The Elderweald-Ironspine Frontier

Overview

Caeldon's oldest lasting frontier between Elves and Dwarves runs along the margins of The Elderweald and The Ironspine, where the forest climbs into the mountain's feet and both peoples drink from the same springs.

It follows the old quarrel between the Rootcrown Concord and the Ironspine Holds after The First Rootcrown-Ironspine Contacts, through the long verge wars, to the rise of the Crownbough houses.

First Contacts

The frontier begins after the ages told in The Shaping of the Elderweald-Ironspine Margins and The First Rootcrown-Ironspine Contacts, when the first Elven and Dwarven peoples settle within reach of each other for good. Between those meetings and the first verge raids lay a long uneasy quiet of some fifteen thousand years: the groves kept to the forest's edge and the holds to the mountain's, each watching the other, until both had filled the verges between them and every spring there was wanted twice.

The Verge Wars

The Elderweald verge disputes become generations of raid, ambush, fouled water, and felled groves, each ending in whatever terms the side holding the slope that season could impose.

Dwarven miners turn streams to wash their ore, and the groves below them sicken. Elven wardens answer by night: props cut in the adits, tool-sheds burned, miners found in the brakes with arrows in them. Hold axe-bands come down in strength to fell the thickets that hide the archers, and the felled groves are mourned as murdered kin. Water is fouled from both ends: tailings from above, carrion thrown down the hold wells from below. Between the war-bands the land kills on its own account: brown bears and grey wolves take the wounded left behind in the forest, hollow ground swallows raiders who do not know the paths, and stone cats hunt the high crags where Elven scouts lie watching the gates.

The Crownbough Turn

The old frontier changes when the Crownbough houses grow out of the wider Rootcrown world. Where the older Wood Elves fight for groves, the Crownbough houses push towards shaping: living halls grown from great trees, refined magic, rank, and display. They take up the old enmity and give it a prouder edge. Now the quarrel is about whose way of life is greater, not only about slopes and springs.

That later rivalry of pride is told in The Courts of Stone and Canopy.

Historical Significance

The Elderweald-Ironspine frontier is where Caeldon's oldest rivalry first becomes history: a border fought over with axes, arrows, and poison long before anyone wrote it down.

It explains why later Elf-Dwarf hatred has so many edges at once: the sacred and the practical, the grove and the hall, wounded pride and murdered kin. Later Human arrivals step into a world already scarred by it. The Confluence world, the Crownboughs, and even the wars of the Roothollows all grow in the shadow of this frontier. Abandoned adits of the verge wars still pock the lower slopes, some collapsed on their last crews, some holding the tools and ore-hoards the miners fled from; treasure-seekers dig them out, and some find Elven arrowheads still in the bones.