The First Stabilizations on Caeldon

Overview

During The First Stabilizations on Caeldon, an early age of the world, the first lasting Elves and Dwarves take form. It follows the world's making, the growing-apart of its lands in The First Regional Differentiations of Caeldon, and the first lines of life in The First Material Lineages of Caeldon.

Here the oldest Elves and Dwarves a later age would know take root in their homelands, and a world that could merely be lived on becomes one where peoples branch, found their first ancestral houses, and meet.

The First Enduring Elves

The first great people to take lasting form on Caeldon are the forebears of the Elves.

Their forerunners carry an old, strong bond to the Verdant Expanse, but on Caeldon that inheritance is slowly tamed into a lasting people of the Material Plane. The oldest lasting Elves take form in the Elderweald and the older depths of the Roothollows, where living root, grove memory, and a right to the ground earned by long rootedness become the heart of the first Elven world.

So every later Elven branch, however far it strays, grows from one old people, rooted deep enough to survive its own partings.

The First Enduring Dwarves

Not long after, the forebears of the Dwarves take lasting form in the mountain roots of the Ironspine.

Their older bond to stone runs to the Iron Backbone, but on Caeldon it is shaped into a lasting people of flesh and blood, not a power of the cosmos or a Harmonic. The first enduring Dwarves are hold-makers and weight-bearers, more and more defined by their skill at cutting, keeping, and living in a world under mountain and stone that must carry its own load.

So every later Dwarven line also grows from one strong root, not from scattered strangers. The broad Ironspine world stands before its deeper holds and its later wars.

Before the Contact Web

These first peoples do not yet meet in the later web of roads and frontiers, but without them it could never form.

Before the oldest frontier feuds, before the catastrophe of the Roothollows, and long before Humans rise, Caeldon has to hold peoples who last long enough to make history. The early Elves and Dwarves are the first. Only after them do the tales run on. The Elven tale runs through The First Elven Stabilization, The Rooting of the Elderweald, and The Founding of the Rootcrown Concord. The Dwarven tale runs through The First Dwarven Stabilization, The Holdmaking of the Ironspine, and The Founding of the Ironspine Holds. Where the two meet come The Shaping of the Elderweald-Ironspine Margins and The First Rootcrown-Ironspine Contacts. Then each people splits and delves, in the Elven Branchings and the Dwarven Deep Holds, while the bloodied Elderweald-Ironspine Frontier is fought out between them, and at last comes the wider world of Caeldon Early Contact.

Historical Significance

The First Stabilizations on Caeldon are where the long life of the world becomes the long life of its peoples.

Because both Elves and Dwarves grow from old, deep roots, their later histories unfold age upon age instead of springing up out of nowhere: branchings, rivalries, long memories, peoples bound to their lands, and in time meetings with others. Without this age, the story would leap from the world's making to finished civilizations. With it, Caeldon follows the order seen everywhere else: first a world, then lasting peoples, and only then the great web of their histories.

The oldest songs of both peoples reach back towards this age and do not reach it. What it left is the peoples themselves, and the old rivalry between grove and hold that the raids, ambushes, and felled groves of the later frontier will sharpen into blood.