The Elderweald Funerary Accord

Overview

The Elderweald funerary accord was sworn in a mixed Human-Wood Elf village after kin of both peoples drew knives over one body. It gives the body to the forest and the memory to the village.

It belongs to the long war of The Elderweald Border Pressures, after The First Confluence-Elderweald Contacts, in one of the few forest-edge villages where both peoples live and marry.

A Death Neither Side Could Finish Alone

The quarrel starts with a death in a mixed household: one of the village's own, killed by raiders on the forest road, with kin on both sides.

The Human kin want the dead mourned in the open, buried where the family can stand over them, and marked so the village never forgets. The Wood Elf kin want the dead given back: returned to the living forest, not kept as the village's property and not cut off from the place they belonged to. Both believe they are defending the dead's dignity. Neither thinks it is arguing over ornament.

Body and Memory

The elders of both peoples, with the two new dead lying beside the first, swear an accord that does not make either side wrong.

The body goes to the forest by the Wood Elf return rite, at the forest edge or in a grove that permits it. The mourning, the speaking of names, the family markers, and the village's memory stay with the village, held in the Human way, apart from the body's return. A proper ending, the village learns, can have more than one threshold.

The Wood Elf kin keep the sanctity of the return. The Human kin keep their open grief and their stones. Both bury the two killed at the door the same way, and the village lives.

Historical Significance

The funerary accord shows that a border village can make custom out of grief instead of blood-feud. It adds a quieter page to the Elderweald border's history of axes and arrows: there, two peoples were tested not only by clearing and water but by how they bury their dead.

Heartlands can keep their principles pure. Borderlands have to finish lives together, and when they manage it, what they make runs deeper than convenience. Edge folk say a dead man given only half his rites walks; the accord is why border villages give both halves, and why a body left unclaimed on the forest road is feared there as one that may get up and come home on its own (see Self-Raised).