The Rootcrown Concord

Overview

The Rootcrown Concord is the oldest major enduring Elven civilization on Caeldon: the Wood Elf world of The Elderweald, the place where Elves first put down roots. It has no seat, no crown, and no court. It is many groves under trees older than the Concord itself, held together by memory and by duty to the forest, and it is the ancestral root from which the High Elf and Thorn Elf civilizations later diverged.

How It Holds Together

Nobody rules the Concord. What holds it is the grove: long memory, slow decisions, and homes grown with the forest rather than cut out of it. The Wood Elves believe a people owes its life to the land that feeds it, and they hold their neighbours to that belief with warnings first and arrows after.

Within a grove, authority belongs to elders and ritual keepers. A matter that crosses several groves' ground goes to a circle of the groves concerned. No grove can bind another, but a grove that ignores a circle soon answers to all of them. The full balance, including the edge mediators, is set out under Peoples and Power.

Daily Life

Grove dwellings, tending work, slow naming, and the return of the dead belong to the forest's own Ordinary Life in the Elderweald. What the Concord adds is the way a household's life is answered for beyond its own grove.

• Arrival. A grove declares a person adult when its elders and ritual keepers agree the person has arrived.
• Joining another grove. A household that moves is not counted of its new grove until it has walked that grove's paths through a full year and learned where its dead lie.
• A circle. When a stream, an edge, or a death touches more than one grove, a circle of the groves concerned meets on it.
• A clearing. A Human settler who wants to clear forest land must ask the nearest grove, whatever a lord has granted. The answer often comes from a circle, and slowly.

What a grove fears is the forest floor: hollows that open under the leaf-litter, some reaching down towards the root-depths, where the fallen are heard calling for days; the great tree that comes down in a night; pale caps mistaken for good mushrooms. It fears fire most of all, and the axe that comes after. Below the floor lies the other fear, and the lure: basin inns tell that the lost lower groves lie at the bottom of the deepest hollows with their grave-goods untouched, and at the Sunken Stairs the bars over the way down have twice been found scratched from below.

Medieval Role

The Concord is the oldest Elven power the basin Humans live beside, and the one they most often misread as absent.

• A grove may refuse a mill village the weir it needs, saying a stream's course is not the grove's to give.
• A circle may take a generation to answer a question the basin wanted settled in a season.
• An edge mediator trusted by both peoples may carry more weight in a death or a marriage than any lord.
• A Human lord may grant a clearing on his own word and find it growing back over his settlers' fences, with arrows in the dark if they persist.
• A basin lord may put a bounty on a killer bear and see beast-hunters come from three valleys to claim it, only to be told at the treeline that no one but the grove's own hunters goes after a killer in its forest.
• A Human village may pay a grove's hunter in salt and iron to track the bear that killed its shepherd, and owe the grove a favour it will be asked for in a hundred years.

Grove memory is older than any Human town, and it is told walking, on the paths where things happened. Here is where the hunter who followed a timber-raider band to the basin's edge, took back every log, and left the raiders their lives and nothing else, and here the hollow the keeper climbed down after a fallen child, to come out at a spring a day's walk away with the child alive. The ring of blackened stumps round one grove's oldest tree is where its people stood while Human fire came through the undergrowth, and were still standing when the fire had passed; no one may cut those stumps, and children are dared to stand in the ring alone after dark. The hunters have a saying for it: ask the tree before you ask the bear.

History

The Concord stands on the oldest Elven ground. The forest regions and their living lineages take shape in The First Regional Differentiations of Caeldon and The First Material Lineages of Caeldon. Elves stabilize in The First Elven Stabilization (c. 500,000-c. 450,000 BR), and the Wood Elf branch hardens in The Rooting of the Elderweald (c. 490,000-c. 470,000 BR). The Concord first consolidates as a civilization in The Founding of the Rootcrown Concord (c. 490,000-c. 460,000 BR).

Every later Elven branching began here; see The Elven Branchings. The Crownbough Courts emerge when one part of the Concord pushes towards refined magical shaping, courtly splendour, and deliberate design, in The Rising of the Crownboughs and The Founding of the Crownbough Courts. The Thornbound Circles emerge when another part hardens under harsher ecology and frontier danger, in The Hardening of the Briarreach and The Founding of the Thornbound Circles.

Tensions

• Clearing and water. The argument with the basin was never about rank. It is about whether a settlement owes anything to the living ground it occupies.
• Slowness. The groves call a generation's wait care; their neighbours call it stalling, and some have stopped waiting.
• The poachers' lord. A basin lord is said to buy greenhart antlers, and the hunters who tracked the last poacher band out of the forest found his colours on their gear.
• Down the hollow. A party of basin treasure-seekers has gone down a deep hollow with ropes and lamps after the grave-goods of the lost lower groves.
• The leavers. Each branching is remembered as a leaving. The groves do not call the Crownbough or Briarreach kin wrong, but they keep count.
• A deferred arrival. One ritual keeper has doubted a young Wood Elf's arrival for many seasons running, and the grove has begun to ask whether the doubt is about the young one at all.
• The Slowwater weir, settlers who refuse the edge custom, and the Gloamroot request to open a Sunken Stair are still unsettled; see the Elderweald's Tensions.