His essence had wandered for an extremely long time.
At least, by his sense of it.
There were no proper days, no nights, no changing seasons, or any reliable celestial bodies by which he might mark the passage of time.
Still, he tried to measure it in any way he could.
He had been here for a very, very long time.
And, unlike other long-lived people, he did not suffer their sicknesses.
He simply could not help but feel the passing of time.
He had wandered through complex landscapes that folded into themselves and disappeared.
He watched colors develop shape.
Some of them had been beautiful.
Some had been horrifying.
Some had simply been strange.
Most had been irrelevant.
That was the problem.
For all the wonders of this place, he had discovered remarkably little that helped him.
He still did not know where he was.
He still did not know why he was here.
And, most importantly, he had absolutely no idea how to leave.
He had tried.
Naturally.
The first attempts had been almost embarrassingly straightforward.
He had reached for magic.
Nothing.
He had tried again, using a different technique.
Nothing.
He had attempted to draw upon the ambient energy of the realm, assuming that whatever this place was, it must possess some form of power.
Nothing.
He had tried more obscure forms of sorcery.
Old techniques.
New techniques.
Things he had invented himself and things he had sworn never to use again.
Nothing.
He had attempted to reach beyond himself and draw upon powers that were not technically his own.
Nothing.
He had tried several methods that required considerably more preparation than he currently possessed.
Nothing.
Eventually, he had even prayed.
That had produced nothing as well.
He wasn't religious in the traditional sense.
Still, he had hoped that something out there would make an exception for him and grant him a little power.
He had given enough service to be granted patronage by some.
But apparently, whatever gods existed did not feel inclined to grant him one now.
So he had continued wandering.
There was no power here that he could feel.
Or, at least, no power he could reach.
That distinction mattered.
He knew enough about magic to understand that absence and inaccessibility were not the same thing.
Perhaps there was power everywhere.
Maybe because of his distinct type of being, he was simply incapable of interacting with it.
Perhaps this realm operated according to principles so far removed from the laws of his own world that calling anything here magic was meaningless.
He had considered that possibility many times.
It was becoming rather tiresome.
Suddenly, he stopped.
Something was different about where he was.
He looked ahead.
At first, he thought it was another alteration in the landscape.
A trick of perspective.
Perhaps another impossibility his mind had simply learned to accept.
Then something moved.
He could feel it deep in his essence.
It was an immense force, far away, if far away could mean anything.
It was a vortex of power.
He looked, but could barely comprehend it.
It was unimaginably large.
Vast beyond anything he had encountered since arriving here.
It churned through itself in enormous spirals, folding over and through layers of something he could not identify.
Energy, power, magic.
He stared.
There was a glimmer of hope, which was immediately followed by caution.
If there was one thing he had learned over his exceedingly long life, it was that enormous amounts of power rarely appeared without enormous consequences.
He took a step toward it.
Then another.
The vortex remained impossibly distant.
He was certain of one thing.
He needed to approach it.