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.

Her polished black shoes left empty prints in the dust on the floor.

"Ah, this one is a favorite of mine," her father was saying over her head. Something about anchors or compasses or weathervanes, no doubt. The old wood squealed under her foot. She paused, and she lifted it -- carefully -- while the floor groaned.

"It's a silver bell from the mast of a seventh-century Liluthian warship," her father went on in a voice that fell damp on the crowded shelves and cluttered tables and half-hinged cupboards. She picked up a little box made of moving wooden gears and springs, and she wiped it on her dress, leaving a smear of dark rotted polish and dust.

"The Liluthians believed that when a silver bell rang during a storm, it protected the ship from being devoured by demons." There was nothing in the box but crumbles of folded paper and an old brass ring. She snapped the box shut and placed it back in its clean square on the shelf.

"Oh, here's a summoning crystal, from the Tilurecs. Second century. These are very rare intact," her father's voice said. After a bit of groping between a rigid stuffed tiger (teeth bared, glass eyes bright) and a chair made of old candlesticks, she found the pull rope for the curtains. Light and dust exploded into the room.

Her father coughed and smacked at the dust with one hand. "A Tilurec shaman would stare into this until he became possessed by an animal spirit." He used his dramatic voice, hoping to inspire a flicker of interest in his perpetually apathetic little girl. He saw her dark head moving occasionally among stacks of books and collections of canopic jars. "I wonder how your uncle Oscar ever got it."

"Black Rummy and cricket fights," she replied in a voice that was flat as a stale biscuit. She tapped on a glass box, which protected a single stone figurine from the inevitable dangers of her late uncle Oscar's curiosity room. "What's this?"

Finally, a spark! Father shuffled closer, grinning, careful of the porcelain masks that lined the wall behind him. "Ah, that is an earth god."

"Of the Old Folk religion, right?"

"Precisely. The Old Folk believed that the gods sleep in these figures, and that they sometimes would wake up and walk among us, if we prayed hard enough. See how he's stepping off his pedestal?"

Agatha stared at the little stone man with bright dark eyes; she felt that there was a story in that polished statue -- of all the reverent hands that had stroked it, all the offerings that had burned at its feet, all the tears and joy and anger that had been given for its judgment. She wanted to touch it, like the Old Folk had so long ago. She pressed her palms on either side of the glass barrier and began to lift --

A box crashed and clattered off a high shelf across the room, and bones and carved ivory skittered and rolled and scattered through the dust on the floor.

Agatha dropped the glass cover back into place, her brows furrowed in anger. "Pinafore!" she snapped at a flash of blue leather wing before it disappeared into an open cupboard.

"I told you not to bring him," her father sighed behind her, while she marched up to the cupboard and threw open the doors with a squeak of old hinges. Pinafore flinched and cowered in a stack of parchment scrolls, and he hid his face in his tail so as not to be seen.

Agatha plucked him out of hiding with two fingers and shook him until his claws detached from the scrolls. "You stay out of trouble," she scolded. Pinafore creaked in dismay.

Out in the foyer, someone with a strong and husky voice was calling and knocking for Mister Thrimble. Father straightened his lapels. "The movers are here with our furniture, though I have no clue where to put it. Agatha, you'll have to help me decide this room. We could sell all this stuff or --"

"We should start a museum," she announced without looking up, scratching with a finger under Pinafore's chin.

Father smiled. "We'll talk about it later." Another call boomed up from the foyer. "Here, I'm coming!" Father shouted back, and he disappeared into the hall.

He felt that...

Felt what? Warmth on a smooth surface, pressure and movement, though the warmth itself remained steady. Lifting? Perhaps... Or nothing more than his imagination. However did one tell the difference?

Focus, concentration and the reminder that he was not the imaginative sort encouraged him. Until he realised the warmth was fading, and whatever had been was gone. Aylen tried somewhere else, sweeping the floor with the vestiges of awareness left to him. There. Boards pressing together and easing apart. Something was moving above them, being supported by them, the miniscule shifts between the cracks gave them away. Moving quickly, somewhere else. No!

It was the first sign he'd felt that he was not alone up here since his mind escaped its bonds. But what could he do with someone walking away? If they'd come so close and there'd been no contact, no quiet voice reaching through the space around hm, did that mean they'd forgotten him? That he was no longer needed? Or had he lost that ability when he left his prison? He reached after those footsteps, not knowing if they were human or beast, or even capable of hearing him. But no matter how far he reached or how loudly he forced his thoughts away from him, there was no response, and the footsteps kept moving away. But the stones nearby rattled if they were free and glowed if they weren't, some of his pent up frustration escaping as he shouted silently. The strength of his anger almost negating the weakness that defined his limits. But the final consequence was no slow pause of steps down the stairs or returning to the attic. Instead, the elemental managed the noncorporeal equivalent of slamming his fists against a table. Nothing truly significant happened, but the glass encasing his statue cracked. The line snapping into existence with the same snap of a twig underfoot, designed to draw attention, and then it spidered up the casing, crackling as it went.

Aylen didn't notice. Just as he hadn't realised that the hands he'd felt did not belong to the feet moving away. But after a moment, the stones stopped their rough display of irritation and the attic was quiet again. He'd need another way to win himself free...

"We should have a museum!" Agatha insisted, adamant that Pinafore should agree with her. She held the fingerling up with both hands over her head, so he could properly see all the wonderful trinkets and treasures that a proper archaeologist would give his right leg for. "Father and I don't need the bottom floor for just us two people -- we could have display cases and little note cards with dates and things on them --"

Pinafore cut her off with a shriek and he flapped his wings, tumbled out of her hands in a panic and scratched her thumb with a claw in his fright (completely by accident, of course). "Ouch!" Agatha frowned and sucked on her bleeding knuckle, and she watched the little dragon scuttle with fanned blue wings and furious tail underneath a bookcase. "What on earth --"

*crack!*

Agatha turned around, curious long before she could think to be afraid, and she saw that the diamonds and jewels set into an ancient feathered headdress were glowing. She blinked, and she set a soft foot forward and craned her long neck -- but certainly, surely they were giving off their own light from within. And the table beside her, with its polished stones and chipped statues, was humming. She only had time to see for an instant that those stones and statues and rubies and sapphires were quivering on their own accord before it all ceased as suddenly as it had begun. Agatha stared at a statue of a cat that she could have sworn had just been shuddering, and she stuck a finger out to touch it --

*crackle*

Her eyes snapped to the glass casing, which was now for all appearances about to fall apart for the web of cracks that had woven through it. She walked around the table, pressed her hands to her knees and leaned forward to stare through it at the gleeful little stone man. "Are you the one causing this trouble?" she accused him. Really, she had no idea what had happened -- maybe Pinafore had accidentally reacted with an old enchanted piece, which wasn't completely impossible -- but this little stone god seemed to have been at the center of that little island of shaking and glowing, and it amused her to believe it was true.

"Well now look what you've done, your house is broken!" She shook her head, admonishing the naughty little statue, and very carefully she took hold of the broken case by the corners and lifted it off onto the seat of a chair beside her. "There," she said, satisfied, "now doesn't that feel better? It's not exactly fresh air, but at least you're not all cooped up."

Agatha squinted at it, and she pressed her face a bit closer. "What a funny little god you are, with a funny little face." She leaned on the table, and with her injured hand she rubbed a finger over his smooth head, wondering at the shrines and temples he must have lived in.

Funny, am I?

The weighted words rolled into existence through her mind as her finger brushed the statue’s head. It was a response so swiftly instinctive that Aylen did not, at first, notice what had changed about his imprisonment. But as a turmoil of images and questions wove their way into his awareness, his mind turned from its pursuit of those heavy steps and reached for that contact with such rapid haste that his own shock travelled with them.

Who are you? Child? Human? Mine?

No one had ever thought him funny before. And that lack of respect surely ruled out the last. But where had she? was this a young girl? The thoughts he’d discovered held no particular flavour he could understand as gender. Where had it come from? The only reason he knew he was reaching into a mind not his own was the distinctly different patterns within and a line of separation that warned him he could go so far, and no farther.

Still, he grasped at what it offered; stealing the identity it had given him through… A statue? his prison? Perhaps. He gave himself shape and form and being, though he could create only the illusion of substance, and a life-sized version of the statue appeared beside the girl. Blinking slow, stone eyes and gradually gaining colour as he plucked and threaded ideas and images through her thoughts to create himself. It took time, too long perhaps, for a young human, but short enough by Aylen’s count, before he was standing before her, a white bearded, balding old man, with green and yellow robes as he’d once worn them, draping over sandaled feet. Bright green eyes were half-hidden by wiry eyebrows and wrinkles like canyons spreading from their corners. They peered out sharply at her from the otherwise still gathering illusion as his question repeated itself, purely for form’s sake.

Who are you?

He did not yet have the hang of adapting his facial features into speech patterns to align with his thoughts, so his lips remained still as he tilted his head forwards, inclining his body ever so slightly in gratitude.

Agatha…

Her hand hovered a charged inch from the little god's bald head, and her eyes were wide. Surely, surely she hadn't just heard a voice in her head. Surely she was dreaming awake, like the seers of Ishtandur. Was she a seer? Her grandmother had always said --

The second time that voice resounded, Agatha remembered to breathe and she backed up; a shelf of skulls behind her tottered woodenly and she jumped, a hand grasping the air for something to steady her while her eyes were fixed on the statue.

Something was shimmering in the air. It was man-shaped.

Her trembling fingers knocked over an iron vase and a porcelain clown before they clamped on the back of a chair.

"Papa?" she called meekly, her head turned toward the doorway while her eyes never moved. She shifted a foot backward. She remembered to breathe. "Pa--" A head, a long robe that threaded itself with color, a nose and a beard and eyes. They all shimmered into existence before her, translucent, and soon enough they would be whole. She reached back and her voice wavered. "Papa!"

Pinafore squealed and creaked in concern and alarm; in a rare show of bravery, the young fingerling scrabbled out of his hiding place and leaped in a flash of blue leather onto the table -- jars and figurines clattered and tinkled and rolled all around him, he swiped his tail and something shattered on the floor. He thrust his long neck, little sharp jaws opened wide and he roared at the shimmery old man with all his might, like a rusty hinge.

Agatha broke her stare to look at the dragon for an instant, and her paralysis was broken. She darted behind the table and crouched there with her face hidden against her arms, taking deep open breaths of musty air. An enchantment, surely -- or, no! Papa had said .... he'd said about that statue ...

Who are you?

"An earth god!" Agatha whispered airily to herself. It was true! She smiled widely for a moment, thrilled that she had wakened an earth god -- but her expression fell just as quickly as she wondered just what sort of god she had awakened. There were gods that were capable of terrible things. She'd seen the picture books.

Slowly she peeped over the edge of the table, breathing through her mouth -- and when nothing terrible happened she stood a bit taller, shifted a bit better into the earth god's sight, her expression one of slack wonder. He looked like a kindly old man -- like a grandfather, wise and full of stories, with sweets in his pockets and an answer to every problem. Try as she might -- even while she could still see through him to the jars and bowls behind -- she couldn't imagine this old, wrinkled man committing any of the horrors of the picture books. She couldn't imagine him anything less than kind. Even as Pinafore growled and fluttered, Agatha's fear dwindled.

Agatha...

Her breath caught again, and this time she remembered her manners. How does one greet a god? Awkwardly, she laid a hand on the chair again and curtsied, and she hoped this was enough. "Yes..." Her voice was barely audible, so much it squeaked and shook. She pretended to clear her throat as she'd seen her father do when he had trouble speaking, and she lifted her chin.

"Yes," she said in her bravest and most articulate voice. "My name is Agatha Eugenia Kerrigan Thrimble. Sir." What was the correct pronoun to address a god with? She curtsied again. "I am honored to meet you. I hope you have had a restful --" no, don't say that! but it was too late: "-- sleep." She winced and looked up, and she wondered if his body were completely whole just yet. He still hadn't moved his wrinkly mouth.

"Is there something I can get you?" The more he looked like a simple old man, the easier it was to believe that he was, indeed. "You must be awfully hungry. Hush, Pin!" She made warning eyes at the squeaking fingerling, and the dragon shut his teeth.

Each subtle shift of her mind's focus helped him pluck something new from the surface of her thoughts. Whether it was about her papa or their location or how she saw him, it was all important. He'd been asleep long enough for the world to change. What he knew of this place now was surely small enough to fill a seed. But seeds could grow, could they not? It was a fundamental truth of nature, and nature, at least, rarely changed its laws. He belonged there, not in this building, house, the girl’s home. But here was where he was, not there.

And she was panicking.

He let her. Better to let her get over it than have to go through this again and again. She’d learn, or they’d part ways. His brow furrowed then, the illusion’s motions hinging upon her portrayal of those emotions that leaked between his mind and hers. A thought had escaped beneath the barrage of her whirling mind and now he played with it, uncertain and unhappy with what it might mean. Could he leave her? Could he leave his idol? She was the one giving him a shape, and he could feel that connection as though it was tangible. Did no one else believe in him? Or were they so far away that didn’t matter?

Too many questions. And they were all wrapped around her own of wondering who he was. And where her papa had gone. He didn’t know. Her papa was the other set of footsteps he’d felt then? A family lived here, perhaps. Aylen’s sigh came as a resignation of his thoughts rather than a deflation of his chest and his green gaze, the most solid part about him yet, followed her own when her eyes slipped towards the table and a tiny little dragon. Through his own eyes, he saw nothing. They didn’t exist, and so, could pass no signal to a brain that also, in a manner of speaking, did not exist. It was somewhere far away, probably still dreaming.

But Agatha’s eyes could see very well. And now that his attention had been drawn that way, he could feel the scratch of little claws atop the table. He could hear, through her ears, the clatter and crash of Pinafore’s(what an odd little name) defiance. But he ignored it, for now. Instead, returning his focus to the recreation of the body he remembered; the one that didn’t frighten little girls, at any rate. He needed her attention back on him, to gauge his progress, so he asked again for her name, and felt it sift upward towards him, likely without conscious effort on her part. Her feeling of elation sparked a confused pleasure in him, as it was a better response than everything else she’d managed so far and was a far cry from the nothing he’d suffered within the stone.

And then that sank into worry, but a slow sort, concern and just a touch of the fear that had been there before. He could not fault her for that. He, too, might have felt some concern if the air started talking to him, or he might have supposed it was one of his kin riding the wind. But as her observations dragged out his adjustments into just the very grandfatherly figure she thought was a kindly old man, he felt that fear vanishing too. Ah, children. There was a reason he’d always liked their company. Their minds were surely no more simple than their adult counterparts, but their thoughts were so much more enlightening, less guarded, and certainly freer. He wondered what a picture book was, but he decided to take one question at a time. Introductions first.

He couldn’t help the amusement inspired by her confusion as to how one went about greeting and introducing one’s self to a god, but he made no move to correct her. In so far as he could remember, he supposed he was. And if he was as old as her thoughts implied (and he’d been old before this whole fiasco began), then proper respect was due. Though he certainly wouldn’t know if she messed up her curtsy. He didn’t even know what that was.

Agatha Eugenia Kerrigan Thrimble…

Her name echoed in a cavernous way, as though to emphasise the size of the mind that accepted it and sent it back, though Aylen certainly meant no such thing. The weight came from a stirring irritation as she tried out what courtesy she knew and mentioned his sleep. His green eyes flashed and faded as the notion of moving lips distracted him, and the old elemental settled back, his emotions easing free of the illusion until it was as solid as it might ever manage. Which was to say, it looked it, but most assuredly remained nothing but air. Colourful air.

He tried, this time, as he introduced himself, so that she might think of him as something other than ‘an earth god’, to give himself the movement that would make him real. He remembered, now that she’d brought it to mind, that there were muscles that made sound and the sound required movement. Of course, an illusion would never be able to make actual words, but an illusion made by a god might make it seem like it could. Once he got the hang of it.

Call me Aylen, as it is my name. It has been years, he didn’t know how many. since I have heard it.

As he sent the thoughts to her, he tried to move his mouth to match the words. But he could no longer quite remember the shape it should take, so there was a rather strange disconnect between words and lips. He kept trying anyway, the memories would return to him or they wouldn’t, it wasn’t as though he could not communicate until they did.

Knowledge is what I need, Agatha. I have no body now to sustain.

He didn’t like that last fact, he didn’t like it at all. And his thoughts were soaked with bitterness as they crept into her mind. But he did not dwell on his lack. For the moment, it was enough that he was free from the stone.

What is a picture book?

"Aylen," Agatha whispered, and for a moment she completely forgot herself. His opacity had slowed to a stop, leaving him translucent as murky water, as he struggled to maintain what little he had with what little was provided him. His voice was in her head, and she was fascinated by the strange movements of his mouth, as if his lips spoke a language different from the one she heard. She felt that he was trying so very hard not to startle her, and the tension eased from her limbs and she took a curious step forward, while Pinafore watched with a reluctant eye.

"You need knowledge?" This poor man had been trapped inside that little figure, with nothing to see but dust and cobwebs for centuries upon centuries. His question confirmed her suspicion that he must come from a great time away indeed. She smiled; she so loved to play teacher.

"Well!" She tipped her head up and turned around slowly, scanning the high shelves and cases full of boxes and jars, but there was not a single volume that might at once appear to be a picture book. When she had turned fully toward him again, she said, "A picture book is a a volume, like a scroll with a binding," she wasn't entirely sure what era he hailed from, "that contains drawings and paintings instead of words. People used to draw pictures on cave walls and temples, you know. They would show in pictures all the stories of their rulers and wars and miracles. A picture book is like that, a story in painting, only you can carry it anywhere."

She finally spotted a wide-looking book, and she skipped around Aylen's illusion to pluck it from a shelf. It dropped open easily in her arms, and she smiled and held it up for the earth god to see. There was a long stylized painting inside, of a man in a kimono, brandishing a sword at a wide-mouthed white fox. She turned the page, and the fox had leaped into a tree, its jaws gaping in mockery down at the hapless hunter.

"Do you mean that knowledge will return your body to you?" She smiled up at him, hopefully -- but at a thought she tipped her head. "Can you see through those eyes? You look rather transparent, Mister Aylen."

The young girl’s thoughts faded into his awareness more gradually as she calmed down and he found the threshold at which he could hold the illusion and his thoughts together without barring himself from the perspective spreading out into the surrounding elements gave him. It was not perfect, nothing was, but as she could see him, and he could not see her, Aylen allowed that he looked good enough for the moment. Even if he could not make it look like he was talking. He would continue to try. Though her thought that he might be speaking a different language left his thoughts ruffled. Were they so far apart in time and place as that? It would be decidedly harder to avoid a fuss if that was the case, and he did not really know how to rectify that.

The only reason he was wielding the magic he’d been given so well now was the simple fact that it was a part of him as much as the earth, and the new aspect of it that funnelled a little girl’s thoughts into his was somewhat similar to delving through stone for its old memories. A nod, at least, was surely universal. He tried it, sending the thought of the action across the space between them and wondering what she would see. He wanted knowledge, and did, in fact, need it. If he was to manage at all in this world he’d awoken in.

At least this fact did not dismay her. Quite the opposite, and his thoughts softened with layered amusement as she fancied herself a teacher. The pleasure she felt at the opportunity he was giving her made it a little better that it was necessary, but only a little. Still, it was better than remaining in the statue. Her explanation, perhaps because it came alongside what she knew and did not have to rely on her spoken words, made him realise that she was a better teacher than he had thought she would be, and that he’d have need of that fact a great deal.

Ahhhh. I did know. Understanding dawned in his thoughts, along with some faint regret. The world had moved on without him. He knew about pictures on a wall, and stencils in wax. Paper had been far rarer. And he had never encountered the sort of binding she saw in her mind. That seems far more convenient than stone.

He followed her movement through the pressure of her feet hitting the floor rather than trying to decipher the action of thoughts and movement in her eyes. The book she found and the painting inside was fascinating. Not least of which was that there was movement inferred on the page. He could not, unfortunately, make it out very clearly, as she was looking at him rather than the book. But she knew what she was showing him. And he rather thought the fox was a cheeky sprite of a fellow. Her attempt to understand his meaning, however, left him with far less desire to enjoy this new artform she’d revealed. His heart sank as his ire rose again, but he only denied the fleeting hope as wishful thinking.

Knowledge will help me find it. But it cannot recreate it. For all he knew, his body might be lying at the bottom of the ocean, in pieces. It would explain why the prayers had gone silent. Even if he could still reach it, he did not even know where to begin searching. The last he had known of it, their world was rather well covered by water. His thoughts were quickly turning sour when she interrupted them.

Hmmm? See? No. They are not real. It is no matter, yours are.

He had never been very well suited to using tact.