My Hollow Knight oc, and one of the (many) failed vessels: meet The Mason.
There were thousands of vessels made in an attempt to make a perfect one, so it makes sense that out of all those vessels, some of them came out to be abject failures.
Was marching with the other vessels only to trip and fall, and their siblings began marching over her body in their hurry. This is how her mask got cracked.
She dug downwards to escape the pounding feet, down into the corpses of her fallen brethren, and hid there until their siblings had all left.
Beneath the soil, her body was under pressure from all sides instead of the pressure being focused onto a sigle point at a time, which was how she survived.
She was stuck there for hours, and during that time she learned what it was like to fear for her life, as well as how to gain comfort from the constant pressure of being underground.
Once she emerged from the soil, she was too emotional to be a good vessel and was just cognizant enough to know that, but that urge to save the kingdom was still burning strong.
She snuck down the well in Dirtmouth, stole some tools, and began to fix the kingdom physically, patching up walls and cutting away the overgrowth.
She gets around via the tunnel systems left behind by the larger worm-like creatures and does her best to stay out of sight.
