The Cecaelia

Miles down, where the pressure would kill anything from the shallows and the only light is the light that living things make, the Cecaelia keep to themselves. They have squid-like tentacles in place of a tail, bioluminescent markings that carry meaning, and a strong preference for not being visited.

They prefer their formal name. The common one is Benthies, and the number of surface-dwellers who have used it in their hearing and been corrected is small only because the number who have met one is small.

The Deep

The Abyss runs on chemistry rather than sunlight: hydrothermal vents and cold seeps feed everything, and the ecosystem is bioluminescent almost throughout — light used to hunt, to lure, and among the Cecaelia to speak. A Cecaelia conversation has a visual register that does not survive translation, and their written language is a poor record of it.

They build in and around the vent fields. No Cecaelia settlement appears on any Kingdom map, and this is not secrecy so much as a shared conviction that nobody else's map is any of their business.

The Surface

They go up rarely and dislike it. A Cecaelia in the shallows carries their own pressure with them, holding a bubble of deep water by main magical force, and the strain of maintaining it is considerable and constant.

A small minority — regarded at home as reckless, and as embarrassingly enthusiastic — have begun wearing engineered pressure suits instead, on the straightforward grounds that it hurts less. That this is controversial at all tells you most of what you need to know about Cecaelia politics.

Colddoor, at the Reef's southern lip, is where the two worlds meet: a grim dive-station where Merrow expeditions launch downward and the occasional Cecaelia comes up. Relations there are correct, professional, and about four hundred years from being warm.

Ways

Secretive to a degree that reads as rudeness on the surface and as ordinary good manners at depth. They are patient beyond any other Faerie tribe, deliberating on timescales that make the Nymph elders look hasty, and they regard the Kingdom's politics as weather happening a very long way above them.

Below and beyond their own territory lie the cold weed-choked waters of the Black Meres, where Vahl the Weedking's boundary is quietly moving. The Cecaelia have reported this. Nobody in Tidewell has worked out how worried to be.