  We find a parametrically light dilaton in special confining theories in three
dimensions. Their duals form what we call a scion of solutions to the
supergravity associated with the large-N limit of the Coulomb branch of the N=4
Super-Yang-Mills (SYM) theory. The supergravity description contains one scalar
with bulk mass that saturates the Breitenlohner-Freedman unitarity bound. The
new solutions are defined within supergravity, they break supersymmetry and
scale invariance, and one dimension is compactified on a shrinking circle, yet
they are completely regular. An approximate dilaton appears in the spectrum of
background fluctuations (or composite states in the confining theory), and
becomes parametrically light along a metastable portion of the scion of new
supergravity solutions, in close proximity of a tachyonic instability. A
first-order phase transition separates stable backgrounds, for which the
approximate dilaton is not parametrically light, from metastable and unstable
backgrounds, for which the dilaton becomes parametrically light, and eventually
tachyonic.
