Damien tried a third time, executing the frantic, panicked reflex of a man wildly patting his pockets for a lost wallet. The pathways through his body that had spent the past few hours learning to carry power to his hands, his legs, and his lungs found absolutely nothing to carry.
Not a trickle. Not a residue. Just noothing.
Whatever Stan's palm had done, the spiritual reservoir was shattered. His physical body remained intact, but the supernatural energy he had drawn from the air to define his existence since breaking out of his cell was gone. Erased.
And it was never coming back.
He fully understood it by the second desperate attempt.
The first reach had been pure panic. The second was the cold, clinical realization of a man discovering a phantom limb. His body had just tried to execute the one unconscious reflex it relied on to survive, and had been met not with resistance, not with pain, but with the suffocating, absolute absence of the thing it was reaching for.
