#llynhurstevent

However, when she walked outside she did not feel the usual joy that sunlight and nature brought her. Instead, she felt quite sad. Depressed was a better word. She just wanted to go back inside and avoid everyone else. Elith noticed that others seemed to be acting strange, but she attributed it to her own mood playing tricks on her. 

Elith headed back to her room, and when she closed her door, she just slid down and sat on the floor for a moment. She thought that maybe her studying had finally taken a toll on her. Her hooves were very sore, like she had begun to founder. 

She turned over on her side from a sitting position to lying down, and fiddled with her fingernails. She noticed they were dirty and very uneven. Elith wondered when she had stopped grooming herself as well as she usually had. She noted that next week was probably time for her pedicurist to come again. She didn’t even feel like calling him and scheduling the appointment. It was just going to be loud and time consuming, and he always had to make extra large shoes for her. 

But today was different. It was as if the sun’s rays were burning through her skin, making her want to fall into a lazy nap on the grass next to the lake. What was going on? She was getting her daily sunlight. Why was she feeling like she should be avoiding it?

As Luna sank down on the bank, she paddled her bare feet in the water. Something about the water seemed so...inviting today. She knew she shouldn’t swim too much, for fear of the water getting inside and killing her - but today, there was something in the air that made her feel like she could do anything.

As she slipped into the water, a surge of energy pulsed through her. For some reason, she found herself able to breathe through the water, and the further she dived down into what normally would be certain death-like situations, the more alive and awake she felt. It seemed that the further she got away from the sun, the more power she felt coursing through her veins.

If her swimming ability and sunlight need had altered so drastically, did this mean she could do other things she couldn’t usually? 

It was 1:04 a.m. and he couldn’t fucking stand it anymore. 

Sergei sat alone at a small table for two in the corner of The Steam Room. He held a steaming cup locked behind his long, cold fingers. A white straw stained inside it’s translucent plastic with streaks of red and clogged with the occasional black clump poked out of the sipping hole of the cup’s lid. He was bundled up a little too heavily for the autumn season and his cheeks puffed out from the gauze stuffed between his teeth. This miserable season leading up to All Hallows’ Eve could kiss his undead ass.

Staying in was making Devon stircrazy, but with the lockdown going on, leaving campus was not an option. Devon couldn’t even leave her room. She had to be invited into buildings, and trying to get someone to play doorman so she could eventually get back inside to a warm bed seemed like a bad idea. Trying to talk to anyone seemed like a bad idea right now. The veil was thin, and tensions were high...

and right now, her influence was so strong she could make even the calmest crawl out of their skin. 

With nowhere to go, and no one to waste away the time with, Devon straightened up and opened Buzzfeed on her phone for probably the hundredth time that day.

Sergei was curled up in the middle of his small dorm bed, wrapped in blankets with a mouth stuffed full of gauze. His sickly pallor was paler than usual and the dark circles beneath his eyes were more prominent. He was always cold, but today he felt chilled to the bone. His phone laid on the floor against the wall where he’d thrown it in frustration after reading the emergency newsletter about this awful season from the Dean of Student Affairs and informing Papa about his sudden unavailability due to the school lockdown. Needless to say, Papa was pissed; and Sergei was sure he’d have to pay for this next month when the gates were finally reopened to let him come and go at will once again.

He gagged and spat out soiled gauze into the wastebasket beside his bed. With a miserable expression, he stuffed fresh white gauze back into his mouth. The two empty gaps in his gums had not bothered him for years, but now they would not stop bleeding. Sergei was starving. There was a full thermos of warm blood fresh from the dining hall right beside him on his desk, but the old wounds in mouth wouldn’t stop bleeding long enough for him to get a single sip in. The taste of his own, dead blood was stomach churning at best and completely nauseating at worst. He was growing more and more irritable by the minute. If he went out right now, he knew he would probably end up doing something to get himself in trouble for violent conduct. Not that it mattered too much, it’s not like he could drain anyone without any fangs. He felt pathetic. 

This stupid “holiday” was bullshit. Back in Russia they had an old pagan harvest festival that took place in September, but “Halloween” was virtually nonexistent there outside of an isolated and short-lived club scene back during the ‘90s. Sergei had never felt an energy exactly like this before. It did, however remind of something else that happened back home. Something that only happened in the dead of winter towards the end of the year. Velja Noć, the Great Night, when the divide between the living and the dead is thin and easy to step across; but this only happened around Christmas during the season of Коляда. What was happening now... Halloween... All Hallow’s Eve... Samhain... and whatever other names existed for it was unique to the West. It was a little similar to what he knew from home, but still very, very different and absolutely at the wrong time of the year.