The Elven Branchings

Overview

The first stable Elves of Caeldon part into the great branches of later history.

It begins with the older Elves of The First Elven Stabilization, who root themselves in the Elderweald as told in The Rooting of the Elderweald. From them come the old Rootcrown Concord, the harsher Thornbound Circles, and the proud Crownbough Courts. After the flood below, the Gloamroot Covenant follows.

The Rootcrown Elves

The first Elven world on Caeldon is one forest people, not several.

In the old Elderweald, the line that later becomes the Rootcrown Concord lives by long memory and long ties to the land: groves older than their oldest songs, hollows and springs known by name, a right to lead that grows out of who has tended a place longest. Every later Elven people remembers this forest as the one it left, and every branch quarrel is also an argument about what that old life was for.

The Thornbound Hardening

One part of that forest people goes into harder country.

In The Briarreach, the woods keep breaking: deadfall, thorn that closes a path in a season, ravines that slide after rain. Ravine cats take whoever crosses alone, wolves come in hard winters, and thickets make ambush easy and rescue slow. Older dangers than these hardened the Thorn Elves, and their elders say those are quiet, not gone. The monster-slayers of the oldest Thornbound tales are hunters who went into those quiet places and came back with something to show, or did not come back. The line that becomes the Thornbound Circles answers with watchfulness, guarded settlement, and strangers kept at the edge.

The Crownbough Rising

Another part climbs.

In The Crownboughs, the line that becomes the Crownbough Courts sings the great trees into halls, galleries, and boughways far above the forest floor. Living architecture, shaping magic, ceremony, and rank become the marks of greatness, and the great households that master them rule those that do not. A fall from a garden-walk is the ordinary death of the careless; a storm can strip a hall from its tree. Great households quarrel there as fiercely as any hold, with poison, rival shapers, and duels on the boughways, and the forest floor below the oldest halls is still strewn with what fell: heirloom silver, grown mail, and the bones of whoever wore it.

The Dark Break Below

The deepest branch is made by catastrophe.

Deep Elves have lived in the upper Roothollows for ages when the Drowning Bloom fills their halls with water, wave after wave, and the upper ways are sealed behind the survivors. The flood does not create the Dark Elves; it hardens them, and the hardened survivors later swear themselves into the Gloamroot Covenant. Thornbound and Crownbough parted from the old forest by temper. The dark branch was forged by drowning, sealed doors, and the memory of help that never came.

After that, Elven difference is no longer only a matter of country and choice. It is also a matter of wound and blame. The deep break is followed in The Sealing of the Upper Roothollows, The Darkening of the Roothollows, The Founding of the Gloamroot Covenant, and The Bitter Root Histories.

Historical Significance

The Branchings are why Elves are never one people, even when outsiders speak of them as one. Rootcrown keeps the old forest, Thornbound the guarded frontier, Crownbough the splendour and the pride, Gloamroot the flood and the grudge. All four remember being one, and the memory makes their quarrels sharper.

The Elderweald, the Briarreach, the Crownboughs, and the Roothollows are the four countries those answers took root in, and each still holds the ruins and the dead of its parting. Hunters of the different branches meet at the same springs and watch each other's bows; boundary groves have been bled for more than once; and each branch keeps a tale against the others, of a gate shut, a guest betrayed, or a kinsman left to the wolves.