Ruins

There are three main types of beings drawn towards the eternal twilight of Ghostlight Ruins: the curious, the insane, and the undead. The latter two don’t make it out of the Ruins again- not without intervention, anyway. Misfortune begets misfortune, leaving the city remains a cursed, miserable locale with no hope for recovery.

“But we know exactly how to dispel curses and slay ghosts! We can do something about it!” the mirror pup exclaimed, all four eyes twinkling with a mixture of pity and inspiration.
Her master simply chuckled quietly. “Some things are better left to time, my student. The Ruins are good to hone your skills in when you are older, but we cannot heal it.”
“If I am to become the best exorcist in the land, I will be the one to heal it!” she responded, all smiles and gusto.

Years upon years later, the young exorcist stood before the entrance to the Ghostlight Ruins in her customary armor, her breath swirling in the unearthly chill. Time had not dampened her fiery ambition to break the curse, and the ominous aura the place radiated was not about to either.
She practically skipped through the bramble-choked archway, thermal vision peeled for cold coalescing silhouettes that indicated the presence of the supernatural. Whenever she found a ghost, a whispered incantation and a flap of her wings summoned blessed winds that stunned her targets and wore them down into nothing. Wherever she encountered a curse, specialized scripts written and pasted suppressed their effects, extinguishing them with the passage of time. Whoever she encountered that still seemed to have a spark of hope, she talked into escorting out and back into society.

That being said, no matter how she fought and nullified and tended there just seemed to be no end to the misery and onslaught of phantoms within Ghostlight Ruins. The exorcist may be patient, but something must be wrong with her methods if the overbearing aura did not recede a little, not even after years of intensive care for the place.

The brambles struck.

The exorcist woke to find herself upon slick, cold cobblestone. She took a shaky breath inwards, choking on the musty petrichor, before staggering to her feet. Her curse-nullifying scripts were tattered and torn, but otherwise she was uncannily unharmed. So why did something feel so- for the lack of a better term- off?
She was halfway down the bramble-choked path before noticing the lack of any heat signature within her thermal vision. This was partially expected- Ghostlight Ruins was cold even without the presence of ghosts. But no matter her surroundings, there was something that her eyes should always pick up.
Her own heat signature.
With a shaky claw, she reached up to her neck, fingers slipping between the crevices of her armor.
It was true.
There was no pulse.

Panic gripped the exorcist’s chest. She ran onward, desperate to find the entrance to the ruins. She knew Ghostlight Ruins well- too well- so why were the surroundings so unfamiliar? Where was the entryway?
She rounded a corner, relief dousing her fear as she spotted two draconic heat signatures blazing in the near distance like twin stars.
“Excuse me, can you please take me to the entrance-” she began, but her words failed as her eyes fixated on the pulsing red-hot flow within the two dragons. It was hypnotic. Intoxicating.
Irresistible.
When she finally shook herself out of her stupor she was standing over two teeth mark-patterned corpses, claws stained a cooling red.
The exorcist screamed into the misty twilight, reaching blindly for a pulse of wind and throwing it in a random direction.
She paused to hear the agonized wail of an unlucky ghost.

The exorcist’s anguish hardened into cold, heavy resolve. The source within the spirit portal may have brought her to Ruins, but she was still able to fight. If she avoided the living- if she dedicated her unresting state entirely to hunting down every single undead of Ghostlight Ruins- there was hope for the place yet.
She will heal the Ruins, one exorcism at a time.