The longer he wandered, the more his form changed.
Not entirely deliberately.
It simply followed his understanding.
His mostly featureless mass slowly gave way to familiar proportions.
A torso, a head, arms and legs. Even fingers.
Oh, how he had longed for them.
But his face remained smooth and indistinct, save for the two crimson lights. Yet even that seemed closer to what he remembered himself being.
He looked less like an apparition and more like the memory of a person.
Identity, he realized, possessed remarkable authority in this place.
What one was, and what one believed oneself to be, were not two distinct things here.
He examined one of his hands.
It moved exactly as he intended.
Reassurance.
There was comfort in familiarity.
This place could not strip him of himself entirely.
He remained who he was, even if it took a while.
The question of who had occupied him for what felt like an immeasurable span.
Now another demanded his attention.
Why?
Why was he here?
Not merely here in the immediate sense.
Why had reality deposited him here?
What had happened?
The last memory remained frustratingly incomplete.
There was conflict. A tremendous collision.
Power beyond anything he had ever wielded before, or perhaps opposed.
After that, nothing.
No death or transition to something else.
He only woke.
He considered, once more, the possibility that this was some divine realm.
He didn't think it was implausible.
Indeed, the more he wandered, the less implausible it became.
There existed a peculiar quality to this place.
Not holiness in the traditional sense.
It was something higher, but not in the directional way.
This realm had repeatedly demonstrated its contempt for such concepts.
Yet he could think of no better description.
It felt foundational.
Perhaps his earlier suspicion had been correct after all.
Perhaps this truly was a realm of ideas.
Not ideas as philosophers reduced them to abstractions scratched onto parchment, but ideas in their purest state.
Concepts before anything else; patterns before language.
If worlds were books, perhaps this was the alphabet from which they had all been written.
The idea possessed an elegance.
Unfortunately, elegant explanations were often wrong.
Still, if such realms existed, if there truly were places where concepts possessed existence independent of minds, then perhaps the creatures called "gods" might inhabit them naturally.
The idea followed almost inevitably.
Not merely powerful beings mistaken for deities.
Actual gods.
Creatures and architects of existence.
Maybe just one. Maybe many.
He searched his memories for religion and faith and found much.
Temples, priests, arguments both for and against divinity.
He remembered speaking to people utterly convinced they had encountered gods.
He also remembered exposing more than one supposed deity as merely another powerful magician with an inflated opinion of themselves.
Power alone did not constitute godhood.
Otherwise, every sufficiently accomplished mage would eventually qualify.
So what was he doing in this place?
He was many things, but he was no god by any means.