Something touched him.
Vellichor recoiled.
The sensation was so sudden and alien that for a moment he could not tell whether it was something reaching toward him or something reaching through him.
After so long without feeling another presence, the sensation was not entirely unwelcome.
But it was wrong.
Deeply wrong.
He did not need to turn to know what it was.
Endrith's essence had moved.
The golden-edged darkness had stretched toward him, one indistinct tendril of blackness reaching through the impossible distance between them.
"Oh."
The thought that followed was considerably less composed.
"Oh, no."
He had spent an eternity beside Endrith.
An eternity talking to him and wondering whether there was anything left inside that empty shape capable of hearing him.
And now, precisely when Vellichor had finally regained enough power to perhaps do something about his situation, Endrith had awakened.
It would have been funny if it were not so inconvenient.
Vellichor found himself thinking of all those ages spent talking into silence.
If Endrith had been capable of this before, perhaps they could have spoken.
Perhaps Vellichor would not have been so alone.
He had never expected Endrith to suddenly become sentimental and recount the story of his life.
He would have settled for anything.
Even just a word, a thought, an insult.
Something.
Anything at all.
Whether it was good or bad still had to be judged.
Vellichor watched the tendril approach.
It touched him.
And immediately the strange sensation returned.
It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant.
It was simply there.
Something brushing against the boundaries of his existence.
How could Endrith touch him when he had been unable to touch Endrith?
Vellichor could not tell whether Endrith was touching his power, his essence, his thoughts, or something deeper than any of those.
Then the connection vanished as the tendril disappeared into nothing.
He stared at the golden-edged darkness.
"Are you... trying to attach yourself to me?"
Of course there was no answer.
Vellichor drifted several steps away.
The darkness followed.
It was locked onto him.
Another tendril emerged.
He moved aside, but it followed.
And when it came close, he pushed it away.
"Are you trying to drain me? Use me as a conduit, maybe? Or do you simply want to be near the power?"
Vellichor considered the possibilities, and none of them were reassuring.
Endrith had spent his entire existence seeking power.
Perhaps this was merely another expression of the same hunger.
Perhaps Endrith did not even understand what he was doing.
Perhaps there was no thought behind it whatsoever.
Only instinct.
The vortex was power beyond anything Vellichor had ever encountered, and Endrith had been staring at it for an eternity.
Now Vellichor had become another source.
Perhaps a more accessible one.
"If you're trying to steal my power," Vellichor said, "I should warn you that I've only just gotten it back. I'll not part with it anytime soon."
The tendril came again.
Vellichor's patience began to wear thin.
"Endrith, stop."
But no matter how often he moved away or pushed the tendril aside, another one came soon after.
Vellichor sighed.
There was something almost absurd about it.
After all the time they had spent together, Endrith had finally become aware enough to notice another person, and apparently his first instinct was to try to consume him.
"Very well."
The next tendril came, and he caught it.
He did not merely push it away.
He held it.
His newly acquired power surged through his form.
The darkness in his grasp twisted violently.
The golden edges of Endrith's essence flared so brightly that, for an instant, Vellichor could see something beneath them.
The actual essence of Endrith, hidden behind the darkness.
A desperate, almost primitive need to be.
It seemed that power was not merely something Endrith sought.
It was something he was.
His existence was directly tied to what he possessed, and he possessed nothing at the moment.
Endrith was nothing.
A shape without a mind.
A will without a person behind it.
Vellichor tightened his grip and raised a hand.
The space around Endrith folded, and the world obeyed the command he had given it.
Lines of impossible geometry appeared around the golden-edged darkness, intersecting and folding over one another until a "something" existed where previously there had been nothing.
Endrith struck against it.
The entire prison rang.
The prison expanded around Endrith, layer after layer.
A sphere, then a lattice, then something beyond either.
A cage constructed not from metal or stone, but from the very rules of the space around them.