[12/10/2026] Daily Art Drop

Xalethi was born in the outer treetop villages of Illiax with bone-white skin, an anomaly among the bronze-skinned Illiaxu that marked her as touched by the Void from birth. The Uxar priests took her to Abakax at nine to begin communion rites, and on her very first night she connected with the Hungry Void, which answered her with a scream of pure negation. She screamed back. By morning she stood in the Black Temple's lowest pool holding a mysterious black spear that bled violet smoke, an artifact no temple record could explain.

The cost was immediate. The Soulshard stripped her mother's face from her memory, her father's warmth, and kept taking. Over the following years the Uxar trained her as a weapon, and she mastered the Silent Tongue with unsettling fluency. Every use of Void magick hollowed her further, eating memories, emotions, even the capacity for surprise. At twenty-one, when an elder priest tried to claim her spear for the cult, she killed him on instinct and drained his Anima to nothing.

She fled Abakax that night, stripped down to what kept her alive (cloak, boots, little else), and followed the old jungle roads out of the Caldorian rainforest into Nyambra. The open sky nearly blinded her. She settled in Umboli, the southern trade town, where her jungle knowledge and willingness to hunt things others wouldn't made her valuable. The local shamans sensed the Hollowing in her and kept their distance, but they let her stay.

Now she wanders Nyambra as a sellsword and exorcist, the spear always smoking at her side, losing a little more of herself each time she uses it.