The Sunken Stairs

Overview

The Sunken Stairs are the mouths of the root-grown stairways that once ran from the deep groves of The Elderweald down into the upper storey of the root-cavern world. None of them goes anywhere now. Each ends a short way down in silt, in collapse, or at one of the bars set during The Sealing of the Upper Roothollows (c. 328,000-c. 318,000 BR).

Small as they are beside the forest, the stairs are where the Elderweald keeps its share of the deep-world grief with its own hands, and where it guards the forest against whatever is still down there. A plea from below has turned one stair into a question for three peoples. What lies behind the bars belongs to The Upper Roothollows.

The Place

The stairs lie in the deepest groves, where the root-mat is thickest and the canopy closes hardest. A stair-mouth looks at first like any of the root-fed hollows that open across the forest floor, and like them it can hold a denning brown bear; a watcher who clears a mouth in spring goes with a spear and a second watcher. The treads give a stair away: steps grown rather than cut, trained out of living root into a descent before the Rupture and still growing, so that the upper treads have thickened into uneven, moss-furred shelves. Most stairs turn once or twice within sight of the mouth and then stop. Some end in a slope of silt, some in fallen root and stone, and some at a bar.

Keepers and Users

The groves nearest the stairs keep their mouths, and the rest of the forest leaves the keeping to them. They hold the ground as every grove holds its ground, by memory and by the dead returned to it, but they do not call the stairs theirs. In their telling a stair is kept for the kin at its foot. The keeping is a debt, not a holding: the watchers clear the mouths, guard them, and keep laments there, and they do not go down.

Each mouth lies in one grove's ground, but anything done to a stair would touch the water and memory of every grove around it. That makes it a matter for a circle of the groves concerned, in the slow manner of The Rootcrown Concord, and a circle cannot be hurried.

The Medieval Present

For most of the year nothing happens at the stairs, and the groves mean it to be so. Through the dry months the watchers clear leaf-fall and deadfall from the mouths so that every stair stays visible. A mouth left to fill is a stair the forest has begun to forget, and the stair groves count each one lost that way as a failure of their own.

The same nights bring the Listening. Watchers lie at the bars through the wettest nights and listen, and in wet years they hear water moving behind some of them. Some say they have heard more than water: a slow tread on the treads below, or a voice counting in the old tongue. The groves remember which stairs have sounded and in which years, held in memory like everything else they know. It is the nearest thing anyone above has to knowledge of the sealed layer, and people who never asked for it before now want it.

History

The stairs date from the time when the forest and the hollows were one world, as described in The First Elven Stabilization. Grove memory holds that they were already little walked before the water came. The Wood Elf retelling in The Bitter Root Histories puts that neglect at the centre of its grief: the upper kin had let the distance grow before the lower kin needed them.

The Drowning Bloom of The Roothollow Rupture rose through the hollows beneath the stairs, and survivors climbed the treads with the water at their heels. The long, piecemeal Sealing closed the stairs one by one, and laments on both sides say some bars were set with people still below. Ever since, the groves have kept the mouths. Ironspine holds tell the same years otherwise, in The Burdened Seal Histories. Both tellings belong to the Deep World thread.

Tensions

• The plea. A Gloamroot house wants the Deep Stair opened to reach a sealed ancestral chamber that it still counts in its chamber-right, where its songs say the house's first heirlooms and its drowned founders lie together.
• Whose bar. Opening the Deep Stair means breaking its bar, and nobody knows who set it.
• A lord's diggers. Word of the Gloamroot plea has reached the forest edge, garbled into a tale that the Elves mean to open the stairs and carry off the treasure of the drowned kin.
• What the Listening heard. The hold has asked to hear the Deep Stair for itself in the next wet season.