The Upper Roothollows

Overview

The Upper Roothollows are the sealed upper storey of the root-cavern world: a layer 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.

Nobody enters them. 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 layer that has been closed for more than three hundred thousand years.

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 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).

By the Roothollows' own reckoning, the upper layer lies beyond the Known Ways, the routes Gloamroot route keepers still count survivable, and so belongs to the region in memory alone. It is the oldest and largest such loss the deep world carries.

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. The nearest groves keep their mouths, do not go down, and keep laments for the Drowning Bloom there. In wet years, grove watchers say, water can be heard moving behind the bars.

  • From below. Many houses of the Gloamroot Covenant still name ancestral chambers in the sealed layer, and some still count them in their chamber-right, as holdings that are theirs and cannot be reached. For the Dark Elves (see Elves) these are the plainest proof of the old wound: home, near enough to name, closed. Nothing passes upward from the deep world directly. Word from a Gloamroot house to the forest still goes the long way round, through The Stonewake Deeps and The Ironspine.

  • The Last Water. Dark Elf laments say that somewhere in the upper hollows lies the Last Water, the final standing floodwater into which Ithaere walked when her worshippers refused her, and that it has never drained. Nobody has seen it since the Sealing. Nobody can say whether it is one pool, a flooded chamber-chain, or only a way of speaking.

The practical fear is water. Some of it still stands up there, and opening any part of the seal could send it somewhere else. That is why the petition over a Sunken Stair that the Elderweald groves are now weighing worries an Ironspine hold as much as it moves the grove keepers.

What Is Not Known

Nearly everything inside is left open: how much of the layer is still flooded and how much has drained or grown over, which chambers survived and in what state, whether anything lives there now, 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. The sealed layer is meant to be filled by the people who use it.

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