Yanagita is built in terraced rings down the sides of Syth, an active caldera, its lowest levels hanging just above the lava's surface. Ice, snow, and glacial melt flowing into the bowl-shaped formation create vast pillars of steam that billow perpetually into the sky — the city's most recognizable landmark, visible long before its brass pipes and carved stone terraces come into view.

The upper tiers are frigid and wind-scoured, pale stone and packed ice, the constant sigh of steam through pipe-work threading through everything. The lower levels are oppressively hot, the air thick and sulphurous, the walls sweating. Between them the middle rings exist in a permanent damp fog, where ice and heat fight each other to a draw and the Dwa'w go about their lives in the haze.

The city never sleeps. The caldera sees to that — the ground trembles in irregular rhythms, the steam pipes moan through the night, and the foundry-light of Syth's reflected glow keeps the lowest quarters in a permanent amber dusk. A sleepless city full of sleepless moon cats.

After her mother and caravan leader Yanagita was killed in a blizzard that shook even the great weight of the Hum-Beasts, a kit named Purnima received visions of a moonlit crater in the north — a city where no Dwa'w would freeze, where the moon's soft breath and the planet's belly of fire might form into song together. Her caravan traveled until they saw the pillars of cloud on the horizon. They had found Syth.

But Syth was volatile. Purnima awoke one morning with her spine folded over a blueprint she did not remember making, charcoal coating her fur, detailed schematics tacked across the shell-walls of her Hum-Beast. The device was called Vajra — a teardrop-shaped monolith of lunar metal, its surface etched with sigils that made tones when looked upon, its hollow core built to house the last breath of a Hum-Beast.

Purnima knew she must sacrifice her own Hum-Beast — her last connection to her dead mother. Her companion Talis refused to allow it. Talis, last of her own line, offered her own beast instead: Moon Burden. The dismantling was a ritual of grief and love. Priestesses sang a harmonic dirge as the lunar alloy was melted down and reformed. When Vajra was lowered into Syth, the ground stilled. The lava eased. The city was born.

The great Hum-Beasts that carried the founding caravans now sit inanimate around the city like sleeping giants. Some have been repurposed into temples, banks, orphanages, prisons. Many city-dwelling Dwa'w believe the stories of nomadic Hum-Beasts are ghost stories, told to kits to keep them from wandering into the wastes.

Purnima herself is entombed within her own Hum-Beast, stationed in eternal watch at the city's first gate. Her caravan hums no more. But there is a sound within the tomb: a music box serenading her mummified remains — the last spell she ever cast. It has been getting louder. No living soul knows why.

The nomadic Dwa'w who did not settle keep their distance and share warning-cants: one day, the magic keeping the eruption at bay will fail. The city will melt into the lava lake. Nothing will remain. They are right. Purnima's music box is a failed warning — her shaking elderly paws introduced a flaw in the mechanism that trapped her soul within it. She screams for her people to run. They cannot hear her.

To outsiders this place is known as The Singing Country — but the Song of the People has long been overtaken by the Song of Industry. The Singing City's melody is now played by a new instrument: the howl of steam through brass pipes. This discordant tune makes even Purnima within her Mausoleum-Beast tremble, unable to rest in peace.

Dwa'w magick is rooted in sound and resonance. Their technology, including the Hum-Beasts, operates on harmonic principles — music boxes, chimes, even weapons are crafted to conduct lunar energy. But settler-Dwa'w have forgotten the spiritual dimension entirely. The rituals of maintenance are gone. The songs that once powered the beasts are only echoes in the wind.