The Upper Roothollows

Overview

The Upper Roothollows are the sealed upper storey of the root-cavern world: a storey of drowned, collapsed, and barred hollows lying between the deep groves of The Elderweald above and the surviving hollows of The Roothollows below. Before the catastrophe they were simply the upper Roothollows, the part of the deep Elven world nearest the forest. Now they are a place both sides can point to and neither can reach: a drowned kingdom of chambers and root-halls, its dead unburied, its house-treasures where the water left them, and its last flood perhaps still waiting.

Nobody enters them openly. The forest keeps the tops of the stairs that once led down, the deep world keeps the names of what lay at the bottom, and between the two lies a world that has been closed for more than three hundred thousand years.

Lay of the Land

The Upper Roothollows have no compass neighbours of their own. They are a storey: beneath the deep groves of the eastern Elderweald and above the surviving hollows of the Roothollows, reaching about as far as the deep groves do. The Sunken Stairs come down to them from the groves around Silthollow. Going round them, from a Gloamroot house to the forest, takes half a year or more through the Stonewake Deeps and the Ironspine. See The Lay of the Land.

What Happened Here

The upper hollows took the worst of the Drowning Bloom. Water rose through them again and again, taking passages, then chambers, then whole refuges, until the survivors withdrew deeper; see The Roothollow Rupture (c. 335,000-c. 328,000 BR). Their terror briefly became a god, Ithaere the Drowned Mother, who raised the drowned as the Drowned Court to guard the refuges, turned it at the last against those who would no longer pay, and faded when the water fell.

What the flood left was not a drowned world to be pumped out but a ruined one: overgrown, unstable, and still holding water in places, with routes that could kill those who tried to keep them open. Over the following generations the passages were barred, abandoned, ritually closed, or written off as losses too costly to reverse. No single decree did it, and no single people. That long closure is treated in The Sealing of the Upper Roothollows (c. 328,000-c. 318,000 BR).

What Is Known

What is known is mostly known from its edges, and mostly by people who have never seen it.

• From above. The Sunken Stairs, root-grown stairways that once climbed from the hollows to the deep groves, end in silt, collapse, and the bars set during the Sealing.
• From below. Many houses of the Gloamroot Covenant still name ancestral chambers in the sealed storey, and some still count them among their chambers, as holdings that are theirs and cannot be reached.
• The Last Water. Dark Elf laments say that somewhere in the upper hollows lies the Last Water, the final still floodwater into which Ithaere walked when her worshippers refused her, and that it has never drained.

The plainest fear is water. Some of it still lies up there, and opening any part of the seal could send it somewhere else. The quieter fear is what else might come down with it: the drowned dead of a hundred houses, and whatever has been guarding their treasure in the dark. A Gloamroot curse carries that fear in it: "may your door open upward". That is why the plea over a Sunken Stair that the Elderweald groves are now weighing worries an Ironspine hold as much as it moves the grove keepers.

Settlements

Nobody lives in the Upper Roothollows. They are faced from above by the grove of Silthollow, which keeps a stair-mouth and does not go down, and from below by Gloamroot houses that still count chambers here as their own.

The People

Nobody lives in the Upper Roothollows. Above them the single household of Silthollow keeps its stair-mouth; below, the Gloamroot houses that count chambers here are told with the people of the Roothollows.

What Is Not Known

Nearly everything inside is left open: how much of the sealed storey is still flooded and how much has drained or grown over, which chambers survived and in what state, whether anything lives there now or anything dead still haunts the chambers it once guarded, what the great houses left behind in their root-chambers, who set which bars and from which side, which of the house-named chambers can still be matched to a real place, and whether any Sunken Stair could be opened without bringing the water with it. Each answer waits for the first story that goes behind a bar.

Tensions

• Two houses, one chamber. Two Gloamroot houses each count the same ancestral chamber beyond the bars as their own.
• Holdings that feed nobody. A chamber a house holds should bring its beds, water, and catch with it, and a sealed one brings none.
• The tithe stones. The flat stones where, it is said, the strongest were given to the water mostly lie beyond the sealed passages.