry over rank, refinement, extraction, and whose order endures, from The First Crownbough-Ironspine Contacts (c. 375,000-c. 360,000 BR) to The Courts of Stone and Canopy (c. 375,000-c. 355,000 BR). Mostly it is fought with insult and splendour, but a quarried slope or a felled stand has more than once ended in blood at the forest's mountain edge. Dwarven quarry-gangs still call one worked-out slope there the Red Face, and will not say why in Elven hearing.

Tensions

• Tending or perfecting. Saerith's devotees call finished form the Bough's fulfilment; the older tenders call it its corruption. Every presentation is a small version of the argument.
• The lesser houses. Saerith's standard travels further than his worship, and in lesser halls it shows as dangerous rites of self-perfection, magical self-reshaping, and quiet despair.
• Mixed heirs. Whether a Human-High Elf child counts as kin is still settled house by house, by whoever heads it, and the Heir Controversy is remembered as a warning of what such quarrels cost.
• A blood duel. Two great houses have each lost a champion on the garden-walks in one season.
• The sealed hall. A house that failed three generations ago left its hall shut with its silver and grafts inside.
• Early presentation. A great house in decline presents an heir its tender has called not ready, because it cannot survive another season with no one to show.
• The Unfinished Garden, the failing Verge Stair, and the gold faces of the basins are the region's own quarrels, kept with its Tensions.