The Deep Folk (Drow) of the Undersilence
Long ago, the Deep Folk lived in harmony with the Worldsong.
Their melodies were cold and strange, but they gave to the music as much as they took.
They shaped caverns into cathedrals of resonance. They sang to the stones and made them dance.
But pride and bloodlust led them astray.
They turned their gifts into weapons, turning every note into a war-cry, every chord into a blade.
The Worldsong recoiled from them, their Soulstrings severed in sorrow and judgment.
Now, the Deep Folk cannot create, only steal.
They prey upon surface-dwellers, luring them into the Undersilence — a place of lost echoes and devouring shadows.
They drain life and music from the unwary, like dark fae, wendigo, or skin-walkers of ancient myth.
Their touch leaves survivors hollow-eyed, incapable of singing, their essence devoured.
They survive on borrowed light, trapped in a cycle of predation they can no longer escape.
Rules of the Deep Folk's Magic (before the unraveling):
1. They could only feed with consent or trickery.
They had to lure, tempt, or bargain with surface folk.
Violence against the innocent was forbidden by ancient laws of balance — not morality, but survival.
To violate those rules risked corrupting the fragile truce between realms, drawing the wrath of the Worldsong.
2. They could only drain what was offered.
A song sung freely.
A bargain struck under twilight.
A prayer whispered unknowingly into the wrong shadows.
3. They could never create new magic.
Only twist, echo, or warp existing songs.
The Black Feast
The world’s unraveling — triggered by Durgrim’s accidental summoning of Djyen — began to fray the old laws.
The Worldsong's bonds weakened. The Deep Folk could feel it.
At first, they celebrated.
For the first time in living memory, they were not bound to coax or trick.
They could strike.
At the village of Hearthmere, they descended without warning —
draining the songs, the hopes, the very souls of the people, leaving a hollow ruin in their wake.
It was a massacre clothed in glee.
But amidst the revelry, Xalyth — raised on the old beliefs — felt a pang of something alien.
Disgust.
The act felt wrong not because it was forbidden —
but because, deep within, the last living spark of her Soulstrings ached at the violation.
She realized, in horror, that their hunger had become mindless cruelty,
and that the more they fed, the more the world's unmaking accelerated.
The Black Feast was the final severing.
A crime not against humanity alone, but against the very music that once sustained the Deep Folk themselves.
Xalyth’s Flight
Haunted, sickened, she fled the Black Feast —
chased by her kin, who saw her sorrow as treason.
As she stumbled toward the dying Grove, weakened by her defiance,
the last spirits of the Heartwood rose in secret.
Boars with hides of bark.
Deer crowned with antlers of flame.
Not to slay her — but to shepherd her.
They slaughtered her pursuers, clearing her path.
Guided by fate and battered spirit,
Xalyth reached the Grove in time to witness Mischa’s Dawncry —
to add her own battered magic to Celesthorn’s awakening —
and to be reborn in the new harmony.
The White-Haired Tricksters
They say long ago, when the drums spoke the truth and the rivers sang sweet,
the children of Orunmila watched over the people, guiding them with wisdom and melody.
But even among the children of the sky, there were those who grew jealous of the songs that healed and the dances that fed the earth.
One dry season, they came — not as monsters with teeth, but as fine, laughing folk:
tall and thin like the iroko trees, hair pale as spilled milk, eyes burning like ember-coals.
They spoke sweetly,
they sang sweeter,
and they promised even sweeter things:
"Come, traveler," they said, "bring your voice, your drum, your flute.
Give us but one song, and we will bless you with a thousand more!"
Many a proud singer believed them.
Many a boastful drummer struck his finest rhythm for them.
Many a foolish child gave away his song, thinking he could bargain with the night.
But the white-haired ones kept every song given —
scooped them into their hollow chests —
and the givers were left hollow themselves.
Some wandered the roads forever silent.
Some grew old in a single breath.
Some forgot their own names,
their own mothers,
their own songs.
So listen, O child of the talking drum:
When you see a stranger too beautiful to be true,
whose hair is pale though no dust has touched it,
whose eyes burn though the fire is cold —
run.
Do not sing.
Do not dance.
Do not play your drum.
The world is wide,
but the Undersilence is hungrier still.
