Vell found the connection.
That was the first step, and perhaps the most important.
If he had possessed a body, he imagined he would have taken a deep breath.
It seemed appropriate.
Every fragment of power he had accumulated came under his control.
The reservoir within him was enormous. No wonder. It had taken him an eternity to fill it as it was.
Now he intended to spend it all in a single moment.
He reached for the connection again.
He needed to feel Sonder, who was so impossibly far away.
He held onto it with everything he was.
"All right."
There would be no second attempt.
If the power he had was not enough, then the amount of power he would need was so incomprehensibly large that gathering it would drive him insane; both from the power itself and from the boredom of gathering it.
Any questions he still had were for another time.
Or they would not be answered at all.
Vell gathered everything.
Everything.
Every fragment.
Every reserve.
Every impossible depth of strength he had drawn from the vortex.
He gathered it all within himself.
He breathed out.
Then he unleashed it, turning it inward.
Vell forced the entirety of his accumulated power against his own existence, driving it into himself with such force that the incomprehensible landscape around him warped beneath it.
Vell pushed against himself.
He forced his essence toward the connection and then drove more power into it, treating his own existence as an obstacle to be overcome.
It was no spell.
No incantation.
No elegant manipulation.
There was merely force; an obscene amount of it.
Vell pushed harder.
Something akin to pain tore through him.
Or perhaps he imagined it.
It felt very real.
It couldn't be.
He wasn't physical.
And there wasn't just pain.
His very existence was caught between two opposing directions.
One pushed him forward.
The other rejected him.
His shape distorted.
The crimson lights within his darkness flickered violently.
Still, he held on.
There was the connection.
There was Sonder.
Sonder was the connection.
And if she was there, then the world was there too.
The vortex had given him an eternity of power.
And for one instant, Vell saw something.
He felt something.
And sensed something.
It wasn't the realm, or the vortex, or the connection.
Seemingly, there was light.
Light that he knew belonged to his world.
A glimpse so brief that he could barely understand what he was seeing.
But it was real.
He did not care.
It was only a glimpse, and that was simply not enough.
He threw away the last of his hesitation, caution, and patience, and along with them, most of his control.
His entire existence became the notion of motion.
He needed to get through.
Any power that he could wield became force.
That force needed to become momentum.
Momentum needed to become something approaching movement.
And it seemed that Vell moved.
Not through space or distance, but through the boundary itself.
He was no longer trying to force himself through the connection.
He was reaching for more of it.
He had already gotten through.
Everything he had known for what might have been eons fell away behind him.
For the first time since awakening, Vell felt something more than stillness.
He felt gravity.
Heat.
Cold.
The distant pressure of a physical world closing in around him.
He was almost there, he thought.
Then he felt something seize him.
Something else that had become all too familiar.
He could not react as his essence was pulled in seemingly every direction with tremendous force.