The Long Stair

Overview

The Long Stair is a stair of living root that runs down into a hill on the eastern side of the Elderweald, where the forest climbs into ridgeland below the Ironspine. An elder working grew it in the years the Roothollows were sealed, to reach the kin left below. It goes down further than the hill is tall and does not arrive. It is one of the few off-key places known on Caeldon, where the Dissonance lies close under the true world.

The Place

The hill is a low, round one, oak-crowned, with a spring at its foot. On its northern side the root-mat parts round a mouth no wider than a doorway, and from it a stair goes down: treads trained out of living root, smooth and even, wider than any of the Sunken Stairs, with no silt, no bar, and no end anyone has reached. The hill is perhaps a hundred feet high. Those who have gone down with a counted rope have paid out many times that and found the stair still going, and the rope, hauled up, shorter than it went down.

Keepers and Users

The grove nearest the hill keeps the mouth, as the stair groves keep theirs, and it does not go down. It holds the hill as every grove holds its ground, by its dead returned to it, and it is the only grove in the forest that does not return its dead within sight of its own trees: it carries them to the far side of the next stream.

Few others come. Treasure-hunters from the basin edge hear that the stair leads to the drowned halls of the Roothollows and their lamps and silver, and try it by night with rope and lanterns; the grove's hunters track them as they track anyone who comes unbrought to the deep groves, and some get past the hunters to the mouth. The grove names none of those who went down, and none has come back up.

The Medieval Present

In the wet season, when the stair groves keep the laments for the Drowning Bloom at the Sunken Stairs, the grove at the hill keeps them at the Long Stair too. Its mourners stand at the mouth and sing every verse true and in full, the names of the lost included, as the oldest keepers taught them. They say the singing from below falls silent for as long as theirs goes on, and that the stair is a tread shorter in a year the laments are sung without a fault. They do not say how they know.

Those who come to the hill uninvited are mostly the grieving: Wood Elves who have lost kin and dreamed of a stair going down, who walk across the forest to find it. The grove watches for them and turns them back, gently if it can.

History

In the sealing years after the Roothollow Rupture, when the old ways down were barred or lost, a circle of groves sang a working to grow a new stair through the hill to the kin still below, in the Sealing of the Upper Roothollows (c. 328,000-c. 318,000 BR). The working was larger than any the groves had sung, and somewhere in it the note went wrong. The stair grew, and went down past the Roothollows into somewhere else. The groves that sang it went down to see where it led; the laments name them with the rest.

Tensions

• The Gloamroot plea. The Dark Elves who want a way opened at the Sunken Stairs have heard of a stair with no bar on it, and their word, come the long way round through the Ironspine, asks whether it reaches them.
• A rope that came back long. A basin rope-maker's son went down last spring and did not come up, but his rope came back longer than it went, wet, and smelling of river.
• The faultless year. The grove's oldest keeper is the last who knows the laments in their oldest form, and she is failing.