Xalyth's Flight and the Dawncry Rebirth

In the deep and broken places, where the Worldsong once rang and now only the echoes of sorrow wept,
Xalyth Flamewhisper was born —
a daughter of silence, a weaver of stolen chords.

Long ago, her people severed their Soulstrings, turning the music of life into weapons of war.
The Worldsong, wounded and grieving, withdrew from them.
No longer could the Deep Folk give to the music, only take —
stealing life, magic, and dreams from the unwary, traveling the night like shadowed fae of old.

Xalyth grew amidst this hunger, believing it the only way.

Until the night of the Black Feast.

They descended upon a village of dreamers,
a place of small songs and honest hearth-fires.
The Deep Folk struck like wraiths —
children’s lullabies twisting into mist, old prayers shriveling in the cold.

Xalyth drank as she had always done —
and for the first time,
tasted ash.

A pang struck her hollow chest — not hunger, but grief.

She fled.

Some of her kin, fearing her treachery, pursued her —
but the wild spirits of the Overworld rose against them:
boars with hides of living bark, deer crowned in antlers of flame,
the last guardians of the old ways.

One by one, her pursuers fell.
Still, Xalyth staggered onward, the stolen life burning away inside her.

She followed the faintest pulse in the earth,
a fragile heartbeat calling to her through the silence.

It led her to the Grove of Groove —
where Mischa, the Lightbearer, stood alone against the encroaching void.

Mischa's Dawncry tore through the corruption,
stitching the broken Heartstrings,
reviving the Heartwood,
freeing the chained dragon Vaelthar.

Seeing this miracle, Xalyth, with the last of her stolen magic,
gave.

For the first time, she offered her essence freely — not to steal, but to save.

In that instant,
the Worldsong reached out and mended her severed Soulstrings.

She was reborn —
no longer cursed to steal and fade,
but living, truly living,
a part of the music once more.

Xalyth rose, changed.

Not pure.
Not innocent.
But alive.

She took up her shattered melodies and wove them into Catmetal Core’s defiant anthem —
vowing to travel the broken world,
to heal the wounds her people had carved,
and to seek others still lost in silence,
before it was too late.