#rhstart

She dug her toes into the sand, though it was cold and damp, caking and cracking where she wished it would crumble. Cressida stared down at the grey, lips pressed together tightly. The man had been found here, with that terrible symbol carved into his back. She crouched down, hand lingering over the sand, as though afraid to touch. What if it stirred something? Something ancient and hungry? Something that was not her goddess and not her friend?

time: ??? location: lobby

“Wait don't move!” Nicholas all but shouted as he frantically grabbed his camera from where it hung around his neck, quickly snapping the picture before the lighting changed. He grinned at the result, before turning the camera to show the photo’s subject how it turned out. “Take a look.”

She sat propped up in her hospital bed, watching TV, some home decorating show, it skirted just along the edge of being to her liking. The night prior it was explained to her that she would be having visitors that day, that Olette Marie Voss was well loved, so despite her ambivalence she was ready. She turned her attention to the door when someone walked in. “Do you know me?” she asked, wondering if this was a visitor or just someone who’d gotten lost.

Though typically a labor and delivery nurse, Marlee had been taking some random shifts in the emergency room at the hospital. Paying for two children to go to college on one salary was becoming increasingly more difficult, and the extra money from working overtime was helping. The distraction from her feelings was a nice plus too. She looked at the chart she was given, walking over to the patient’s bed. “Oh boy, it looks like you’ve got a little ouchie there.”

Snapchat to ....

The midnight hour drew nearer, and so the veil between worlds grew thinner in turn. Cressida had returned from the northern shore, from divining power from the moon's light, and her own had dimmed from exertion. In place of prayer, which required so much spirit, she tended idly to the church. She tidied the pews, then replenished the altar -- replacing the wilted flowers, pouring mulled wine into a goblet, nicking her thumb and spreading the blood along the metal rim. Stepping back, Cressida took her thumb in her mouth, laving over the wound until the metallic taste faded, and she turned toward the low creak of the wooden door.

"Her energy is growing," Brigid murmured, knelt on the sands of the shore, bent forward so her hands sank beneath the wet, pale grains. Her fingers splayed and sank deeper, and she wished for the the Veiled One to swallow her whole. "Hungry. Restless." Her own body felt it: the ache, the hollow emptiness, desperate to be sated.