The thing went onward.
There was no destination, yet it searched.
It did not know what it was looking for.
It thought, if thought could be had, that it would recognize it, if recognition could be had, when it found it.
It felt a strange certainty that this was the right choice.
As it wandered, something changed.
Not in the realm, but in it.
The inky shape wavered, and for a fleeting instant, if time could be said to exist, a protrusion emerged from its side before dissolving back into nothingness.
Later, if later it was, another emerged.
It too disappeared.
Later still, another came, and it remained.
Then another.
It regarded them.
It did not know what they were or what purpose they served, but they felt right.
Because they resembled something it had once possessed.
It tried to move one.
The appendage obeyed.
It found that curious.
It repeated the motion.
The second followed.
Neither was entirely correct, the thing thought.
Something was missing.
The two appendages were merely short, rounded extensions of its otherwise featureless form.
Stubby things.
Incomplete.
Yet it somehow preferred them to nothing at all.
It lingered there for a while, moving them without purpose.
The motions awakened no memories.
Only familiarity.
There should have been more.
It knew that.
Something ought to have extended from them.
Something capable of grasping.
Touching.
Holding.
The knowledge existed without explanation.
So it tried.
The darkness at the ends of the appendages shifted.
Stretched.
Collapsed again.
Whatever it sought to create remained beyond its reach.
It accepted the failure without disappointment.
Not because it lacked ambition.
Because there was no reason to hurry.
Time seemed almost decorative here.
It continued its search.
The realm had changed as well.
Or perhaps only its understanding had.
The impossible structures no longer unraveled its thoughts quite so completely.
It began to notice patterns.
Simple ones.
Another landscape, once little more than incomprehensible noise, resolved into vast currents.
What those currents were, it did not know.
They did not seem to be wind, or liquid, nor were they solid.
Somehow, it understood that those currents led elsewhere.
Simple things remained simple.
A point was still a point.
A line was still a line.
Yet now it could appreciate why they existed.
The realm had not become less strange.
It had become more comprehensible.
That felt closer to the truth.
Whatever this place was, it was not changing to accommodate it.
It was changing to accommodate the place.
Or perhaps remembering how.
So it drifted onward, its two crude appendages trailing behind like unfinished thoughts, searching for something whose shape it still could not remember.