The Roothollows

Overview

The Roothollows are the root-cavern world beneath and beside the Elderweald: hollows where the forest's roots come down through the ceiling and grow into the stone, chambers floored with old leaf-mould and fungus, black water lying still in reservoirs, and passages that run on long after the root gives out. Their people are the Dark Elves (see Elves), who live in house chamber-clusters strung along the Known Ways, the routes their route keepers still count survivable, under the hard rule of The Gloamroot Covenant.

Lay of the Land

The Roothollows lie beneath the eastern Elderweald, between the root-mat of the deep groves and the stone of the Ironspine's forest-side roots. Directly above the surviving hollows lies the sealed storey of the Upper Roothollows, and above that the forest. Eastwards the hollows run in under the mountains to meet the Stonewake Deeps, with the Rootstone Heartwell on the line. North, west, and south they end only where the Known Ways end.

The ground falls eastwards and downwards: living root and gloam near the forest, dead root and bare stone towards the Deeps. Threewater Turn lies on a Known Way in the middle hollows, five or six weeks from Stairdeep through warded corridors and a watched crossing; Sapfall is out near the end of the Known Ways. Word to the forest above goes the long way round, through Stonewake and the Ironspine, and takes half a year or more. See The Lay of the Land.

Land and Hazards

The Roothollows are a threshold between living root and deep stone. Near the top, living root carries the ceilings and lines the walls; lower down, the root thins to dead strands and the stone takes over. Water-bearing caverns, root-bound hollows, the fungal darks where fungus grows thick on dead root and washed-down leaf-mould, hidden passages, and the remnants of an old underforest ecology make the region richer in water and food than bare stone, and less stable.

There is no weather. The forest's year still reaches down, though: sap rises in the living root in the forest's spring and falls in its autumn, and seeps run fuller after the rains above. In places the living root gives off a faint pale glow, the gloam, which is the only light the region makes of itself.

Ordinary Life

Life in the Roothollows is arranged around the chamber, the water, and the door. The Dwarves next door order their lives around air and the way out; here air comes down with the root, and what is guarded is who comes in.

A house lives in a cluster of chambers held by chamber-right along a Known Way, and the layout says who belongs. The outermost is the threshold chamber, where the way enters, the route keepers lodge, and strangers are received. Behind it lie working chambers, store-hollows, and the fungus beds; then the shared sleeping chambers, where several generations of a household sleep together around the few lamps; and innermost the root-chamber, the house's oldest living root, where children are named and the dead are returned. Dependents, debt-bound workers, and refugees sleep in the outer chambers. How far in someone sleeps is how far they have been admitted, and everyone can read it.

Peoples and Power

Power belongs to whoever can secure water, food, habitable chambers, safe movement, and protection. The houses of the Gloamroot Covenant hold chambers, reservoirs, and fungus darks by chamber-right; its survival and warding orders hold the danger, and route keepers drawn from them keep the Known Ways. A house that cannot protect its dependents loses them, and an order that cannot feed its wardens cannot ward.

Belonging is guarded inside the houses too. Birth, naming, and a place in the house are fought over as fiercely as water, because a life not yet secured still feels close to loss. A young Dark Elf may be capable, useful, and trusted on the ways long before the house grants a share in its inheritance, as in the case told in The Gloamroot Inheritance Ambiguity.

Settlements

No seat rules the Gloamroot Covenant, so the Roothollows have no capital. Power is held house by house, and the great houses whose chamber-clusters hold the most water act together as the region's centre, since the houses that hold water also hold the debts of the houses that lack it. One of the largest is Threewater Turn.

• Threewater Turn. The chamber-cluster of a great house where three waters meet on a Known Way.
• Paleseep. A lesser house of a few households around a thin seep lit faintly by the gloam.
• Sapfall. A small house near the end of the Known Ways, a few households whose chambers breathe only while the root above them lives.

The People

About 40,000 people live along the Known Ways, nearly all of them Dark Elves. Perhaps one in six are dependents and refugee lines sleeping in other houses' outer chambers.

• Dark Elves.

Neighbours and Borders

Every edge of the Roothollows is a door of some kind: barred, guarded, or simply no longer kept. All of them were set by the catastrophe or by the quarrels that followed it, and their history runs through the Deep World thread.

• Inward: the Stonewake Deeps. Towards The Stonewake Deeps, root-cavern gives way to dense stone across shared reservoirs and root-stone crossings.
• Above: the sealed hollows and the forest. The Roothollows began as the lower storey of one forest-and-root continuum with The Elderweald, as described in The First Elven Stabilization. The Roothollow Rupture (c. 335,000-c. 328,000 BR) broke that continuum and The Sealing of the Upper Roothollows (c. 328,000-c. 318,000 BR) closed it.
• Beyond the Deeps: the Ironspine. The mountain holds of The Ironspine reach the Roothollows only through Stonewake.
• Outward: the end of the Known Ways. Elsewhere the Roothollows have no neighbour, only an end.

Roads, Rivers, and Trade

Nothing in the Roothollows flows far enough to be called a river. Water stands in reservoirs, seeps through root-bound hollows, and lies black and still in chambers that nobody drinks from. Movement runs along the Known Ways, kept by route keepers who answer to the houses and survival orders of the Covenant. A Known Way is more than a road. Under the old refuge custom it is the only kind of route along which someone in need may be sent on without shame, so striking one off can be a kind of murder, and every house remembers someone who called it one.

What moves:

• Within: water, fungus from the fungal darks, chamber space, and protection, passed between houses and their dependents.
• Across to Stonewake: nothing in bulk.
• Upward: nothing directly.

Inside the region the route keepers say who passes; at each crossing, whichever side holds its end.

Historical Memory

The Roothollows remember themselves as the place that was left to drown. They were the main stage of The Drowning Bloom, when Surging Deep-linked floods rose through the upper hollows again and again and rescue came late or not at all. That memory belongs to the Deep World thread, and the order of it matters to every Dark Elf who tells it: first the old deep world shaped in The First Regional Differentiations of Caeldon; then a Stonewake Compact, formed in The Deepening of Stonewake and The Founding of the Stonewake Compact, already on its inward edge before any Dark Elf house banded with another; then the Rupture; the Sealing; the hardening of the survivors into a branch of their own in The Darkening of the Roothollows; and only then The Founding of the Gloamroot Covenant.

Belief

Dark Elves honour The Last Chamber as a true but severe god, kept by houses and route keepers rather than by any priesthood. Its small shrines stand in threshold chambers and refuge chambers, and the question put to it there is the host's: can this house still hold one more? It is called on when a refugee is received, when a house names a ground for refusal, and when kin swear over the dead that a refuge could or could not have held. The Measured Seal is known and not denied, but to most Dark Elves it sounds too much like respectable closure.

Tensions

The falling water at the Heartwell and the share a Dwarven archive writes for it are told at The Rootstone Heartwell, the refugee line still sleeping in a great house's outer chambers at The Gloamroot Covenant, and the plea to open a Sunken Stair at The Sunken Stairs. Along the Known Ways:

• A struck way, passable. A route keeper reports that a passage struck from the Known Ways generations ago is passable after all.
• A wall going grey. The root behind one house's working chambers has begun to die, and root-borers are in it.
• Lamps beyond the bars. Delvers coming back along a struck way swear they saw lamplight moving in a drowned chamber above the Sealing bars, where no one has lived for three hundred thousand years.