"Humanity isn't as cruel a punishment as you think." The afterlife isn't something he thinks he can question, or even address - he's never known or glimpsed what might come after this, despite having come to terms with his mortality unusually frequently. "Some prefer it."

What he is now - he can't imagine not being this. He couldn't imagine it either, when he'd first Ascended. He couldn't be or do anything besides what he was, energy on a plane beyond average perception, free to expand and experience the universe in its entirety. But here -

Here, there's nothing. No Others. No greater purpose. Just a city with a warped slash of spacetime chaining him to this miniscule portion of a larger universe, and he was never meant to exist like this.