The sand man froze mid-step, his towering, shifting body of swirling grit and dust halting as if the very air had thickened into stone.
His hollow eyes flared with a deep golden hue, pulsing with the rhythm of his heightened awareness.
"Did it really die in my eyes?"
He felt it again—that sharp, bone-deep sensation that ripped through his consciousness like a severed nerve.
One of his reanimation servants had fallen. AGAIN!
The connection to it, an invisible thread tied to his own soul, snapped violently, leaving a strange hollowness in his chest.
He straightened slowly, grains of sand trickling down from his shoulders like a waterfall as he focused.
The entire apartment seemed to grow quieter, the distant hum of the city replaced by the pounding rhythm of his ancient heartbeat echoing in the dark corridors of his mind.
Then, another thread snapped.
A second reanimation servant gone.
The sand man's mind reeled.
