The Chromatic Chord

Great Trees and Groves

The great trees of the old Elven forest world, from the never-cut stands of the Elderweald to the trees the High Elves have trained into halls and gates, and the groves the peoples hold sacred.

Overview

The great trees are the old trees of the Elven forest world. In the Elderweald they have never been cut, and the Wood Elves live among them and speak of them as kin. In the Crownboughs the High Elves have bent and braided them over generations into halls, galleries, boughways, and gates. A grove is a stand of such trees with a household or a rite bound to it. The peoples tell them apart by place and use, not by species.

Appearance

The Old Stands of the Elderweald

The deep-weald tree is broad before it is tall. Its trunk is so wide at the foot that a household can live inside one, and some do, in hollowed boles that are still alive. The bark is dark grey-brown, deeply furrowed and soft with moss low down; the roots spread in buttresses and then sink into the root-mat of living root, leaf-mould, and moss that floors the forest. The crowns are broad-leaved and close completely overhead, so the floor stays dim and cool through summer and light comes down in coins and threads. The leaves turn and fall in the forest's autumn.

The Trained Trees of the Crownboughs

The Crownbough great trees are of the same old stock, but nothing large about them has been left to grow as it pleased. Limbs are bent, braided, and grafted into roofs, walls, stepped terraces, and walkways well above the floor, until a single tree, or several grown together, holds a hall of five storeys. Living wood is trained into doorposts, lintels, and the leaves of gates; the gate of the Verge Stair stands between two such trees and moves in wind as they do. Below them, the understorey is cleared and planted, and its smaller growth is trained into the low halls of the Understorey Courts.

Family Groves and Temple-Gardens

A High Elf family grove is a stand near a house's hall, tended as closely as a child, where the house's dead have been returned. Its trees are less trained than the hall and older-looking for it. A temple-garden of the Ordered Bough is a grove, hall, and terrace shaped together, where one tender's work is continued by the next and no form is ever called finished. The oldest is the Unfinished Garden at Amberbough, among halls braided from trees older than the courts, and whether it may be declared finished is argued there now.

Other Groves

Thorn Elves of the Briarreach keep small grove-gardens inside their thorn-hedged clearings, in a forest that keeps breaking and holds few great trees. Elsewhere, sacred groves stand by springs and old wells, and the peoples reach the Truthwell from them as from wells and springs. One tree is named by kind: the reading stand of the Keeper of Scrolls is carved from an ancient oak.

Habitat and Range

The great trees need deep, wet ground: the Elderweald's sponge of root and springs, and the outward side of the same forest world, climbing towards the Ironspine, where the trained trees stand. Outside the Elven heartlands no great stand is told of, though single old trees and sacred groves are kept wherever the peoples keep them.

Behaviour and Temperament

A great tree grows slowly and keeps growing. Trained growth does not stay trained: a boughway left alone for a few seasons begins to sag, and a hall closes its own doorways with new wood. Roots go where they will; at the Verge Stair they have spread across the top flight until the Dwarven Root Course lies half under root and works loose at the joints.

Abilities

Old, deep-rooted groves answer Nature Magic far better than young growth. A warden reading damage and regrowth can learn from an old grove where loggers entered after the trails have healed, and a grove can be woken to shift, block, and grasp in defence of a shrine, or bound into a long covenant that hides and feeds those within it (see Living Grove and Heartwood Sanctuary).

Life Cycle

No grove counts a great tree's years. A grove's oldest stand can predate the Rootcrown Concord itself, renewing from its own root and seed as single trees go. A great tree comes down rarely, and when it does it can crush a dwelling, dam a stream, and flood a string of hollows in a night, and its fallen trunk feeds the root-mat for generations. The Crownboughs raise new trees from seedlings and grafts, and a graft can fail: one given to a basin lord has died in basin soil.

Uses and Dangers

The great trees give shelter above all: grove dwellings, root-holds, trained halls, and the roads of the canopy. In the Elderweald wood comes only from what has fallen, and seasoned deadwood is traded outward, but cut timber is never sold. The Crownboughs send shaped wood, grafts, and seedlings outward, always as gifts and never for sale; a sapling grafted from a house's own family grove is the highest gift a house can give, and a young High Elf is presented at court carrying a bough or sapling trained from it.

The dangers are falls. Limbs grown heavy with building come down in high wind, storm seasons strip the outer walks and drop dead wood on the terraces below, and a slip from a garden-walk is the ordinary death of the careless.

Lore and Belief

To the Wood Elves the trees are kin before they are shelter. Ground that holds a household's dead among the grove's trees is never sold and cannot be cleared, and cutting a living tree is a wrong against kin; groves have driven out those who did it, and hunted the Human woodcutters who tried. The oldest living trees of the deep weald are thousands of years old, and the stands they grow in are older than any count; Wood Elf telling has it that the eldest trees remember the first households that came under them. A child is expected to show in its own season what it is, as a sapling shows in time what kind of tree it is. The High Elves argue over the same image with a pruning knife: whether it tends a sapling towards its own shape or cuts it towards a shape decided in advance.

Where It Appears

Places:

People and faith:

History and magic:

In the Writers’ Guide

See Also