The First Roothollow-Deep Contacts

Overview

The First Roothollow-Deep Contacts are the earliest lasting meetings across the threshold between the upper Roothollows and the deep stone of the older Stonewake Deeps.

At the crossings and reservoirs of that threshold, the root-cavern Elves and the deep holds of the Stonewake Compact first meet in the dark. Later the Drowning Bloom and the fighting below that follows it turn these meetings into grievance.

A Shared Deep Threshold Becomes Historical

The deep meetings begin once the borderland of root and deep stone is no longer only crossed, but lived on.

From above, the root-cavern Elves see living root grown down from the forest world: refuge, memory-paths, and holy ground under the earth. From below, the Compact's holds see a way that must be defended, water that must be kept, and rock that must be braced if the deep is to stand.

Two peoples who might never have met in daylight meet here with lamps in their hands.

Crossings of Need and Uneasy Recognition

These are not meetings in halls. They are meetings at crossings.

The ways run through deadly ground. One reservoir serves chambers on both sides. The root-stone crossings gather water, passage, and old meaning into the same few places. So the first encounters below come from need: parties meeting at a crossing with weapons drawn, water drawn under each other's eyes, leave to pass given and taken back. Lamps go out and parties go missing; each side blames the other first, and is often wrong. The deep has its own killers: black-water eels in the still pools that take a wader, lampless spiders in the unused ways, and falls of rock nobody braced.

Before the Bloom

Everything here happens on the near side of the catastrophe that remakes everything below.

They stand between The Shaping of the Roothollow-Stonewake Interface and The Roothollow Rupture. They also come before the later Heartwell Struggles, when one place becomes the field where the refugees' claim to survive and the holds' claim to keep the deep meet with spears.

The later grievance does not begin only in disaster. It begins in meetings at crossings already full of thirst, danger, and old meaning.

Historical Significance

Dark Elf-Dwarf hatred in the deep is older than the Drowning Bloom. Before the flood, the sealing, and the fighting over places came these uneasy crossings.

Much of the ground they met on now lies under flood water or behind seals. What survives are the crossings themselves, worn smooth by two peoples' feet, and Dwarven brace-marks cut into root-stone that Dark Elves still call a desecration.

Both peoples tell of parties lost at the crossings in this age, and neither has quite stopped looking. The drowned ways below are said to hold their lamps, blades, and water-tallies, and Stonewake delvers who go down on weighted ropes into the black pools bring up a rusted lamp-hook now and then, and now and then do not come up at all; the black-water eels take the blame. A Dark Elf counting-rhyme still names the crossings that ate a party, one for each finger, and children dare one another to say the last name in the dark.