First Rootcrown-Ironspine Contacts

Overview

The First Rootcrown-Ironspine Contacts are the earliest lasting meetings between the settled Elven and Dwarven worlds on Caeldon.

The older Rootcrown Concord and the early Ironspine Holds come face to face across the borderland already formed in The Shaping of the Elderweald-Ironspine Margins. Both peoples are long rooted and holdmade by then, and the frontier feuds have not yet set into a war of generations.

Adjacent Worlds Become Counterparts

The first meetings come once Elves and Dwarves stop merely sharing a world and start living within sight of one another.

The Rootcrown Concord holds its ground by its groves, by the memory of place, and by the old duty to answer to living wood. The early Ironspine Holds hold theirs by what they cut and build, by walled passes, by tallies kept in stone, and by halls meant to outlast their makers. Neither knows the other well yet, but each is now too strong to ignore.

Here the two oldest peoples of the cradle stop having separate stories.

Margins, Watersheds, and Frontiers

The first meetings happen not in halls but at the edges: forest feet, stream-heads, and slopes where ore lies under old roots.

There both sides bargain, and sometimes kill, over who may pass, who may dig, and who may say yes. A stream the grove-keepers hold sacred is a hold's water to the Ironspine; a seam the Dwarves need to see out the winter lies beneath trees the Elves will not cut. The first raids are small: an ore-party ambushed at a stream, a grove-keepers' watch-post pulled down, tools and cattle carried off, a body left where the other side will find it.

It is not yet the long hatred. Wary trading, a shared hunt against the grey wolves that take both peoples' herds, and a truce at a ford for a season all remain possible. The frontier is tense, but nobody yet carries a grudge older than themselves.

Before the Verge Disputes

These meetings matter because they come before the feuding sets hard.

They come before the Elderweald-Ironspine Frontier in its later form, when fouled water, felled groves, deep mining, and sacred ground become generations of raid and ambush. Between the two lies a long uneasy quiet of some fifteen thousand years, from c. 425,000 BR, in which grove and hold each kept to its own edge and watched the other across the empty slopes, until the verges filled and no slope was left that only one of them wanted. They overlap the early Elven Branchings, whose long parting is only beginning, and come before the Dwarven Deep Holds draw much of the Dwarven world below.

Historical Significance

Caeldon's oldest rivalry between peoples begins here. Every later war along the forest-mountain border, and the catastrophes that spread from it, comes after these first meetings.

Almost nothing of that age still stands, which is why both peoples argue so hard over it. The holds keep stone tallies of the first ore-party lost at a stream and the first stream-price paid in iron. The groves remember in song the first keepers killed on the verge, and trees planted over them still stand. Each side calls the other's account a lie. Where the oldest ambush-sites are pointed out, ore-hunters still dig for the tools and blades the dead carried, and grove-keepers still drive them off.