The Green Deep

Overview

The Green Deep is the jungle across the strait south of the cradle-web: a hot, drowned country where great rivers split and rejoin into mazes of brown water under a roof of leaves, and where the stepped stone cities of an elder world lie half sunk beneath them. It is held by the Sollun, a people of many bodies and few minds, found nowhere else on Caeldon.

No one in the old world has seen it, and nothing from it has ever reached the old world. Its name is canon's, not anyone's in the cradle. It is one of the four lands beyond the old world's maps (see the extent of the map).

Lay of the Land

The Green Deep lies south of the Confluence Basins, across a strait beyond the cradle-web's unmapped southern coast. Its northern shore is mangrove and mud; behind it the land rises slowly into the jungle, cut through by the river-mazes, which come down from unmapped highlands in the south. The drowned cities lie thickest in the middle reaches, where the rivers braid widest. How wide the strait is, where on the cradle side it is nearest, and how far the Green Deep runs east, west, and south are unmapped. See The Lay of the Land.

What Happened Here

Before the jungle, the Green Deep was a world of stone. Its builders raised stepped cities on the river terraces, with causeways and water-stairs between them, at the same deep age in which the elder worlds of the north were rising. In the Sinking of the Stairs (c. 230,000-c. 190,000 BR) the rivers turned against them: the channels shifted, the causeways went under, and the cities were drowned one after another until the jungle closed over what was left. Who the builders were, and whether any of them lived on, the old regions never knew, and canon leaves open.

The Sollun rose in the drowned country after them, and the river-mazes have been theirs ever since.

What Is Known

To the old world, nothing. To canon, the broad strokes.

• The river-mazes. Brown rivers wide as lakes, splitting and joining among islands of jungle, rising a man's height in the rains and falling to mud and pools in the dry.
• The drowned cities. Stepped stone cities rise out of the water and the vines, their lower stairs under the river, their upper courts open to the sky and full of trees.
• The Sollun. The Sollun are small, frog-skinned, six-limbed river people, never alone.
• The strayed. A Sollun body cut off from its hive's song for long enough becomes a self: one mind in one body, with the hive's memories fading in it.
• What the drowned cities keep. The Sollun will not enter some of the cities at all.

Settlements

The Sollun live in hive-mounds on the river islands, each hive one settlement, and the strayed in the drowned cities. None of them is named or known in the old world. On the cradle side, nothing faces the Green Deep; the last settlements towards it are the lowest towns of the Lower Serath, far up the river from any coast.

The People

How many Sollun live in the Green Deep, in how many hives, is left open; the strayed are few. No people of the old world lives there.

What Is Not Known

Nearly everything is left open on purpose: how wide the strait is and whether anyone could cross it; whether the Serath reaches it; who built the stepped cities, what they called themselves, and what drowned them; what the Sollun are beneath their skins, how they bear their young, and how a new hive begins; whether the Sollun were ever the builders' servants, heirs, or enemies; what is still working in the cities the hives will not enter; how far south the river-mazes run and what lies in the highlands they come from; whether the sealed archive-cities of the Witnessfields ever wrote down the Green Deep; and which gods, if any, hold it.

Tensions

• The city two hives want. A drowned city has come up out of the river in a dry year, its courts clear of water for the first time in living memory.
• A people of selves. A band of the strayed has grown large enough to hold a drowned city of its own, and is taking in other strayed from every hive's banks.
• The working city. A hive that lost a garden to the floods has started sending bodies into one of the cities the Sollun do not enter.