Whatever this energy was, whatever it was made of, it was invigorating on the way in and consuming on the way out, and by the time you noticed the cost, your edges were already soft, soon you'll turn to mist yourself and drift with the mist too...
The dread in Bruce's chest, the cold premonition that had not left him since he opened his eyes here, was not paranoia. It was his soul, what little of it remained, telling him it was under attack.
He took a slow breath, and tried not to enjoy how it felt.
The figures in grey were the next problem. Carriages. Scythes. Coming to take people, choosing some, leaving others. He did not have enough information to know what that meant. It could be bad. It could be worse than bad.
But he noticed, sitting with it, that the people the figures left behind were not surviving either — they were the ones in this cluster, in this mist, slowly being eaten. So whatever the figures did, 'being left' was not safety.
