The Elderweald

Overview

The Elderweald is the old-growth forest at the centre of the Elven world and the oldest major named Elven region on Caeldon. It is the homeland of the Wood Elves and of The Rootcrown Concord. The Wood Elf way of life took root here (c. 490,000-c. 470,000 BR), the groves bound themselves into the Concord over the same long span (c. 490,000-c. 460,000 BR), and they have kept the forest ever since.

Every other Elven heartland began as part of this one. The Crownboughs and the Briarreach grew out of its edges, and the Roothollows were once its lower storey. The Elderweald is the forest they still measure themselves against. To Humans and Dwarves it is plainer: the forest that will not be cleared, dim and huge, where bears den under the root-mat, moss-coated deer walk in the oldest groves, and barred stairs lead down into a drowned world. It has quarrelled with the Ironspine over water for more than four hundred thousand years and with the basin farmers for nearly forty thousand.

Lay of the Land

The Elderweald is the north-western heart of the cradle-web. The Ironspine rises along its eastern side, the Crownboughs open from its south-east, and the Briarreach runs along its western and south-western edge. Its southern treeline faces the basin farmland. North of it, beyond forest nobody has mapped, lies the snow country of the Rimefold, which the groves know only as the cold edge of the world.

The ground climbs eastwards into the broken ridgeland of the verges. The Slowwater rises there, runs west through the deep weald, and turns south to leave the forest at Eddymill. The deep groves, Oldstand among them, lie in the middle and east, about a month's walk with a watcher from the treeline, and Silthollow keeps its stair-mouth among them over the sealed hollows; the Roothollows lie below the forest's eastern half. The forest is about two months across, and Fernrest, on the southern treeline, is about four weeks by cart from Sheafmeet. The forest has no centre; see Settlements, and The Lay of the Land for the whole map.

Land and Hazards

The Elderweald is temperate forest that has never been cut. Its trees are old enough that a grove's oldest stand can predate the Concord itself, and the canopy closes so completely that the floor stays dim and cool through summer. Underfoot is root: a soft, deep mat of living root, leaf-mould, and moss, laced with springs, slow streams, and water-bearing hollows. The ground holds water the way a sponge does. Towards the Ironspine it rises into broken ridgeland, mountain feet, and runoff channels; towards the basins it thins into lighter woodland cut by feeder streams.

What makes it dangerous:

• Hollow ground. Root-fed hollows open under the leaf-litter.
• Great falls. An ancient tree comes down rarely, but when it does it can crush a dwelling, dam a stream, and flood a string of hollows in a single night.
• The wet season. Hollows fill and join, low paths go under, and ground that was firm in autumn will not hold a person in spring.
• Beasts. Brown bears den in the hollows and come out angry when a wet season floods them, grey wolves hunt the edge farms in hard winters. Wild boar kill gleaners at the treeline, and hornets nest in the hollow boles.
• What grows. Pale caps look like the good mushrooms and kill after a false recovery, and dreamcress in the slow streams brings sleep too deep and dreams too dark.
• Offence. The danger most visitors meet is the one they bring.

Ordinary Life

Wood Elves live in groves. A grove is a household-sized settlement grown into a stand of old trees: dwellings shaped from hollowed bole and living root, root-holds that widen as slowly as the trees around them, and floors laid on the root-mat itself. Nothing is built that the grove could not have grown. Some groves have been lived in without a break since before the Concord, and their people speak of the trees as kin before they speak of them as shelter.

Work is tending rather than shaping. Households gather nuts, fruit, fungus, roots, and medicinal growth; they clear deadfall from streams and watch the water through the dry months; they keep paths open by walking them, not by cutting them. Wood comes only from what has fallen. Hunting is real but bounded, and a grove that over-hunts its ground hears about it from the next. The hunters are also the forest's swords and its beast-slayers: they walk with visitors, run down poachers, and go out against a bear or a wolf pack that has taken someone.

Peoples and Power

The Concord has no seat and no crown. It is many groves, each distinct, held together by shared memory and inherited duty to the living forest. Within a grove the elders and ritual keepers are heeded because they hold the memory of place: who remembers where a watercourse ran, which paths are old, and where the dead lie. When a matter crosses more than one grove's ground (a stream, an edge, a death in a mixed settlement), a circle of the groves concerned meets on it.

Such decisions are slow on purpose. A question can wait a generation, which the groves call care and their neighbours call stalling. No grove can bind another, but a grove that ignores a circle soon finds the other groves' paths closed to it, and old grudges between groves are remembered for longer than Human kingdoms last.

Settlements

The Concord has no seat, so the Elderweald has no capital. A circle meets wherever the groves concerned are, and the groves with the longest memory carry the most weight in it, but none of them is a centre. A grove is a household; what passes for a settlement here is a stand of old trees with one long-lived family in it.

• Oldstand. A deep grove whose oldest stand is older than the Concord, lived in without a break since.
• Silthollow. The grove nearest one of the Sunken Stairs, a single household that keeps the stair-mouth and does not go down.
• Fernrest. A mixed settlement of a few dozen households at the basin-facing treeline: a Wood Elf grove on the forest side, Human farmsteads on the cleared side, and between them households with kin in both.
• Eddymill. A Human mill village of about forty households where the Slowwater leaves the forest for the basin farmland, with a mill, ditched fields, and a ford.

The People

About 160,000 people live in and at the edge of the Elderweald. Some three in four are Wood Elves, and nearly everyone in the deep weald is. Humans of the edge hamlets and mill villages are about a quarter, a thousand or more households are mixed, and Dwarven envoys at the verges come and go.

• Wood Elves.
• Humans. Edge folk dress, live, and die as basin folk do (see the Confluence Basins) and take holding-names in the same way.

Neighbours and Borders

The Elderweald has five edges. Two are contested, and only one of those still moves.

The basin edge. Where the trees give out towards The Confluence Basins, the forest faces the farmland of the Human Confluence Marches. Use drew this border before any agreement did: first the recurring encounters of The First Confluence-Elderweald Contacts (c. 38,000-c. 24,000 BR), then the long friction over clearing, roads, and water of The Elderweald Border Pressures (c. 26,000-c. 10,000 BR). It is still contested and still shifts one clearing at a time. In practice, it lies wherever a grove's watchers last said no and were heeded.

The kin forests. Towards the Briarreach the welcome grows slower and warier until it becomes judgement, a drift set by The Hardening of the Briarreach (c. 425,000-c. 410,000 BR). Towards the Crownboughs the trees begin to be trained, a drift set by The Rising of the Crownboughs (c. 398,000-c. 390,000 BR). Neither edge has a line, and neither has ever been fought over by armies.

Roads, Rivers, and Trade

The Elderweald has no roads, only kept paths. They are old, walked open rather than cut, and part of the forest's memory, so a path's age counts for as much as where it goes. Visitors are not turned away, but they do not walk alone. A watcher from the nearest grove goes with them and chooses the way. Paths to the dead, to the stair-mouths, and between the deepest groves are not walked by outsiders at all. Human roads stop at the treeline, and every attempt to cut one further has ended in blood or in a road the forest closed within a generation.

The main water is the Slowwater, which gathers from springs on the Ironspine verges, runs dark and root-lined through the deep weald, and leaves the forest as one of the feeder streams of the basin farmland. Both neighbours want it, the holds for works upstream and the farms for ditches and mills downstream. The groves treat its course as remembered water that no one people may move. Nobody uses it as a road.

• Outward: what the forest lets fall, such as nuts, fruit, fungus, resin, medicinal herbs, and seasoned deadwood, along with the hire of a watcher-guide.
• Inward: salt, cloth, and metal tools, most of it bought at the edge settlements.

Historical Memory

The Elderweald remembers being first. Before there was a Concord to argue about, there was an Elderweald way of life to depart from, and the groves still reckon history by who departed from it. Each branching is remembered as a leaving. The groves do not call the leavers wrong, but they keep count.

Belief

The Wood Elves keep the grove reverence from which the Ordered Bough grew, but they keep it as alignment custom and not as a faith. There are no temple-gardens, tenders, doctrine, or patrons of finished form. Ritual keepers hold memory and rites; they are not clergy. Reverence is the ordinary practice already described: taking only fallen wood, walking paths open, leaving water where it runs, naming a child when it has emerged, and returning the dead.

At the grave the groves honour the god Humans call Ennor the Grave-Watcher under a name of their own, as the one who sees the returned onward. At the basin edge, mixed funerals divide the work between grove return and the Human swearing of the death under the Sworn Accord, which enters the same god by his Human name. Laments for the Drowning Bloom, kept at the stair-mouths, name Ithaere the Drowned Mother, though the upper forest knows little of her beyond the name. The edge farms bring Anvelle the Harvest-Mother with them, the god of the fields the forest keeps declining to become.

Tensions

The Gloamroot plea to open one of the Sunken Stairs, and the Ironspine hold that fears for its works below, are told at The Sunken Stairs. Elsewhere in the forest:

• The Slowwater weir. A mill village on the Slowwater wants a weir to hold water through dry years.
• Settlers outside the accord. Settlers newly arrived from deeper in the basins refuse the edge custom.
• The bounty on the Mother. The old she-bear of the hollows has killed a mill-hand at Eddymill, and a basin lord has put a bounty on her hide.
• The greenhart hide. A moss-coated greenhart hide has been sold at Sheafmeet for more silver than a farm is worth.