Page 145 of Fated or Knot

“We should have a personal essence lamp amongst our things. We need it to go exploring.”

I searched for it, cringing as I probably got salt water in amongst all of our things before I found the round lamp toward the bottom of the bag. Once I activated it and fixed it over his shoulder, Marius dunked underwater and undulated his tail slowly to take us under through a narrow opening partially blocked off by a rockfall.

Once we were past it, he said,“Welcome to the drowned city of Telimarr.”The essence lamp illuminated our immediate surroundings, but I had the impression we’d just entered a large, still space. We headed down at an angle, skimming over a set of stairs cut into the stone. There were hints of elegant patterns chiseled into the stairs, though they’d mostly been eroded away and coated in a layer of mossy fuzz.

“Telimarr was a dark elf city back when the elves were still a subterranean race,”Marius explained.“The Doras beat up against their back door until it burst in one day and filled allthree levels of the city. It’s been reclaimed by the water fae since then.”

I thought of the rockfall we’d just squeezed past.“It’s safe?”

“Aye. There’s a small group of bioluminescent fae who live in the lower levels. They’re harmless. They might be amused at the sight of us tourists.”

He knew we wouldn’t be the first—or last—kelpie and nixie couple to visit Telimarr. Once the floor of this level was within the halo of our essence lamp, I understood why. We traced a path of devastation first, as the sea had poured forcefully upon the rubble of the first buildings we passed. But further along, we saw what Marius called“a period of ancient history suspended in time.”He’d been here before, on his own, just to learn. Some of the facts he remembered, he related to me as we explored.

There was a town square, marked with a circular fountain where a cracking statue of a graceful but headless elf woman stood with her palms extended upward. Before emerging to see the stars, dark elves used to worship the black unknown found deep in their caves. There was no darkness as complete as that found when surrounded by solid rock. Elves trapped for extended periods in the unknown claimed it was a religious experience.

“Half the time, they’d be blind, too. Total darkness is terrible on the body, no matter what kind of fae you are,”Marius added.

“What made dark elves turn their eyes up toward the stars rather than down toward the deep earth?”I asked curiously.

“Other fae.”That was a joke. He didn’t really know either, but dark elf promiscuity was the gel that held the many races of the Unseelie together, especially going back to the early days of Serian.

Most of the Unseelie had some dark elf blood mixed in if they looked far enough back in their family trees. He thought I might be a rare exception, since my mother was a dreamlander, buthe and his brothers were a quarter dark elf from Nemensia, and Fal, insufferably, was as pure-blooded an elf as possible for an Unseelie.

“Why insufferable?”I asked.

He snorted a spray of bubbles and thought of a recent memory. “You are unfairly attractive,”I’d told Fal while tracing his alpha mark. Marius had watched me admiring his brother’s naked body with jealousy burning in his gut.

I rolled my eyes.“Are you forgetting the next thing that happened? I sawyoufully naked.”

He responded with a wave of smugness. He was well aware I found his strength incredibly attractive, which also was such a male ego thing. I patted his neck and turned my attention to our surroundings.

The surviving buildings we passed were made of stone and occupied by small sea creatures, if at all. The architecture was curious, blocky and crude compared to modern fae buildings but elegant in their own ways. Sculpted embellishments turned columns into works of art, and wall panels became optical illusions from engraved, looping shapes.

I could admire all this for hours, especially when we followed a path down to the next level. Everything was more intact here, like the sea had filled it up gently after taking its wrath out on the floor above.

“Look at these crystals.”Marius took me to a bush-sized cluster of spiky, prism-like growths on the ceiling and had me turn off our essence lamp.

Darkness closed in, but it wasn’t complete. The prisms glowed with dull lime green light. Distant pinpricks of different colors dotted the ceiling, walls, and floor.“Wow, they’re so pretty,”I said.

“They’re a special crystal. Do you like silver?”The question wasn’t as random as it seemed. Marius’s next thought was that Fal preferred the color silver.

“Um, yes?”

“We should find him a silver or gray piece. Dark elves fucking love rocks.”

He wanted to do something nice for Fal?

“I can play nice,”he grumbled.“Besides, this’ll mean something more to him. I’ll let him tell you the dark elf fact.”

I wondered what he was talking about but did my best to let it go. I’d probably understand when I presented Fal with a crystal that glowed in the dark and saw his reaction.

“We can just take these crystals?”I asked.

Marius exaggerated a look left and right.“I don’t see anyone around to stop us. Besides, you only need a piece, not a whole formation.”

Fair enough. We searched for crystals of a nice silvery hue on and off as we explored the rest of Telimarr. Eventually, we found one. Marius had to wrap some of his clinging mane around it and pull with the full strength of his kelpie form, but we did get a prism-like chunk free.

Though most things of value had long been taken, there was enough intact here to see how the subterranean fae lived. My favorite spot by far was a thick temple made with sheets of multicolored crystal rather than glass. We floated inside the empty area where ancient dark elves used to gather and imagined what they might’ve done here.

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