Vanth has been a deliverer of the dead longer than humans have tilled and sown. She cleaves souls from bodies and leads them through the gates of the underworld. Few still believe in the Etruscan deities of old—particularly not since their old cities became part of the Roman Empire, then of Byzantium, and the memory of its deities was superseded by that of their Roman counterparts. New souls no longer pop up on Vanth's radar quite as frequently as they did before.
Even so, this jurisdiction of death—now led by the vengeful Horkos—has done its best to modernise: Horkos keeps Vanth apprised of work with harried texts. The city itself has continued to evolve, every month bringing newly-dead souls who, in life, kept this lost culture's customs alive. At the centre of the influx of souls is this psychopomp goddess, who (annoyed as she is by the interpersonal stresses of her job) has faithfully ferried the dead to Horkos year after year for millennia.
As the link between the underworld and the living, Vanth has always had the luxury of checking in with the modern peoples and picking the fashion she likes: it's one of the greater joys of her job. The school of aesthetics that current humans call "goth" is irresistible to her—and also decidedly not much like that of the Goths whose society she's watched rise and fall, though evidently informed by history, which suits her to a tee.
From the centuries before centuries were ever recorded, Vanth has answered to her boss Horkos (Orcus, Orkus), ruler of the Etruscan underworld. It isn't known what became of the previous ruler, Leinth; the story goes that she simply faded from being one day. How curious indeed.
Well, the underworld is now ruled by Horkos, and Horkos even went so far as to name the entire realm after himself. Horkos (the metropolis) is largely populated by souls with millenium-old tastes in decor and a lack of living descendants paying them respects. For centuries—and especially ever since the Roman Empire reached is heyday—the number of followers of the Etruscan religion has steadily dwindled, to the point where it's become almost manageable for Vanth (Horkos' lone messenger) to personally fetch every single soul at the point of death.
Oddly enough, though, the current century has seen an uptick in believers and believer-deaths, particularly (and strangely) from countries outside of Tuscany. They say a bastardised (yet still intimidating) version of Horkos has recently made an appearance in a wildly popular game, and some have taken interest in the mythos behind him...
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