How could he have forgotten?
It was absurd.
Endrith of Irath, the Wizard King.
Of course.
Of course it had been him.
Not merely another enemy.
Not merely another king.
The man.
The one person who had pursued power above everything else.
It was as though an entire section of his memory had suddenly opened up.
Endrith was not some minor figure.
Not some obscure scholar.
He had been one of the defining figures of an age.
To forget such a man would have been like forgetting the existence of the sun while still remembering daylight.
It was impossible.
And yet he had done exactly that.
He repeated the name to himself several times, as though afraid that if he stopped thinking it, it would disappear again.
It didn't, which was reassuring, and brought a sense of relief.
He had a real anchor now, but still not an answer.
Merely something solid enough to begin asking better questions.
If Endrith was the last person he remembered, then what had happened between them?
There had been a fight, that much had become obvious, but how had the battle ended?
There was so much power.
It was almost laughable how much there was.
It wasn't just vast quantities of magical force, but something stranger.
Something that had ceased to be magic at all.
It was frustrating.
He knew enough to understand what he no longer knew.
The battle did not simply end because one of them was victorious.
If it had, then one of them would be dead, simple as that.
And as he was right now, he didn't think he was.
Dead, that is.
He was here.
Which meant whatever had happened at the end had produced consequences neither of them had intended.
He paused.
Perhaps one of them had.
He considered Endrith carefully.
He had an ambitious title: the Wizard King.
What thoughts had gone through his mind was something no one could ever safely assume.
Had Endrith sought this place?
This specific plane?
It wasn't impossible.
He had no idea what Endrith actually wanted.
If concepts themselves possessed substance here, if power originated somewhere beyond ordinary existence...!
Would someone like Endrith have searched for it?
Almost certainly.
Vellichor would not.
He had no greed for such things.
Maybe out of curiosity, if he had ever thought of doing something like this.
Curiosity had always been his most dangerous vice.
Then another possibility emerged.
Perhaps neither of them had discovered this place.
Perhaps they had broken something.
A barrier.
A law.
Some sort of boundary.
He thought about it, but resumed walking.
The realm shifted around him.
Or perhaps that, too, was merely imagination.
So, where was he?
He had encountered nothing that he could even begin to call another person.
He heard no voices of any kind.
Sound wasn't entirely absent, but what he heard was mostly nonsense, or nothing that he could make sense of.
Even the motion of walking left no footprints behind, and he had found no others.
There wasn't a single piece of evidence that another consciousness occupied this impossible place.
Yet absence proved remarkably little.
This realm contained distances that couldn't be measured.
He might have wandered for an eternity while remaining only a single thought away from someone else.
Or perhaps Endrith had never arrived.
Perhaps Vellichor alone had crossed whatever threshold separated ordinary existence from this place.
Perhaps Endrith had survived.
Perhaps he had died.
Perhaps both.
Perhaps he had built another kingdom of slavery and domination during Vellichor's absence.
He disliked that.
Normally, uncertainty invited experimentation.
Here...
He possessed nothing upon which to experiment.
Only what he was.
"I don't know what to do," he said aloud.
Ignorance honestly admitted remained preferable to certainty honestly fabricated.
Still, something continued to trouble him.
Not Endrith.
Not the battle.
Not this place.
A detail.
Small enough to escape him, but important enough that its absence bothered him.
He searched for it.
He knew it was there.
He knew he had once known it.
And he knew, with a certainty that bordered on instinct, that until he remembered that missing piece, he would never truly understand why he had awakened in this impossible realm at all.