There'd been voices once. He remembered. Calling him Earth GIver, Great God, Sacrifice... They'd taken his stone while he slept, Cut into his back and carved through his ribs, taken out his heart. Or perhaps they'd cracked his skull and stolen his mind. He did not know. He'd meant to sleep for a thousand years, perhaps he had, the world he'd awakened to had been one of utter darkness, stirred only by distant words beseeching him. Formalised into prayer. He was not a god, yet they prayed to him, offering gratitude or further wishes. The first he appreciated, though he could do nothing with it, and the second he could do nothing about. 

He could not even move. There was a tightening about his limbs that did not even allow him to turn his head. He could not close his eyelids. 

Aylen found himself locked in a panicked struggle to do just that for a time that seemed beyond counting, but at the same moment, the short length of a blink. He could not understand what had happened, but he did know that his body was no longer his, and that whatever held him now was far too small, and immobile, to be of any use. As his struggles continued, the voices faded, the knowledge they brought of the seasons passing, and his people growing, drifted into a darkness his eyes could not pierce. It was strange, to be aware of himself and at once trapped beyond his senses. He could touch nothing, he could see nothing, he could smell and taste nothing... And after a time, there was nothing to hear as well. So he struggled alone. 

As he could not tell the passing time, he did not know how long he spent simply trying to move something, anything at all. But even that boon could not keep him stubbornly set against his prison. Eventually, he stopped trying. 

The moment he was no longer trying to define himself through movement, the constrictions eased. His mind relaxed, and the world around him opened up. There was still nothing to see or feel or hear, but there was space. He could sense that much, if little else. Maybe there was nothing else. He'd given up his body to a people that needed it more. That he could still think was miracle enough. It was a miracle he did not appreciate. He had not planned for millenia with nothing to do. The idea of being trapped, immobile, within nothing, weighed on him as heavily as his earlier paralysis, but with unexpected results. Rather than constricting his mind, or presence, feeble as it was, it squeezed it outward, and he felt stretched. Pulled and tugged and twisted, thoughts abraded into worthless segments of emotion and instinct until there was no more space, but an infinite abundance of chaos. None of it belonged to him.

There were edges and folds and reverberations, ripples in colour and waves of sound. It took him further into time deciphering the mess, until he discovered a single, vehement presence among the rest. Pure and shaped, faceted and singing a low sweet harmony in discord with one cracked tone. Stones. Precious gems, flawed but priceless, even the one that had chipped some time ago. With that focus, he slipped to the next realisation, feeling a strange flatness of wood that was meant to be round. It was carved flooring, weighted down and pierced with metal into an emptiness below. Every new discovery lead to a greater one, Aylen's mind burgeoning with freedom throughout the house walls, feeling footsteps and weighing walls with nails holding up fired sand, sheets of thin metal, carved stone, cold outside and layered brick walls. And yet, though he could creep through everything that came from the earth, though he could have laid out a plan of the house in every other detail, including the hidden rooms and second cellar, he could not have said who the people were within it, nor what half the metal he could feel did, hot or cold or stirring of what seemed its own accord. Nor, and this struck him sore, could he have said what faces hid behind the glass. And though he could feel streets beyond the wall, he could not go to them. 

He was trapped in the highest room of the building, surrounded by other things that did not mind the gathering layers of dust, nor the light thread of spider's silk winding around their sides. And that was well and good, for he recognised items that, although he could not see them, had no use other than to collect dust and provide a home for arachnids insofar as he could tell. He did not belong. And it was a curious thing, for he could not feel himself, nor the thing that contained him. Without the memory of pushing through it, he would not even have realised it was hard stone. He could not feel the striation of layers pressed together by some heavy force in the beginning of time. He could not see the smoothed edges worn shiny by so many groping fingers. He'd been turned into an idol, two foot high and delightfully posed stepping free of his pedestal. It was a crude rendering, when compared with many of the surrounding valuables and artefacts, but the artist had captured the elemental well enough to trap him within the depiction of a bearded old traveller. Had he been capable of it, Aylen might have paused in his desire for escape to find humour in the little spider hanging from his nose. As it was, he sought only some explanation, and a means of freedom.