The Founding of the Gloamroot Covenant
How Dark Elf survivors in the deep Roothollows consolidate into the first enduring post-catastrophe civilization.
Overview
The Dark Elf survivors of the deep Roothollows swear themselves into the first lasting realm built after a catastrophe below Caeldon: the Gloamroot Covenant.
After The Drowning Bloom and the sealing of the upper ways, survival, wards, house power, and the bitter memory of abandonment are bound into one order. The hardening that comes before it is told in The Darkening of the Roothollows.
Survivors in the Deep
The Covenant begins when survival can no longer be scraped together chamber by chamber.
After the Drowning Bloom and the Sealing of the Upper Roothollows, the Dark Elves live in refuge chambers among failing root and standing black water, with sealed doors at their backs. Someone must hold the chambers that can be lived in, guard the ways between them, and decide who eats when the fungus beds fail. Those who can, rule.
Wards and Houses
The Houses that hold the food, the water, and the defensible chambers become the first lords below, and the ward-keepers and survival orders become their shield. A House that cannot protect its people loses them to one that can. A ward-keeper who cannot hold a way shut against flood, collapse, or a rival House is no use to anyone. Together they make the hard order later known as the Gloamroot Covenant.
The fighting that follows with the Dwarves is told in The Heartwell Struggles. What it does to the Houses' heirs is told in The Gloamroot Inheritance Ambiguity.
A Right Won by Protecting
The survivors cannot claim the old upper world as though nothing had happened. Too many ways are gone and too much help came too late. The new lords earn obedience by what they can still protect, and those who cannot protect themselves give it.
That gives the Covenant its lasting hardness. It is a realm founded on the belief that protection must never again depend on anyone outside it, because once it did, and the water came.
Historical Significance
The founding of the Gloamroot Covenant turns Dark Elf survival into one of the setting's clearest realms born of catastrophe: not only grief and scattering, but a new people with Houses, wards, and long grudges.
It stands between the Sealing of the Upper Roothollows and the deep wars that follow, beginning with the rival claims of The Heartwell Stakings and breaking open in The Heartwell Struggles. Without the Covenant, the deep world would be only a wound. With it, the wound has spears. Ward-keepers of the founding years are remembered in House lullabies as the ones who held the door, and Dark Elf children still play a game of ward-and-water in which the slowest one is left outside. The Covenant's first heroes are House raiders and ward-keepers; its first villains are the Houses that broke the founding oath and plundered another's seekers in the dark.
In the Writers’ Guide
- The Civilizations of the Medieval Era The Medieval EraThe Elven Orders