Something shifted at that very moment... Bruce felt it, It was small at first. A slight tightening. A faint pressure behind his sternum where, in the physical realm, his core would have sat. Then the pressure spread into his shoulders, down through his chest, into the soft architecture of his soul-body and as it spread, he felt himself firm up.
His edges, which the mist had been thinning, suddenly held.
He felt the draw stop.
The mist around him kept moving, kept brushing his skin, kept doing whatever it had been doing but it was no longer eating him. It could not reach him anymore. He had a wall now, not made of anything he could see, but real. A wall of himself.
The will had woken.
A second later, almost at the same moment, he felt the aura come.
That one was different. It did not tighten inward. It pushed outward. A soft radiating presence that extended a hand-span past his soul-body in every direction, then settled there, holding its shape.
