The Sunken Stairs

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).

The Elderweald page can name them in a sentence, but it cannot carry what happens at them. Here the forest keeps its share of the deep-world grief with its own hands, and here a petition from below has turned one stair into a question for three peoples. This page covers the stair-mouths and the groves that keep them. What lies behind the bars belongs to The Upper Roothollows, which leaves it open.

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. The treads give it 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.

The bars are not alike. Some are root drawn tight across the stairwell, some are fitted stone, and some are a collapse that someone afterwards shored. Who set which bar, and from which side, is not known, and the groves feel that ignorance more sharply than outsiders expect.

How many stairs there are is itself disputed. A few mouths have silted almost level with the floor and survive as stairs only in the laments that still count them, and one grove will call a water-filled hollow a stair where its neighbour sees nothing but a hollow. In the wet season every mouth takes water, and it stands on the upper treads until spring is over.

The stair that matters most at present is the Deep Stair, so called because its treads run further down in sight of the mouth than any other before they reach a bar.

There is no way in for a stranger. The paths to the stair-mouths are among those that outsiders do not walk at all, so anyone who stands at one has been brought by the grove that keeps it, through that grove’s dwellings and past its dead.

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, watch 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.

Few others come. Mourners from other groves arrive for the laments. The Dark Elves of the Gloamroot Covenant cannot reach the stairs from below, and their word reaches the forest only the long way round, through the Stonewake Deeps and the Ironspine, as described in The Roothollows. Dwarves of the Ironspine Holds meet the forest at its verges and are not brought this far.

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 wet season is the stairs' season. As the hollows fill, mourners gather at the mouths to keep the laments for the Drowning Bloom. The laments name Ithaere the Drowned Mother, of whom the groves know little beyond her name. They also call on the god Humans know as Ennor the Grave-Watcher, under the groves' own name for him, to see onward the dead of the upper hollows, whom no grove ever returned to living ground. In Wood Elf eyes those deaths are still unfinished.

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. 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.

For now the stairs also hold an answer still owed. A Gloamroot house has asked for the Deep Stair to be opened, the stair groves are weighing it, and no circle has spoken.

The stairs date from the time when the forest and the hollows were one continuum, 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 disuse 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 the long, piecemeal Sealing closed them along with everything else. 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.