He went toward the vortex.
At first, there was no apparent change.
It remained impossibly distant, its enormous shape occupying some portion of the realm that his mind still insisted on calling ahead.
But as he continued, he began to feel it.
He felt its power.
After a few moments, closer to the heart of the storm, something caught his attention.
Something that clearly did not belong.
For a moment, he thought he had made a mistake.
Another shape his mind had interpreted incorrectly.
But the longer he looked, the more certain he became.
He had expected to find something.
He had not expected to find him.
Endrith.
Or something that had once been Endrith.
The resemblance was barely there.
If he had encountered this creature anywhere else, he would never have identified it.
There was no recognizable face.
It was scarcely even a body.
A shapeless mass floated before the vortex, little more than a blob suspended within the currents of power.
Its edges were blurred, but they were golden in color.
The gold seemed to bleed outward from it without quite separating from the form.
Within the gold was nothing.
Only blackness.
Not darkness in the ordinary sense.
There was simply an absence where something should have been.
He watched.
Something occasionally moved within the blackness.
A shape or fragment.
Something that did not belong.
It would push outward, briefly escaping the confines of the dark mass, only to be pulled back almost immediately.
Absorbed and erased.
Or perhaps simply reclaimed.
He could not tell.
There was no doubt that this was Endrith.
Recognition did not always require a face, or even a body.
There was something in this essence that made it unmistakable.
And here he was.
He looked toward the vortex and saw that the creature was reaching for it.
It had no hands with which to reach, but everything about it strained toward the enormous reservoir of power.
It wanted it.
That much was obvious.
The vortex was practically within its grasp, yet Endrith could not take anything from it.
There was no connection.
No conduit.
No means of drawing the power inward.
Just as he had discovered.
Both of them had spent so long learning how to use power, manipulate it, borrow it.
And now both of them stood beside the greatest concentration of power they had ever encountered and could not touch it.
Endrith's essence appeared to want nothing else.
That was all he could see in him.
Perhaps there had been more.
But looking at that black, empty shape, he could not find it.
There was only hunger.
A hunger so profound that it seemed to have consumed everything else.
It was funny because of the absurdity.
The greatest, infinite, and unfathomable source of power, enough to make the greatest magic of their world look like a candle beside a star, and neither could get a drop from it.
But there was a difference between them.
Slowly, he had learned to exist here.
To reconstruct pieces of himself.
Perception.
Identity.
Memory.
He had his name, his past, his mistakes, even Sonder.
He had even begun to understand this place, even if he had only scratched the surface.
Endrith had not.
There was no identity.
No recognizable thought.
No apparent curiosity.
Only the endless desire for something it could not reach.
How fitting.