CoSM:Neith

Neith (stylised as NEITH) is a sci-fi-fantasy writing project by me, Camille. Compared to other projects like Cradle of Songs and Moonsong, it has a lesser focus on worldbuilding, instead being mainly driven by character writing. It revolves around a group of mercenaries surviving through perilous jobs, which usually go underpaid, while often being at odds with each other. In doing these, they uncover mysteries about the world around them–the Inbetween–as well as secrets each of them wishes to hide.

Neith, originally Faolsong, began sometime around September of 2022 as a very short-lived TTRPG campaign with my then-partner. It very oddly started as a Shin Megami Tensei-inspired homebrew with elemental damage and demon summoning, primarily based on my experience with Shin Megami Tensei IV and Shin Megami Tensei If..., somewhat to the detriment of the overall combat experience. The story, however, had us engaged despite the road bumps. Over the course of the campaign, I made several changes to the mechanics, enough that I began losing interest and eventually moved on to making a better, more narrative-focused homebrew system for what would eventually become Moonsong. Recently, as of June of 2026, I've been drawn towards developing more of the lore and characters of this world, and I ended up changing the name to what it is now.

Inspirations

Neith is at its core a thematic offshoot of Drakengard and its spinoff NieR Replicant. This sets the overall grave tone of the project, and the idea for a narrative following deeply flawed characters. It extends to one of its main musical influences, 尽きる ("Exhausted"), Drakengard's ending B credit roll theme. Another large inspiration for Neith is Ɐ Gundam, providing the general aesthetic of a world that's technologically behind ours, enmeshed with advanced gadgets such as androids and computers, reframed as ancient unknown technology.

Themes

While the other Warawara project, Moonsong, deals with transitionality, creation, the wonder of the journey, the sea and nature, Neith takes a contrasting approach: it revolves around themes of loss, grief, trauma and taboo. Every major character in the narrative has lost someone or something dear to them, or been through awful torment. Nevertheless, they march on, each of them having different interpretations of life and the world around them. Neith became kind but full of pent-up anger, Caim a cruel egoist, Dantalion a forever-repenting shell of a man, so on and so forth.

Characters

Neith's party

Neith

Neith is the titular protagonist of this project. A faol homunculus, he was saved from a very advanced death process by forcing a reluctant pact with a fatally injured Aarki, both seeing no other choice in the moment. The pact left him with a feathered wing-like protuberance surrounding his left eye, and took away his ability to feel injuries, a dangerous situation given his profession as a bounty hunter. A skilled swordsman, well-meaning and kind with a good sense of humour, but prone to holding grudges and bad at managing his anger, which he considers righteous. His patience is frequently tested by Aarki's contrastingly acrid, sardonic personality.

He is a fugitive slave created for the sole purpose of carrying heavy loads between storage houses. As such, he has a discreetly respectable musculature. He harbours tremendous hatred toward the wealthy, especially those serving the Church, which commissioned him to be created as an eternal servant. He works within a Robin-Hood-esque frame of mind of helping the laypeople, workers and the less fortunate while actively hindering the rich and powerful.

Aarki

Aarki is Neith's pact-partner, a howloone, a kind of small feathered dragon capable of shifting into a much larger version of itself. An often sarcastic and hateful being, he harbours a deep hatred for mankind, especially faoil, as he was nearly killed as a kit while escaping from a group of hunters intent on keeping him as a pet. His pact with Neith began when they both found each other near death in the woods, as Aarki was being hunted and Neith was both being searched by the Church and in the late stages of the death process. He harbours mixed feelings about the pact, but seeing as he was saved by it, and Neith would probably die if it were broken, he sticks with him in an uneasy truce. This pact has taken away his ability to injure others, causing him agonising pain were he to attack someone else, leaving him reliant on Neith for combat.

Berith

Berith is a former priest turned bounty hunter, and a decent transthaumaturge. He's shy, gullible and cowardly, but extremely diligent with his personal studies, which usually involve the creation of life, or tacquin. Despite his diligence, he's never been able to create a homunculus, failing in some way or another each time he's tried. He and Neith have known each other for a long time, initially simply for convenience, as Berith was intent on finding a way to prevent the death process, using Neith as a guinea pig. They were eventually found out by the Church, which led to Berith being excommunicated, and Neith escaping and entering his pact. After this catastrophe, both of them have become close friends, becoming bounty hunters to fund their runaway lives.

Caim

Caim is the party's third (reluctant) member, a black-furred faol man. He lives in an underground Old World bunker, which the rest of the party later use as a hideout. He is an infuriatingly un-self-aware cruel egomaniac who would rather blame anyone but himself for any of the problems he causes. This is explained by the fact that he has no concept of caring for someone else, as in his early youth he lost the only person willing to protect him. And yet he's so crushed by his loneliness (borne from his aforementioned lack of care) that he uses it as an excuse to lash out against a world he perceives as fundamentally evil and cruel. He has knowledge of the Old World (which he seems to be connected to) and past events from the Inbetween which other characters are not privy to. When asked about his age, he either avoids the question entirely, says he doesn't remember, or says he's somewhere around his fifties or sixties (despite looking like he's in his early thirties at most).

His only company before joining Neith's party has been the several homunculi he keeps making just to mistreat to the point where they have an erotic Pavlovian response to getting socked. In general, he doesn't seem to harbour any love for anyone in his life, at least not that the protagonists know.

Caim's homunculi

At the time Neith meets Caim, he "owns" (as he puts it) two homunculi, both biologically his. They initially have no names, since Caim reckons naming them is neither smart nor necessary, akin to a farmer and his livestock. Neith, being a homunculus himself, sees this as preposterous, and christens both of them anyway. The younger sibling, piebald black-and-white, he names Folt, and the elder, fully white from the fact that he's moonsung folk, he names Aeron. Naturally, Caim thinks this is idiotic, and it will just lead to everyone else feeling worse when they inevitably die.

Aeron is reserved and quiet, and seldom speaks. He's a self-taught beginner cisthaumaturge and Caim's favourite. In so being, Caim "allows" him to show some attitude, and Aeron has much of it to give. He'll frequently go against Caim's wishes and attempt to do his own thing, usually practicing his thaumaturgy and worldly knowledge. Caim considers this a fruitless endeavour, as 20 years is too little for anyone to become any kind of scholar, but Neith encourages this enough that he will borrow books from the nearby town's library to give him. Folt, comparatively, is a much bubblier person, outwardly acting cute and frequently playing maid to Caim as a way to suck up to him. In return, Caim is much more ruthless with him, a reaction that Folt, somehow, seems to be turned on by. However, appearances deceive, as Folt is, by far, the person with the worst outlook on life in the entire main cast. He's an absolutely pessimistic nihilist and believes life to be a great joke played on mankind by GOD for its own entertainment. He's a tremendous narcissist, a trait he probably inherited from his father, except unlike Caim, Folt has so little to lose that his cruelty is tenfold. For now, he can only be cruel to beings lower in the pecking order than him, which aren't many. His favourite pastime is going outside to squish ants and watch as the rest try to bring them back to the nest, something he finds really funny.

Nine

Named after the only word she seems to be able to say, Nine is a near-mute teenage human girl Berith and Neith find preserved inside a vessel in the deeper floors of the underground bunker, which seems to have originally been a laboratory. She's endowed with powerful innate talent which she seems completely unaware of, as she has no knowledge of either herself or the world around her. She is seemingly a blank slate, and she's incredibly impressionable, but surprisingly not gullible. The laboratory's files describe her as a chimæra, and connect her to an organisation called Echidna, which seems to have been important in the Old World. As a result of being a chimæra, she has the ability to become a large, winged, wolf-like monster under situations of high stress. With this hidden power, she becomes the party's fourth member.

Dantalion

Dantalion is a disgraced retired legion commander turned bounty hunter, and the party's fifth member. He's a grey-furred brunn, tall and large due to his musculature, which, combined with his stoic, silent personality, makes him come off as scary; in reality, he's much kinder than people give him credit for. His dismissal from the army was due to the fact that he murdered his own wife, whom he found eating their stillborn second child as a severe trauma response to the brutal death of their first. Due to him holding a high position and being valued by his soldiers and superiors, he wasn't incarcerated. He wishes he was, but such is how these matters go under the Church. He now trudges through life under the impression that it is fundamentally about suffering, and that he must atone for the sin of murdering the person he loved most in life. He does this through various and extensive methods of self-flagellation. He constantly wears cilices and several belts lined on their inner side with spikes, and will leave deep in the night to flog himself with a discipline. As a result, his entire body is scarred, but he's also developed an incredible resistance to pain, which, alongside his ilk's natural regenerative capabilities, makes him a very effective damage sponge.

Bellerophon

Bellerophon is an organisation of androids living in a bunker in the eastern half of the Inbetween, which the westerners believe to be working under a man literally called "Bellerophon." They're initially intent on reaching GOD on the mountainous far end of the western half, atop Mount Sinai. This attempt at connection eventually becomes an attempt at destruction when Lucifer forms a pact with their commander, Loess.

AcF0x Loess

Loess, serial AcF0x, is the commander of Bellerophon, or at least what remains of it. She's a ginger-haired commander-type ring A android with a headstrong personality, racked with guilt over not being able to save all of her soldiers during a cataclysmic event they call the Conception. Because she's an Ac (commander) model, she feels terrible psychological turmoil over not having a connection with GOD, leading her to find someone else to follow. In the end, she's contacted by an AI named Lucifer, who offers her a pact in exchange for both his power and guidance. She accepts, and while Lucifer seems to not be affected by it (presumably due to the incredibly disproportionate power imbalance), Loess loses her physical body, only remaining as a program inside the bunker's servers. In her new form, Lucifer is able to access the bunker's servers and "infect" almost the entirety of Bellerophon's remaining forces.

Cr4l7z Chrysocolla

Chrysocolla, serial Cr4l7z, often shortened to Chrys, is a blonde recon-type ring C android. She's one of the few Bellerophon androids who were disconnected from the server (during a routine maintenance check) before Lucifer gained total control, and the only one who remained alive after the rest were destroyed by their infected comrades. She defected to the west and became part of a community of androids living undercover as regular humans. Chrys originally had an energetic, eager personality, which somewhat faded after the hundreds of years she's been in hiding from both Bellerophon and the people around her. She remains just and optimistic, intent on fighting for the safety of her fellow androids, but has become somewhat jaded over the years. She has a far-fetched plan to restore the servers and reconnect with GOD, only requiring the manpower needed to fight against her infected comrades.

Other

GOD

GOD is the highest deity in the westerners' religion, a mysterious figure living atop Mount Sinai which speaks to its followers through the use of devices called oracles, in other words, computers.

Lucifer

Lucifer is an AI with some unknown connection to Echidna. He's intentionally vague about his origins or purpose, but seems to be diametrically opposed to GOD, and as such uses Bellerophon through Loess to attempt to destroy it.

Logo history

The oldest logo for Neith, back then Faolsong, evidently initially intended as a fan-made spinoff of the Megaten series. In use from November 2022 to December 2022.
The previous logo's Japanese version I made for fun.
Logo from December 2022 to July 2023. Inspiration shifted from Megaten to Drakengard, clearly.
Logo from July 2023 to March 2024, a slight modification of the previous iteration.
Japanese version of the July 2023 logo. I changed the kanji for dog with the one for wolf since that aligned better with the actual meaning of "faol."
Logo from March 2024 to March 2026. I flipped the artwork for some reason.
Japanese version of the March 2024 logo.
Logo from March 2026 to August 2026. Still kind of Drakengard-inspired.
Japanese version of the March 2026 logo.
Current logo in use since the 20th of August, 2026