Pale Cave Creatures
The pale cave creatures are the small life of the waters beneath the Elderweald: pale fish and small cave creatures that the Dark Elf houses of the Roothollows take from their reservoirs and hollows. Fungus is the staple below, and these are the food that comes after it, eaten fresh when caught and counted on in lean years. They are what remains of an old underforest ecology that once filled the root-caverns, and nobody has given them names beyond what they look like.
Appearance
Pale Fish
The reservoir fish are small, none longer than a hand, and white or faintly pink, so thin-skinned that the dark line of the gut shows through in lamplight. Most have no eyes, only a smooth place where eyes would be; a few have small, clouded ones. They swim slowly near the bottom, steering by long, fine feelers at the mouth and by a row of small pits along each side that seem to feel the water move. They smell of nothing but cold water.
Small Cave Creatures
With them live other small, pale things: blind, translucent shrimp that pick over the silt; slender, pale newts with feathery red gills, as long as a finger, that cling to the root strands at the water’s edge; and soft white crayfish with long thin claws that back into crevices when touched. All are pale, slow, and quiet, and all go still when a lamp comes near, as if the light were a weight.
Habitat and Range
They live in the water-bearing caverns, seeps, and reservoirs of the Roothollows, and in the root-bound hollows where water stands among the roots. They are most plentiful near the top, where living root comes down through the ceilings and dead leaf-mould washes in, and thin out where the root gives way to bare stone. Some reservoirs are shared with the Stonewake Deeps, and the creatures in them do not know whose share they are in. Whether any still live behind the bars of the sealed Upper Roothollows nobody knows.
Behaviour and Temperament
They feed on what drifts down: leaf-mould, fungus fallen from the beds, root sap, and one another. They move little, live slowly, and wait a long time between meals. None of them flees far; a fish touched by a hand drifts a body’s length away and settles again, which is why children can catch them.
Life Cycle
They grow slowly and live long for their size, and they breed seldom, a few eggs at a time under stones or among the roots. A reservoir fished too hard takes years to fill again, which the houses know and count in the reckoning of water and what is owed.
Uses and Dangers
They are food: second after fungus, eaten fresh, dried beside the fungus cakes, or boiled into broth with them. Each house takes them from its own reservoirs and hollows by chamber-right, so a house that loses a chamber can lose its catch with it. They are harmless, but the water they live in is not. Running water is drunk, and still black water is not; the creatures of the black water are left alone.
Lore and Belief
Parents warn children that if they stray near the black water Ithaere the Drowned Mother will take them as her tithe, and her hair, in the laments, is a tangle of drowned roots, drift, and the small bones of cave creatures. Some Dark Elves hold that the pale things are what the Drowning Bloom left of the underforest’s living creatures, washed down and blinded, and that taking them is taking what the flood spared; others say only that they are food. Both are said at the same table.