The Elderborn
Creatures too ancient, too vast, or too magically sovereign to be subjugated, taxed, or dismissed. They fail the Court's porcelain human standard as thoroughly as any beetle in a service warren, and none of it matters, because the Queen's writ has never once been enforced upon them and everyone involved knows it.
The Kingdom's response has been to make a virtue of the arrangement. Elderborn are received at court with a degree of ceremony reserved for nobody else — precedence, titles, standing invitations, an entire office of the Chancery devoted to their correspondence — and the ceremony's purpose is to make deference look like patronage.
Who Counts
There is no roll, because a roll would have to be complete. These are the ones the Chancery keeps correspondence with.
| Kind | Where | The particulars |
|---|---|---|
| Treants | The Greenmantle, the deep Nightwood | Trees that walk, on a timescale that makes the Dryads look hasty. One crossed the Greenmantle's southern edge in living memory and the logging stopped. |
| Hamadryads | The Heartwood | Dryad elders grown so far into their trees that the Faerie has stopped and something else has continued. See Eldest Thanewood, whom the Chancery has never dared reclassify. |
| Faerie dragons | The high Twilight, the Land of Night | Small, iridescent, older than the Kingdom, and unattuned — they do not hold one element, which the Kingdom's magical theory says is impossible. |
| Satyr envoys | Arriving from beyond the maps, always leaving again | Horned, goat-legged, and welcomed. See below. |
| Great corvids | Everywhere, at altitude | Crows, ravens, magpies, and jackdaws; the Court calls their council the Avian High Command and pretends this is a courtesy rather than a description. They hold the sky the Kingdom claims. |
Doctrine
Court theology cannot admit an equal, so it has made them furniture. In the sermons and the schoolroom catechisms, the Elderborn are "vestiges of the Prime Garden": magnificent, yes, and undeniably old, but stagnant — beings who stand outside the cycle of metamorphosis and therefore outside the climb toward the Queen's shape. Beautiful, and finished, and going nowhere.
It is an elegant piece of work. It concedes every visible fact — their power, their age, their beauty — and converts each into evidence of a spiritual dead end, so that a Sylph scullion polishing dew-glass may pity a dragon.
The Elderborn's own view of the doctrine, where any has been recorded, is that it is very funny.
Diplomacy
Relations run on the Old Concords, a body of treaty read aloud once a year at the Ring in a ceremony the Court describes as a renewal of the Queen's grace and every Concord text describes as terms. The distinction has never been tested. Nobody at court wants to learn which reading the corvids hold, and the corvids have never volunteered it.
What the Concords cover, in practice: rights of flight and altitude, tribute framed as gifts, the movement of caravans through standing timber, and a schedule of what may be taken from whose ground. What they do not cover is enforcement, in either direction, and this is why they have lasted.
The Satyr Problem
A satyr has a goat's legs, a goat's horns, and a beast's face. By every criterion the Chancery applies to the Feral-Kin, a satyr belongs in a fighting pit or on a frontier patrol.
Satyrs are instead seated at the Queen's own table, addressed as Excellency, and served first.
The difference is that satyrs arrive as envoys of something the Kingdom cannot see the far edge of, stay exactly as long as they intend to, and cannot be compelled to do anything whatsoever. The Court's aesthetic hierarchy bends around that fact without a word of acknowledgment, and every Feral-Kin scout who has ever stood guard at a state dinner has watched it bend.
Relations
Correct with the Kingdom, and mutually careful. Warmer with the Gnomes, who treat the underground Elderborn as neighbors rather than as diplomatic incidents, and with the Dryads, whose oldest members are becoming Elderborn by degrees and have not filed anything about it.
With the Basekin below the line, the record is thinner and more interesting. The great corvids are known to carry mail nobody has asked the Kingdom's permission to send, and there are Low-Brood guilds in three provinces whose charters were witnessed by a treant. None of these arrangements appear in the Concords. The Kingdom has not asked, because asking would require admitting the possibility of an answer.