An unknown amount of time passed.
He had stopped measuring it after a while.
His existence wasn't that different from his previous one.
No hunger, no sleep, and mostly thought.
The one thing that was lacking was action.
He had changed considerably during that time, though.
His form had become far more definite.
His body, his arms, his legs, even his face, he thought.
He had not found a mirror.
Still, he had regained enough of himself that he no longer thought of his existence as some strange philosophical accident.
He was Vellichor.
A man who had lived and made choices.
And he was currently trapped in an incomprehensible realm with the most irritatingly single-minded person he had ever known.
Endrith had not changed.
Not even slightly.
The golden-edged darkness continued to stare toward the vortex of power.
Barely a creature and even less of a person.
He had tried to change that.
He had talked.
A great deal.
He did not expect Endrith to answer.
Talking had nevertheless become useful.
It reminded Vellichor that there was still a mind inside him capable of producing thoughts and arranging them into words.
He told Endrith about his life.
Not the polished version.
Certainly not the version that would have been useful if he were attempting to convince someone that he had been a decent man.
He told him everything.
Or as much as he could remember.
Some of it was ugly.
Some of it was worse than ugly.
There were things Vellichor had done that he had never spoken aloud, even when he had been alive.
There had been people he had hurt deliberately.
People he had sacrificed because the alternative had seemed inconvenient.
He told Endrith about those.
He told him about wars.
About the peculiar arrogance of believing that because one understood something, one therefore had the right to control it.
He told him things that embarrassed him, too.
Those were somehow harder.
There had been foolish decisions.
Ridiculous arguments.
Moments when he had said something he thought was clever at the time and, several years later, could barely contain his embarrassment.
There had been people he had attempted to impress and failed miserably.
There had been occasions when he had been frightened and pretended not to be.
He even told Endrith about some of the truly humiliating moments.
He told Endrith.
The golden-edged darkness remained motionless.
Vellichor continued anyway.
He spoke about happier things, too.
There were fewer of those.
But they existed.
Good food, quiet evenings, places he had visited simply because they were beautiful, and people he had met who wanted nothing from him and from whom he wanted nothing, just company.
The rare occasions when he had helped someone without expecting anything in return.
He found himself lingering on those longer than he expected.
He had built things.
Destroyed things.
Changed things.
He wondered whether Endrith would have understood that.
He wondered what Endrith's memories might have looked like.
They had both been terrible men.
That much was obvious.
But terrible men were still men.
There had to have been something else inside Endrith once.
Something besides ambition.
Besides power.
Besides the endless hunger that had reduced him to this.
"Did you ever have anyone?" Vellichor asked one day.
The vortex churned silently before them.
"Someone you cared about?"
No response.
Vellichor glanced toward him.
"I suppose that's a question you can't answer."
He thought about Sonder.
"I had someone," he said.
He paused, and said nothing more about it.
"I wonder if you did."
He had never known Endrith well.
He knew the king's deeds.
His wars and the Irathy conquests.
The experiments.
He knew the stories told about him.
But Endrith the person?
Vellichor could scarcely remember hearing the great Wizard King speak.
Two of the most powerful men their world had produced.
And Vellichor knew almost nothing about the man himself.
"Perhaps you were never very good at talking either."
Nothing.
Vellichor sighed.
Still, he kept talking.
Because perhaps Endrith would someday hear him.
Perhaps something remained buried beneath all that darkness.
And perhaps not.
But even if Endrith never understood a single word, Vellichor had discovered that speaking was not only for the benefit of the listener.
It was for the speaker, too.
And in a place where there was nothing else to remind him that he was still himself, that was reason enough.