Lavinia

Shake the dust from your mane lost one, there is no escaping this place. Still, you can carve another way. Dig deeper still, knowing you don't have to go down any longer.

Her and Della bust through into the underground canal, they had found themselves dug far deeper into plague than they expected. They had thought the currents would drag them home, a shameful trip but nothing more. Then they fell. Heavy spines kept them at the bottom of the canal, too low for the many preventions the keeper of the falls had put into place to prevent anything caught by the currents from the damnation of the falls. Pinion ever hungers, and it swallows all that dare to linger at its throat.

The curse of Pinion seeps into every being it touches; A venom more potent than any other cruelty, twisting their very beings. Even possessing the power to leave the city by their own merit, the curse of Pinion drew them back like a needle to the pole, endlessly turning them back towards its heart. Spiraling back inward, their many escape attempts riddle the towering walls of the cavern that hosts its city, all curving back home with no matter to their desperation or determination.

In the end, Della lingered a little too long. The curse weighed on her mind and tore at her spirit. Blood she spilled long before reaching this hell now haunted her anew, as the bloodlust of Pinion could not touch someone already so familiar to its ravenous hunger. Instead of falling to the violence of Pinion, she fell into a deep mourning. Forlorn, she lost herself to this place of endless suffering. She had always been quiet, withdrawn. Hidden within a cavernous maw that wanted nothing else but to swallow her, she disappeared entirely. A silent thing that followed the whims of a long dead god, the fading hatred compelling her to burrow within herself and find every fault.

It in turn compelled Lavinia to dig down. This city was built upon graves, the largest one being the hollow of the city itself. If mourning twisted upon itself as a poison would have its victims warped in death, then that was its venom. She still had its teeth, a familiar violence lured out of her by powers outside of her own. Still she could dig, still she could escape this place. It didn't matter anymore how she left.

She tunneled down, sinking into the groundwater left by the runoff of the falls, deeper still, having long since passed the graves the city stood upon. Her own grave was to be as far as she could manage to get from that cursed place, yet instead she fell into smooth tunnels carved by a roaring heat that was no longer present. Deep ravines now emptied, carved by pooling magma long ago. She had escaped the city and in turned stumbled upon something else entirely, though what it was she had found did not matter at all to her. It was a way out, her grave had led to a freedom she could survive.

The obsequies was far kinder to her, encircling and living off of Pinion as a parasite instead of its prey. The tunnels were full of those who had escaped, they seeped what little life remained of the curse from the city. Stealing its power and its victims away from it, cutting away at what kept that lingering ghost alive.