The Chromatic Chord

The Crownboughs

The cultivated canopy forest in the south-eastern corner of the old Elven world, where trees have been trained into halls and terraces, homeland of the High Elves and the Crownbough Courts. See The Forest Heartlands.

Overview

The Crownboughs are a cultivated canopy forest on the outward-facing side of the old Elven forest world, and the homeland of the High Elves and of The Crownbough Courts. Nothing large here has been left to grow as it pleased. Trees have been trained into halls and terraces, gardens raised into the canopy, and whole settlements composed over more lifetimes than most peoples have history. The branch rose out of the older Rootcrown Concord (c. 398,000-c. 390,000 BR), gathered into courts soon after (c. 390,000-c. 375,000 BR), and has been ruled by its great houses ever since.

This is where Elven reverence for living growth became the art of shaping it, and where that art became a measure for judging others. Dwarves and Humans know High Elves by the polished face the great houses turn outward. Behind it lie blood duels fought on garden-walks above the drop, poison measured by the leaf, dead halls where silver mirrors still hang, and bears in the wild dark beneath the canopy, with worse beasts beside them that no house will name.

Lay of the Land

The Crownboughs fill the south-eastern corner of the forest world. The Elderweald lies north and west of them, the Ironspine east, and the Confluence Basins south. The Headwater Marches lie on the far side of the mountains, which is why no Crownbough edge reaches them.

The floor climbs gently eastwards to the southern mountain verges, and the great houses' watercourses come down from them through the gardens towards the basins. The Understorey Courts and Lowgarden stand on the southern, basin-facing edge, about five weeks from Sheafmeet by the embassy road. Amberbough lies in the middle of the canopy, two or three weeks higher for those taken up. Highbraid stands on the eastern side at the Verge Stair, about a month below Anvilwake. Their place in the whole map is given in The Lay of the Land.

Land and Hazards

The land climbs gently towards the mountain verges of The Ironspine, but most of the Crownboughs' height is grown. Great trees have been bent and braided over generations into galleries, living halls, and stepped terraces, linked by boughways and suspended garden-walks well above the forest floor. The understorey beneath them is cleared, planted, and kept. A traveller coming in from the edge leaves ordinary temperate woodland and walks into something closer to a garden the size of a country.

The dangers are mostly the price of living high:

  • Falls. Much of daily life happens in the canopy. A slip from a garden-walk is the ordinary death of the careless, the young, and the visiting.
  • Wind and weight. A canopy strong enough to carry a hall also catches every storm.
  • Neglect. Shaped growth does not stay shaped.
  • Canker. Hall Canker enters through a late pruning cut and creeps from hall to hall along the grafted boughways.
  • Old halls. Halls left empty by failed houses go wild and haunted, closing their own doorways and dropping their walks, and some still hold silver mirrors that show the viewer an improved face, said to be the tears of Saerith the Mirror-King.
  • The understorey. Brown bears den beneath the leaf-litter and come out angry in a wet spring.

Ordinary Life

Most High Elves are not courtiers. They belong to houses: long-lived households bound to a family grove and to a hall the house has been growing, in many cases, since before anyone living was born. Work is tending. Branches are trained into roofs and walkways, terraces and garden-walks are kept, fruit, nuts, roots, and herbs come from the canopy gardens and the planted understorey, and the family grove where the house's dead have been returned is cared for as closely as any child. No hall is ever finished. A young High Elf learns a craft by continuing shaping begun by a grandparent's grandparent, and pride lies in handing it on in better shape than it was received.

Peoples and Power

The Crownboughs are held by several courts rather than one crown. Each gathers around a few great houses, with lesser houses and dependants ranked beneath them, and rank is read in visible refinement: the hall a house has grown, the gardens it keeps, the composure of its people, and the heirs it can present. The great houses rule because they are the oldest, the richest in growth, and the best attended, and they dress that in the old claim that refinement is a duty. Their word on rank is obeyed even by those it humbles, because a house they turn against loses its marriages, its gifts, and its friends.

The population is overwhelmingly High Elf. Mixed Human-High Elf families, the most familiar mixed kin on Caeldon, live chiefly in households tied to the embassies, and whether their children are counted as kin is still settled house by house. Human and Dwarven envoys come and go at the edges but rarely live deeper in.

Settlements

With no crown there is no capital. The great seats together are the region's centre: several great seats, each grown around the halls of a few great houses and a temple-garden. The oldest and most closely watched is Amberbough.

  • Amberbough. The great seat that has grown around the Unfinished Garden.
  • Highbraid. A seat on the mountain-facing side, nearest the Verge Stair.
  • Willowstep. The hall of one lesser house: a single trained hall of five storeys, its terraces and canopy gardens, and the family grove where the house's dead have been returned.
  • Lowgarden. A village of a hundred or two on the low terraces beside the Understorey Courts, at the foot of the canopy on the basin-facing edge.

The People

About 100,000 people live in the Crownboughs, some nineteen in twenty of them High Elves. Humans, about four thousand, live mostly in the embassy villages on the basin-facing edge, over a thousand mixed Human-High Elf households live beside them, and a hundred or so Dwarven envoys stay at Highbraid.

  • High Elves.
  • Humans and mixed families. Embassy households wear basin cloth in Crownbough cut, and the mixed families take basin holding-names; a mixed child takes a house name only if a house presents it.

Neighbours and Borders

Roads, Rivers, and Trade

Inside the region the main roads are in the air. Boughways run hall to hall and seat to seat, and each belongs to the house whose growth carries it, so travel aloft is by leave, and a stranger on a walk without it may be helped down the quick way. Water comes down from the mountain verges in streams and springs that forest and hold have fought over since before either was a court or a hold. The great houses treat their watercourses as garden water, to be kept and composed, not as roads.

Two routes lead out:

  • The basin road. The embassy road towards the Confluence world descends to the Understorey Courts, terraced receiving grounds at the foot of the canopy on the basin-facing edge.
  • The Verge Stair. On the mountain side the threshold is crossed by a stone stair of Dwarven building that ends at a gate the High Elves grew.

What moves along them:

  • Outward: trained and shaped wood, grafts and seedlings given as gifts rather than sold, fine garden-craft, and teaching.
  • Inward: worked metal and dressed stone from the Ironspine, which the great houses use more freely than their boasts admit, and basin goods from the Human side.
  • Both ways: prestige. Every gift is measured, every reception ranked, and an embassy is judged on how high into the canopy it is received.

Passage belongs to the great houses. A house that hosts an embassy decides whom it brings upward, the senior tenders decide who may enter the temple-gardens, and the Ironspine gate holds keep the lower half of the Verge Stair under the gate oaths of the Held Covenant.

Historical Memory

The great houses remember the Rising as the moment Elven life chose to be seen. The Elderweald remembers it as a departure. Both tellings are polite, old, and unforgiving.

Most of what the Crownboughs argue about sits on the Elder and Young thread. The rivalry with the Ironspine taught the High Elves to meet another serious civilization by judging it, and they met the Human world the same way. Courtiers still speak of Human kingdoms as recent experiments while admitting, among themselves, that the experiments did not stay small. The Crownbough Heir Controversy, when a mixed heir rose to power before anyone agreed what the child was, is remembered twice: by Saerith's devotees as proof of how much a lineage can be made to bear, and by tenders as a warning of what that costs.

Belief

The Crownboughs are the home of the Ordered Bough, one of the few organized religions of the medieval world, grown from the grove-reverence the Elderweald still keeps as custom. Its temple-gardens, its tenders, and its rites of emergence and return shape nearly every life here. The dead are returned to the family grove under the guidance of the god Humans call Ennor the Grave-Watcher, whom the Bough honours under an Elven name.

Saerith the Mirror-King is the faith's most powerful and most contested patron, the god of finished form, honoured at court wherever lineage and presentation are at stake and feared in the houses that cannot meet his image.

Tensions

  • The Unfinished Garden. A faction of great houses wants the Unfinished Garden, the oldest of the temple-gardens, declared complete, its forms fixed, and its shaping ended in Saerith's honour.
  • A Dwarven door-frame. The stone half of the Verge Stair is failing, and an Ironspine gate hold has offered to rebuild it properly.
  • The canker at Willowstep. Hall Canker has broken out in Willowstep's oldest boughs, a season after a great house's tender pruned there as a favour.
  • Something below Willowstep. Two gardeners have been killed in the understorey below a lesser house that had a rite of change performed this year.
  • A mirror sold in the basins. A silver mirror from a dead hall has turned up in a Sheafmeet merchant's house.
  • Gold faces in the basins. Human households in the basins that admire Crownbough polish have begun painting gold faces of their own.

Sites

In the Writers’ Guide

See Also