Vellichor began to think through the problem.
If his body still existed, the solution might be almost embarrassingly straightforward.
He had projected his spirit before.
He had separated consciousness from flesh.
Sent thoughts across distances.
Entered places where his physical body could not follow.
The principles were not entirely unfamiliar.
The difficulty was scale.
And the nature of this place.
He had never attempted to project himself across whatever boundary separated this realm from reality.
And he had never projected what he was back onto himself.
"Well," he murmured. "If you're still there, then I can find you."
If his body was gone, then things became considerably more complicated.
He could not simply return to a body that no longer existed.
He would have to make one.
Not necessarily a body of flesh.
Just something he could give his essence to.
Something that would not reject him.
The closer it was to his original, the better.
But there was little chance of that happening.
He thought himself unique in some ways.
A strong living mage would be the most suitable host, but he wouldn't want to take someone else's body.
Now he found himself confronted with the question personally.
If he recreated himself perfectly from his memories, somehow, would that be Vellichor?
Or merely something that believed it was?
He looked toward the distant vortex.
He shook his head.
That would be a problem for later.
Maybe not at all.
That was philosophy, and what time did he have for philosophy if he had power?
First, he needed to find out whether the original Vellichor still existed.
The power he had taken from the vortex was immense.
Perhaps not enough to tear open reality by brute force.
But perhaps he did not need to.
Perhaps he only needed enough power to establish a connection.
A single point of contact between this essence and the world beyond.
So he began with power.
There was no reason to complicate matters.
He returned to the vortex and reached toward it, allowing its current to flow into him once more.
He drew more and more.
The vortex seemed inexhaustible.
The abundance was almost unsettling.
Over the course of his life, he had usually needed to painfully coax such amounts into existence.
Here, it simply gave itself away.
And so he drew, until he thought it was enough.
There was no threshold to reach.
It seemed that the vortex had more than enough to give, while his essence could hold as much as he believed it could.
He then turned to his other task.
To find himself.
The Dread Mage Vellichor.
He knew perfectly well who he was.
An old man who had lived too long and done too much.
His identity wasn't the problem.
He searched.
He reached outward with the senses he had developed here.
He searched far and wide.
The task proved considerably more difficult than drawing power from the vortex.
Finding a single fragment of himself somewhere beyond this realm was like trying to hear a whisper across an infinite distance.
He searched and searched.
He did not know how far he searched or for how long.
He just did.
He had time.
And power.
So he searched.