Lavinia is torn about her new Perk. For one it is very interesting, a second Blood Art and if it’s anything like the first then she’s in for a steep learning curve. She still hasn’t understood all there is to [Blood Art; Kinesis], she’s learned much of its limitations but has barely had the chance to test the fullest of its capabilities.

And now she earns another Blood Art. Lavinia hopes she’ll get to leave these Dungeons to put both Blood Arts to their fullest, she didn’t feel comfortable within its confines and receiving a Perk that allows her to turn into a shroud of mist like she is when materializing out of a [Crimson Blink] supports all her itching impulses to dash for whatever pathway looks like the quickest exit.

The farther she follows Hera in search of this would-be King, Mark, the more she longs for a way out of the dungeons. There is something within its walls at these depths, the many empty lakes and streams cutting through rock as void keeps Lavinia on her toes. The water, the air and the earth burying them suffocated her with a watchful presence, like all had connived to peer at her every move through tunnels.

The Human, Hera, doesn’t suffer the same sensations and simply leads the way with the occasional mutter as she casts a spell to seek the way to her would-be King. Lavinia watches these manipulations through her otherwise hyperactive senses and has noticed that each time she cast the spell, a hole forms in the world around, draining it of Mana not unlike she drains foes of blood.

It is with some effort via quick [Inspect], happenstance of luck and often coincidence that Lavinia observes these drains. Each time Hera draws on mana from the world to join with the mana crawling from her pathways, she also ignites the Essence within her staff. Essence flows into her spell's ‘skeleton’ and forms the ‘meat’ that Lavinia watches twist and mix until it becomes something…pungent.

The result of the combination was enough to set Lavinia on edge at its first mixture. The sliver of it sent her hairs standing all across her body and though Hera quickly explained what she was doing, Lavinia remained unsure— the energy the Caster wielded to track her King felt strong enough to destroy a great number of enemies, the Minotaur comes to mind.

“Why can you not be King?” Lavinia questions aloud, “Then we can return, destroy the Minotaur and send me to Corym.”

Hera glances over her shoulder. They have been walking down yet another cramped tunnel, working through new rooms and chambers leaking from the roof and walls. Each one littered with corpses suffered for nothing, each one bearing the many eyes that press against Lavinia.

“These Dungeons, specifically those designed to contest the throne of Mankind, well, they’re a puzzle.” Hera says, keeping her [Magelight] spell high and brightly lit; this tunnel has no crystals or moss, there are few like it and often crawling with monsters suited for the dark.

Lavinia tilts her head at Hera, ears flopping up and down as she hums up at her. “You mean how the exit wasn’t the entrance? How Lucy’s room is gone?” She had already noticed this among other odd occurrences in the dungeon. The path she expected to thread, the path she took when she first arrived, she will never find it.

A larger part of her than she will admit longed to gaze at the ground where Lucy is buried. Everything she's done since then feel wrong, stupid. She let Ulx keep the GroveStaff, she hasn't learned a lick about Henry Vanavil and his power. All she's done is eat.

It is the right thing to eat...but Lucy's strength was more.

Until it met Henry.

Hera nods, grinning back at Lavinia, “You noticed, good. The Dungeon rearranges itself incessantly to prevent Chosens from learning or forming routes to the Minotaur’s final maze. It throws challenge after challenge at the unprepared and there are many.” She grimaces as she steps over a skull only for it to crumble under Lavinia’s feet.

“Fortunately, I am not Chosen and I am currently not bound to one. Returning to the Minotaur’s maze will not be an issue but claiming its crown, well, I am not Chosen, it’s power will not manifest in me and it will not kill Henry.” A flash of emotion crosses her face as she laments.

Lavinia nods, returning to silence as they exit the tunnel and Hera casts that tracking spell again. She mutters words Lavinia doesn’t struggles with and a swirl of mana dances onto the tip of her staff to be filled with a sliver of Essence. It ignites the entirety in a glorious light show that bounces off the clean, black glass walls of the chamber they’ve stepped into.

The weight of Hera’s magic bends and boils the air in the chamber, sending cracks through the glass walls reflecting Lavinia and her companion. Grimacing, Lavinia bears through the discomfort of the spell but nearly breaks when she senses someone’s gaze falling on her. She searches the chamber and finds nothing but four spaced walls reflecting she and Hera. There aren’t any monsters, glowing moss or crystals here, only the four glass walls, space and the exit through three tunnels Hera is trying to discern the correct path from.

Lavinia carries her attention to the ceiling only to find it empty or perhaps boundless as the one within the Minotaur’s maze. Only a darkness gazes back at her, sending a shiver down her spine at the thought of Henry reaching out and snatching her. Shaking the image away, Lavinia looks up in time to glimpse a grinning, red skulled, burnt eyed, tortured wad of melting flesh glowering down at her. She dashes away in time, summoning a swirl of Essence in her hand as she centres her foot to attack.

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“Lavinia?” Hera calls, her tracking spell dispelled leaving her three orbs of [Magelight] bopping behind her. “You look…what did you see?”

Lavinia narrows her eyes at the human, glancing at the walls of obsidian glass and then more cautiously at the boundless ceiling, “Something is here.”

Hera manages a smile but grips her staff, “There always is something. I’ll keep my guard up.”

That wasn’t the reaction Lavinia was hoping for but she settles for it and follows after the Caster, taking the rightmost tunnel path and leaving the chamber of obsidian glass walls and whatever that creature was behind.

Several paces in and it still disturbs Lavinia, “It was red. A red skull and melting flesh.”

“Oh?”

“It’s eyes were burnt but it was smiling.”

Hera doesn’t say anything for a moment, carrying on down the damp and to her fortune moss-lit tunnel. As the silence builds she speaks up, “Whatever happened to that staff? The GroveStaff?”

Lavinia expected this question. Once she learned Hera was the very Caster that helped bury Lucy and the same one that complained about her having the GroveStaff, she expected it.

“Corym.” Lavinia answers without further explanation. She felt some bit of shame for proving the Caster’s younger self right about her having the GroveStaff, after all, she couldn’t truly attest to where it is at the moment. Only that it must be in Ulx’s possession and Ulx is in Corym.

Hera stays silent, the rocks scatter underfoot and water drips from somewhere in the tunnel as they navigate through to the next chamber. This one reminds Lavinia of the Minotaur’s maze of columns and rows except the walls form into smaller rooms of their own, squares, rectangles and other shapes forming structures that slant and sit upon on each other throughout the giant space.

A stream angles through the city of squares and rectangular boxes, curving around and soaking some in its flowing waters. As Lavinia steps past Hera and her eyes adjust, she notes a twinkling in the midst of the boxes, a heap of metals, crystals and gems glimmer seductively in each of the structures as large as the home Seraph Squad shared.

Hera starts to weave her spell but Lavinia stops her and points atop one of the rooms stacked and heaped. A man stood among legs wide apart, he digs through the heap of glimmering metals, tossing them through as he searches. Little more than a rag drapes across his body and his stench offends Lavinia’s nostrils from the distance.

“Mark!” Hera hastens her step to reach him and the two end up climbing over heaps of gold, silver and other rich currencies judging from the token shape of the metals.

‘Lavinia…’ a voice carried on the winds of the rushing stream halts Lavinia’s climb. She looks over her shoulder but finds nothing, searching about herself while Hera meets with Mark she summons Essence to bolster her being as the sensation of many eyes falls on her again.

There! By the very entrance they just passed through is a feminine figure. Human, barefoot and in a white dress. Her fingers clench the tunnels edge, cracking a handful of dust and debris she feeds to her slackened jaw, a ghoulish face hidden beneath a towel of black hair. Lavinia hears every crunch and shatter of rock or teeth like she’s the one chewing, its taste works its way onto her tongue as she watches the barefoot woman eat the tunnel.

She cracks another handful and from the distance offers Lavinia the crushed rock and crystals. A cold shiver runs through Lavinia as she instinctively steps back, “Hera!” she calls without turning away from the barefoot woman.

Lavinia’s ear twitches as silence answers her call. She dares not look away from the strange woman but the world behind her has gone dark, dead and silent. Hera isn't here with her. Lavinia gulps, pulling her resolve together as the woman takes a shambling step forward with her offering of stone.

“Lavinia…”

Her own name sends shivers through her. Hoarsely spoken in her ears despite the woman never taking a step. Her skeletal hand beckons out for Lavinia, desperately clawing as a smog of darkness swells past her feet, drowning gold and metals as it swells from all directions. A true darkness to the silence.

“He-!”

“Lavinia, run! Run!”

For a sliver of the startling moment, the woman’s hoarse voice reveals a tone Lavinia would recognize anywhere. The woman raises her head, a single red eye gleams behind her draping hair and the darkness ascends the top of structures and forgotten luxurious. The stone offering in her hand shatters and she breaks into a free sprint after Lavinia.

Lavinia blinks and the woman disappears from her sight. Turning to flee to wherever only to have what’s left of her braids snatched. Behind her is the woman already, her bones rotted through with maggots and their kin feasting still on the living corpse. She forces Lavinia close and with her unhinged jaw screams.

“Run!”

Lavinia wakes up. Finding herself staring at the entrance they’d walked in through. No smog of darkness drowns the ground and no living corpse offers her stone to eat. She does hear voices. Hera.

“Mark! Mark!” the woman seems to continue right where she stopped when Lavinia spotted the woman. Has no time passed at all? Was it all a dream?

“Hera!” Lavinia yells, scrambling up the mound of luxury, “Hera, wait!” The Caster had made it over to a third mound ahead of Lavinia to reunite with her raggedy would-be King. I have a bad feeling about this.

Against her better senses and against the barefoot woman’s warnings, Lavinia leaps over onto the second and then the third stack. Hera studies the man burrowing through rusted axes, forgotten chainmail and lost jewelled boxes. He shows no concern for his audience, barely noticing Hera herself much less Lavinia.

“What is he searching for?” Lavinia shakes her head before Hera can answer, “No, I don’t care, bring him and let’s get out of here. This place isn’t…it isn’t right.”

Nothing about the dungeons have been right but since they’ve come this far things have taken a turn. Lavinia dreads to traverse through the dungeons alone again.

“Be a bit patient will you? He’s not…he’s not well and he’s confused.” She says, rubbing the would-be King’s back in soothing circles as she whispers to him.

Lavinia swallows a growl and uses her words instead, “No, we have to leave quick. There are—”

A mound breaks apart in a landslide of metals, crushing all beneath it. Hera matches Lavinia’s suspicious glare and studies the fallen mound for a tense moment. Nothing else happens so she turns to Lavinia only to gasp instead.

Hairs on her neck raised in warning, Lavinia spots her enemy in Hera’s eyes before it has a chance to smite her. Weaving aside on instinct, Lavinia scatters through the mound pf treasure and turns about on her heel, Essence flaring through her pathways.

A creature whose skull has been fashioned into some sort of flowerbud rattles at the two. Without eyes and those giant legs, how it ever managed to sneak up on Lavinia is a wonder.

Another mound collapses somewhere in the massive room. Lavinia growls, “We leave now.”