The Mirth and the Cradle Choir
It hums. Still. Even now. Even here.
"Beneath the lamb pastures and the broken glades, where the mists boil low and heavy, the world still hums.
It hums not with wind, nor river, nor beast — but with something older. Something deeper.
Something that remembers us better than we remember it."
— Griswold Cain, Lamentwood Cradle
I first heard it in the mud.
Not from a mouth, nor a bird, nor the wind between branches — but a deep, yawning hum, like a lullaby forgotten by the world and still somehow being sung.
The locals call them Mirths. Some with reverence. Some with dread. Some believe there are twelve. Others claim thirteen. I’ve not found them all, but I’ve stood at the foot of one — rooted in earth like a cathedral made of silence and song.
The Mirths do not speak. They do not move. They hum.
And their hum is old.
Older than kings. Older than the first bootprint in the first mud of Loria.
They are not gods, though I have seen pilgrims kneel at their base and pray with salt-stung eyes. They are not trees, though their trunks rise high enough to silence birds. They are not mushrooms, not exactly, though their vast caps collect starlight and their roots reach the memories of rivers.
They’re not from here. Or perhaps they are here, in the way a foundation is part of a house, or a lullaby is part of a cradle.
"The Cradle is a cradle still, but it rocks fewer dreams now than it did in the elder days."
— Griswold Cain
What Are the Mirths?
Some say the first Mirths formed from the last breath of the world’s last dragon — dropped into the soil and left to hum the old world back into shape. Others say they are the dreams of the land itself, tangled into roots and trunk because no one else would remember them.
No record tells of their planting. No one witnessed their birth.
They simply were.
Their roots — vast, golden, veined with light — stretch beneath Loria in what I’ve come to know as the Dreamroot: a slow, glowing network that stitches memory into moss, rivers into song, time into sleep.
Where the Dreamroot runs thick, the laws of the waking world unravel.
Paths drift. Stones hum. Rain forgets how to fall.
I once stepped into a clearing and came out younger. My boots were wet, but my memories were dry.
This is not magic in the way spellcasters mean it.
It is older. It is buried. It is longing.
What Is Mirthroot Resin?
Where Dreamroots thicken, something forms.
Mirthroot Resin.
A golden orb, knotted like a heart beneath the soil. It is not sap. It is not blood. It is the condensed sorrow and song of the Choir, harvested by few and protected by many.
A single drop can mend a shattered mind, awaken old magic, or open doors best left shut. It is distilled dream. And it does not want to be moved.
The Cradle guards it.
With silence. With fog. With beasts made of thorn and harmony.
The wise leave it. The greedy take it.
The Choir remembers both.
"A single vial of resin is heavier than a kingdom's ransom.
And costlier, if weighed in dreams."
— Griswold Cain
The Dreamroot Choir
The Mirths are not individuals.
They are a Choir.
Each Mirth hums a note in an ancient, forgotten harmony. The harmony maintains the balance of breath, time, decay, and rebirth in Loria. When the hum is broken — and I’ve heard it go sharp, once — things unravel.
I walked through a village that had been swallowed by fog. Its name forgotten even by the stones. Children born silent, mouths shaped in song but no voice.
The Choir does not punish.
It mourns.
And mourning has sharper teeth than wrath.
Speculations & In-World Rumors
- Some believe there is a 13th Mirth, long-silent, buried in the East beneath what was once a city of bells. No one hears the bells now.
- Others believe the Mirths dream in unison and their shared dream is Loria itself.
- There are whispered rites to summon a 'seed-hum' — a single note meant to awaken the Dreamroot in places where the land has forgotten itself.
- One scholar attempted to distill resin into ink. The manuscript was found years later, written in no known tongue, humming faintly when burned.
Suggested Echoes & Adaptations (In-World)
- A village that drifts a few feet each night due to a ruptured Dreamroot.
- A glowing golden orb rumored to be resin guarded by an Order of the Hollow Tongue, who sing nothing but listen to everything.
- A creature birthed entirely from the Mirth’s mourning — wordless, ancient, and half-rooted in song.
- A Mirth that begins humming again after centuries of silence — and the consequences of remembering what it had once forgotten.
Notes from the Field: Odd Theories, Hooks, and Maybes
I’ve scribbled down a few notions over the years. Can’t say which are true — or if any are wise to pursue — but they may spark something in the right (or wrong) mind.
- A Mirth that hums backwards, unweaving memory instead of preserving it. Travelers near it forget who they were… and sometimes return as something else entirely.
- A decayed Mirth, long since rotted, whose Dreamroot hums in a language of grief. Those who sleep nearby wake sobbing golden tears.
- A lost hymn, said to awaken a dormant Mirth. But each line comes at a cost: a memory, a name, a year of your life.
- A monk who stole a vial of resin, fled into the swamps, and now speaks only in echoed birdsong. His campfire stories draw animals near… and sometimes, trees.
- A resin vault deep below a forgotten chapel, guarded not by warriors, but by silence so complete it deafens the soul. The further you descend, the less you remember what you're looking for.
- A trader in Old Woth who offers “false resin” in small glass vials. But what he’s selling may not be false — only misplaced, and terribly hungry.
Of course, it’s all speculation.
Probably best to forget it.
(Unless you’re the sort who prefers to remember...)
"It is not the silence that will kill us.
It is forgetting the song ever mattered."
— Griswold Cain