The Darkening of the Roothollows

Overview

After The Drowning Bloom, the surviving deep Elves in the Roothollows harden into the Dark Elves.

These are the years between catastrophe and the Gloamroot Covenant: a broken people learning to live among sealed doors, black water, and their own dead, and growing into something more than wounded Elves below.

The Survivors

Before the flood, the deep Elves were already warier than the forest branches above. Passage below was guarded, the chamber that could be held was the chamber that mattered, and whoever held a chamber decided who sheltered in it.

After The Roothollow Rupture and the Sealing of the Upper Roothollows, that older life cannot go on. Passages are drowned, chambers lost, ancestral halls walled away behind seals. The survivors live in the chambers that held, ration the fungus beds, and learn the new dangers by the dead they leave: still black water where black-water eels take the waders, weeping caps on the margins that kill whoever eats them, root-borers greying the walls of a house until the root gives and the ceiling comes down.

Wound and Suspicion

What the survivors remember changes. Memory no longer gathers around stewardship of the old root-world. It gathers around aid that never came, routes sealed with kin still behind them, and the conviction that those below were left to live or die alone. The truth is less simple than the later laments, but the result is plain: the deep branch grows harder, more suspicious, and more willing to follow whoever can protect them than whoever is kin.

The deepest wound is refuge. Laments name who opened a door, who barred it, who waited too long, and who saved one chamber by letting the water take another. Some of those chambers are still remembered by name. Children are told which sealed passages hold whose bones, and that the pale curtains of lampless spiders across a passage mean no living kin has walked it since.

Before the Covenant

No realm comes of the darkening yet. By the time the survivors have hardened around guarded refuge and bitter separation, the houses, ward-keepers, and route keepers who later found the Covenant are gathering a people already forged by flood and closure, as told in The Founding of the Gloamroot Covenant.

It is also why the later fighting with the Dwarves over The Rootstone Heartwell is so fierce. By then the survivors believe they have the right to live below because they held it, and on no one else's leave.

Historical Significance

The darkening separates the birth of the Dark Elves from the founding of their Covenant. The Gloamroot Covenant does not begin Dark Elf difference; it gathers it. The Thornbound and Crownbough branches parted from the old Elves over thorn and canopy. Only the dark branch was made by a flood and the memory of being left behind.