Iskandrin had prophesied the the power of the ancient seal, the dragon who became the heavens, would drive Calliope mad in time. He had been right, the spell that encased her body in stone had left her mind free to wrestle with what she had done, and what she had taken into herself. She had become unmoored, adrift with powers and ideas that no human mind was meant to comprehend. It had driven her quite insane but, as a wise man once said, eternity is a long time, esspecially towards the end. She did not know how long had passed, could not have known even if her shattered mind hadn't spent long decade recongealing, like dissolved salt emerging from a drying tidal pool. Sanity, of a sort, had returned to her only to be threatened again by the fact of her apparently eternal confinement. Without her hands or her tongue she could do no magics save those that originated in her own mind. With no spell books to teach her and no feedback to go on she had worked blindly, day by day trying to invent mental magics from scratch. It was an impossible task for a mortal, but she had the time. Slowly, ever so slowly, she had learned to reach out, to feel what was going on around her. Iskandrin had not hurled her blindly from the Plain of the Ziggurat, he intended her to wake one day and free him from what she now understood to be a hellish half life, torn between the mortal and the divine, bearing a wound that could never heal, and she couldn't do that if she awoke at the bottom of the ocean and immediately drowned or was crushed in the black depths. Slowly, ever so slowly she had felt herself in some warm place, years passed before she felt others around her and decades before she could so much as brush their minds. Even then it was the work of decades to influence them, to place in their minds the image of her, to draw them to worship her as they did their own feeble gods. Slowly, ever so slowly, she cracked open her own well of power to release a trickle that they had been able to shape, proof they thought, of her divinity.

Generations had passed. They were slow and stupid. But she was patient. She didn't have any other options afterall. They didn't know how to write, so she taught them, they didn't know how to forge tools, so she sent them dreams, they couldn't speak her words, so she had them carve them into the stone. All done as a blind woman might craft a chest of draws, with infinite frustration at how much easier it might have been if she had but a moment outside of her marble prison. At last she felt like the day had come, like they might finally work her liberation, felt it so strongly she could have sworn she felt her heart beat again, though she could no more swear than she could move. Then... nothing. It was as if a poor sexual partner had brought her close to release and then suddenly leaped from the marriage bed and vanished. The nothing endured, the eternal cold of her stony existence and the creeping thought that all she thought she had accomplished was just another trick her mind had played upon her...

The scream that had begun ages ago tore from her throat as she toppled to the ground in an undignified heap. She twitched violently, unable to bring to mind any of the once familiar rituals of operating a body. She came very close to dying simply because her heart forgot to beat, but a spike of adrenaline and fury at the thought were enough to make that desicated organ spasm violently, and the old poison began to pump through her veins. Her breath, foolishly expended in her scream, suddenly sucked in and she sat up, blinking one eye at a time in awkward rememberence. A man was standing before her. His garb was strange and his eyes were shocked. She extended her hand and spoke an arcane word of unmaking that should have blasted him out of existance. Nothing happened, though the man shivered slightly as though a cold breeze had blown down from a mountain. Calliope frowned and repeated the exercise, this time directing her ire at a nearby boulder. It compliently exploded into gravel. The man had freed her before her time she realized. She owed him for awakening her and by ancient covenants could not destroy him until she first repaid him. She extended her hands and drew darkness in around her until it swirled into a shift of midnight silk. The same magic lifted her to her feet, not so much for dramatic effect but because she wasn't sure she could operate all her muscles at once.

"Who," she demanded in the ancient Temple tounge. "Are you?"