The First Confluence-Elderweald Contacts

Overview

Humans and Wood Elves first form a lasting contact zone where the Confluence Basins meet the outer Elderweald.

The meetings start after the age told in The Shaping of the Confluence-Headwater World, once the gathered Confluence and the rooted Elderweald have taken shape. New clearings, diverted streams, poached deer, and arrows from the treeline then bind rising Humans and older Wood Elves to one forest edge, the ground of the long quarrel told in The Elderweald Border Pressures.

At the Forest Edge

There is no single frontier here, and no clean line.

Contact begins where basin farmers follow the feeder streams of the Confluence Basins up to the trees and keep coming back. They find no Elven kingdom. They find watchers seen only when they choose to be, grove-keepers who step out of the wood to forbid a felling, warning-cuts on the trunks along a path, and behind them the outer reach of the older Rootcrown Concord.

A streamcourse, a clearing, or a hunted grove matters more than any claim to rule. Both sides keep returning to the same edges, and so they keep meeting.

Use Before Agreement

The edge is used long before anyone agrees how.

To the Humans the forest edge is water, firewood, timber, and new fields. To the Wood Elves it is never open ground: it is living wood, kept by the old groves since before the basin peoples had names. So the first meetings are neither trade nor war. They are bargains struck over a stream, an arrow in a fence post, a woodcutter found dead beneath his own tree, a clearing burned in answer. Whoever has more people on a given stretch of edge usually decides.

The edge kills on its own as well. Grey wolves take lone walkers in hard winters, wild boar gore gleaners under the oaks, and the pale caps that grow among good mushrooms empty whole households in a bad autumn. The Elves know which is which, and some of the first bargains are struck for that knowledge.

Historical Significance

The Elderweald Border Pressures are therefore no sudden war of conquest. Before the long fights over clearing and water came the same forest edge met again and again, and the dead on both sides of it.

The age is still in the ground. The forest has taken back the first clearings and grown over their stumps; lines of field-stone run into the trees where no farm stands; ploughs on the basin side still turn up old arrowheads. Basin villages sing of the woman who first bargained water from the watchers and came home alive. Wood Elf groves remember the first stand of old trees to fall to Human axes. Guarded, armed, and never quite at war, it is one of the oldest lasting meetings between Humans and Elves on Caeldon.