The last coherent thought Alex Mather, 34, had was of a quarterly forecast. He awoke to the physical reality of Elian, a body so utterly consumed by starvation and exhaustion that it hovered at the precipice of death.
He lay on the straw cot, his skin clammy, his mind screaming in terror as he ran an immediate diagnostic. The body was functional, but barely. It was critically depleted, and its profound stillness—the quiet of near-death—was acting as a terrible magnet. Stillness, or Death Energy, was slowly seeping into his core, drawn by the host's own cellular failure.
Elian is still alive, but his state of near-death makes him the stillest object available. He is the battery now.
The door scraped open, and Theron, a mountain of brute force and fury, stomped in. "Get up, you sickly wretch! The buckets need filling! Move!"
Alex pulled himself to standing. His limbs felt like lead, unresponsive. He was a dead man walking, powered only by the ambient death-field that now saturated his empty cells. Theron shoved a heavy, dirty wooden bucket toward him.
Alex staggered, grasping the rough handle. The weight of the empty bucket was manageable, but the prospect of carrying it, filling it, and carrying it back—the sustained expenditure of energy—was a physical impossibility. He knew he would collapse. The thin store of Stillness would be gone in minutes.
In that desperate moment, Alex focused his will on the latent Stillness pooled at his core. He commanded the energy to surge and serve its purpose: lend Vigor to the most still thing.
The Stillness rushed out, focused entirely back onto the near-dead vessel of Elian.
A deep, bone-crushing cold vacuum ripped through Alex. The Stillness energy discharged in an instant, giving his limbs a shocking, unnatural tension. The weight of the bucket became meaningless; he felt a raw, temporary surge of borrowed power.
But as the stored Stillness vanished, his mind, desperate to sustain the action, initiated a terrifying override. The power drew on the only remaining source of stillness: his own biological time.
A wave of sharp, cracking pain erupted through his temples. He felt a profound drain, as though years were being vacuumed from his body. His legs and back stiffened, and when he lowered the bucket, he saw a faint, new network of lines etched around his eyes and across his brow.
Rule Confirmed: The power works on the body. I trade biological time for unnatural vigor. I can age myself to death in a single day.
He quickly set the bucket down and masked the crippling systemic shock. Theron, already halfway out the door toward the well, didn't notice the sudden, deep fatigue or the new lines on the boy's face.
"Don't stand there! Fetch the water!"
Alex leaned against the wall, trembling. He was fighting a lethal clock in two ways: starvation was killing his host body, and his power was destroying his future. His survival depended entirely on quantifying the cost.
The necessity of knowing the rules of this new ledger is paramount, as Alex risks aging himself into a corpse with a single miscalculation.