The Roothollow Rupture
The catastrophe of c. 335,000-c. 328,000 BR that drove the Dark Elves deeper and began the Elf-Dwarf enmity; at its heart was the Drowning Bloom. See The Threads of History.
Overview
The Roothollow Rupture is the great catastrophe of the deep world: the Drowning Bloom that drowned the upper Roothollows, and the first lasting wars between Dark Elves and Dwarves that rose out of its water.
It breaks the old upper-underworld and leaves behind a new deep world fought over by the young Gloamroot Covenant and the older Stonewake Compact, above all at The Rootstone Heartwell. Its story runs as flood, sealing, darkening, founding, first claims, and open war. On the Elven side that means the road from drowning into The Darkening of the Roothollows and then The Founding of the Gloamroot Covenant. The Dwarves meet the catastrophe already formed: Stonewake had deepened in The Deepening of Stonewake (c. 365,000-c. 350,000 BR) and sworn its Compact in The Founding of the Stonewake Compact (c. 360,000-c. 348,000 BR), and the Rupture tests and hardens that older realm rather than creating it.
The Drowning Bloom
The Rupture begins, after the ages told in The Shaping of the Roothollow-Stonewake Interface and The First Roothollow-Deep Contacts, with the Drowning Bloom. The two names are not the same: the Rupture is the whole catastrophe and the wars that followed it, and the Drowning Bloom is its flood, the catastrophe at its heart, which keeps its own name in Dark Elf memory. Water tied to the Surging Deep rises through the upper-underworld again and again, wave after wave, taking first the low passages and at last the refuges themselves, and leaves what it drains overgrown and rotten.
When the water finally falls, the survivors go deeper and seal the ruined upper world behind them, and Ithaere walks into the last of the flood and is gone.
Survival Below
In the deeper chambers that held, the survivors harden first into the Dark Elves and then into the Gloamroot Covenant. Refuge, guarded ways, wards, and rule cannot be pulled apart after the flood: Houses, survival orders, and the right to rule by defending grow up together. Bitterness and caution are not only Dark Elf temper. They are what is left of a people rebuilt where help came too late or not at all.
At the same time the older Stonewake Compact, already one of the great deep realms of the Ironspine, tightens its grip on the routes, reservoirs, and archives the flood threatened. A new deep people and a hardened old one grow side by side, with opposite memories and claims on the same places.
War over the Heartwell
The two meet at The Rootstone Heartwell.
The first rival claims are told in The Heartwell Stakings and the war over the site in The Heartwell Struggles. How each people remembers it is followed in The Bitter Root Histories.
Historical Significance
The Roothollow Rupture is the oldest deep-world war still felt across Caeldon's history.
It is why Dark Elf memory is so full of abandonment, why Dwarven deep realms treat their works as the ground of their right to rule, and why the hatred between Elves and Dwarves runs deeper than forest and mountain quarrels above. Below the world it has a second, older, harsher root.
In the Writers’ Guide
- The Ages of Caeldon FoundationsThe Deep Ruptures
- The Threads of History FoundationsThe Deep World
- The Civilizations of the Medieval Era The Medieval EraThe Elven Orders
- The Forest Heartlands The Medieval EraThe Elderweald
- Stone and the Deep The Medieval EraThe Roothollows
- Writing in the Medieval Era The Medieval EraWho Abandoned Whom Below
- The Drowned Court A Bestiary of Caeldon
- Glossary Foundations