The Rootstone Heartwell

Overview

The Rootstone Heartwell is a root-cavern reservoir centred on a living stone-root confluence, on the edge where The Roothollows meet The Stonewake Deeps, the deep hold-cluster of the Ironspine. It is the first great disputed site between Dark Elves and Dwarves: water, road, and load-bearing heart of the deep earth to one side, surviving root-heart of the drowned underworld to the other.

Both peoples have bled for it for more than three hundred thousand years. Both draw from it every day, under each other's spears, and neither has ever said the struggle is over.

The Place

The reservoir lies in a root-cavern where living root has grown through stone and stone has closed around root, so that neither the Roothollows nor the Deeps can say where their own ground stops. At its heart is the confluence chamber, where the stone-root meets the water: a black lake under a vault of braided root and rock, so still that a dropped pebble rings for a long time.

It is approached from two sides that do not resemble each other. From the Roothollows the way runs along Known Ways, root-bound passages kept by Gloamroot route keepers, hung with the curtains of lampless spiders wherever a side-way has gone unused. From the Deeps it runs through Stonewake basins: cut and braced, their doors carrying the marks of the wardens who hold them, their draughts kept moving by Kobold vent crews. Between the two lies the confluence chamber, which nobody holds alone.

Keepers and Users

• Gloamroot route keepers and claimants. The Gloamroot Covenant holds the root side by the old custom of refuge, by long memory, and by the blades of its route keepers: the Heartwell is where Dark Elves were sheltered, refused, or turned away when the old world broke, and proof that they still belong below.
• Stonewake reservoir wardens and archive-keepers. The Stonewake Compact holds the basins because it cut and braced them and garrisons their doors.
• Kobold vent crews. Kobold crews of the Underhouse Compacts keep the air moving on the stone side, paid in water and goods on terms the holds set, and are the first to notice what the rock and the draughts are doing.

The mountain holds of the Ironspine Holds reach the Heartwell only through Stonewake and inherit its quarrel at one remove. Otherwise the users are the claimants, the envoys who cross in both directions, and the water itself, which both sides draw. Things come up out of the flooded galleries now and then, pale and blind and hungry, and both sides pay hunters to go down after them. It is the one shared work at the Heartwell nobody argues over, and the hunters, Dark Elf and Dwarf alike, drink together afterwards in a way their elders would not like to see. Gallery-divers come too, from both peoples and from the Kobold warrens, after what the drowned underworld left below. Relic-sellers on the stone side buy whatever they raise without caring which side of the line it came out of, and the divers fear the eels and the weeping water less than they fear the wardens of the other side catching them in it.

The Medieval Present

Neither side holds the Heartwell whole. Its root-side approaches run as Known Ways, and its stone-side basins answer to Stonewake wardens. The confluence chamber between them is entered only under watch from both ends, as on the rest of the contested edge described in The Roothollows. Nobody ever agreed to this line. It is where the old fighting left each side's reach, and both keep it as a held position rather than a peace. Few generations pass without a raid across it: a Gloamroot war-band cutting down a warden post at a crossing, a Stonewake reprisal burning out a root-side guardhouse, and then the long feud-reckoning between the lines that lost kin.

History

The threshold the Heartwell sits on is older than the Gloamroot. It formed on the edge of a Stonewake Compact already old after The Deepening of Stonewake (c. 365,000-c. 350,000 BR) and The Founding of the Stonewake Compact (c. 360,000-c. 348,000 BR), as traced in The Shaping of the Roothollow-Stonewake Interface (c. 345,000-c. 340,000 BR).

What the struggles fixed was two memories of one place. Gloamroot refuge-memory asks who was sheltered, refused, delayed, or rightly turned away when the old world broke, and remembers refuge betrayed. Stonewake sealing-memory asks who closed what had become too dangerous, who lied about the danger, and who let a short closure harden into exclusion, and remembers closure justified. The same struggles left the Heartwell among the holy places of two Terra Resonants: The Last Chamber, of refuge that can be survived, burdened welcome, and the chamber that still holds, and The Measured Seal, of rightful closure, the keeper's burden, and the seal that must answer for itself. At the sharpest stake-speakings both are called together, as rival judges of the same deeds.

Tensions

• Where the water goes. The falling readings have no innocent explanation that both sides would accept.
• A share written by the other hand. A reservoir warden has proposed writing the Gloamroot's own reckoning of their draw beside the Dwarven share, so that the two can at least be compared.
• A third voice. Kobold crews honour The Last Chamber under a name of their own at the same small shrines as the Dwarves.
• Diving for the drowned halls. A Gloamroot line wants to send divers into the flooded galleries for the treasures of its own drowned forebears, and says no Dwarven tally can forbid kin from their dead.
• The hunters' find. A mixed party of hunters, sent down after something that took a warden's child from the lake shore, came back from the flooded galleries with a worked silver root-crown of the drowned underworld and one of their number missing.