Prologue
War was being waged across the land, a mighty war that would change the very fate of the world, but the power of the war also awoke a very deep being.
Deep under the ground a gem was buried, a gem from the ancient times when wild dragons roamed free across the land above. It was no ordinary gem though, it was a very large Eldunarí whose inhabitant had been banished underground long before any of the other races even came to Alagaësia.
The other underground dwelling races avoided the cursed chamber that housed it, afraid of the power that the sleeping dragon embodied.
But now that power that had been sealed underground for centuries was awakening and finding its way back to the upper world. For now the power was merely seeking, light tendrils of thought brushing against anything it came in contact with.
It desired something…something that could free it from the ancient curse that trapped it underground.
Meanwhile on the surface, dragons soared overhead as a lone elf broke away from her kind, slipping nearly unnoticed into the nearby ranks of werecats. Likewise a tall, shaggy werecat approached her in his human form.
One person noticed their strange exchange though, a silvered werecat that was old beyond age. She watched with nervous energy but did nothing to stop it, it was inevitable.
This strange meeting took place only moments before the fall of Galbatorix and his cursed black dragon.
Then the tyrant king fell and Eragon took the last of the dragons and everything associated with them to a far off land to train the new Riders.
Everything gradually returned to peace but only a year after this a strange thing happened. The elf maid and the tall werecat had a child, a cursed child some called her.
The elf maiden, Mistil her friends called her, died in childbirth; she had slipped into the forest to have the child in secret, trusting her power to keep herself and the child alive. Something strange happened though and she died in her forest hut with the child in her arms.
The elves discovered her soon after and could find no explanation for her death; the only thing they knew was that the air around the hut felt wrong, as though some dark power had suddenly settled there.
The child's father, the werecat known only as Rawon, was slain a few days later in the dwarf tunnels between Surda and the mountains. His last words were that the child should be called Amaya Waneta before he went into the tunnels.
A problem existed now between the elves and the werecats, with no parents who would raise the halfling? The werecats argued long and hard, the strange sounds heard throughout the land until finally they reached an agreement.
As the child's mother was an elf, she should be raised by the elves and they left her with Queen Arya in the elf kingdom.
The elves named her Katherine Aleron because the werecats had given her no name, keeping her father's last wish a secret between themselves and the child.
In appearance she grew mostly elf, if slightly short at four and a half feet, with sharp slanting blue eyes and pointed, if cat-like, ears but her tail was visible even in humanoid form. She was more cat-like than any elf before her and had claws and sharp teeth like the werecats as well as the ability to take on her cat shape, which was larger than other werecats and a light tawny-silver shade with dark brown tufts that matched her hair.
The elves, fearing the power they had felt around her birthplace and unsure what to do with the halfling, left her in the care of a young elf that lived on the outskirts of Ellesméra.
The halfling became the elves' secret child; the only ones outside the forest that even knew of her existence were the werecats and Eragon.