Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-3134600-20140811224344/@comment-14267015-20150411062424

It has never been confirmed that the Cocoon was Warlock's, it was just a reference to him. As for the Aether, I'm a firm believer that it is the Reality Stone. The Dark Elves wanted to use it to make the universe the way it use to be, aka mostly dark matter. That isn't the natural state of the universe, technically the "natural state" of the universe is eternally transitional. Slowly changing from one state to another. As for those that argue that the Aether has showed some form of consciousness, all of the Stones have one. The Tesseract chose to open a portal for Loki/the Sceptre, no one touched it. The only other possibility that makes sense to me would be the Time Stone and they planned to reverse time back to the way things were. But there wouldn't a way to explain how Malekith used the power of time to increase his strength, energy bolts, or to grow in size.

I also speculate that the Sceptre contains the Soul Stone. In the comics the Soul gem was the first one Thanos got a hold of, wouldn't be too much of a stretch if he had gotten it off-screen in the MCU. Furthermore, when Selvig was under the Stone's influence he stated the knowledge it gave him was "truth". The Soul gem has long had an ability called the "Cold Light of Truth". Plus, if the Sceptre was using the Mind Stone why did it need to come in contact with someone to control them? Mind control doesn't require anyone to touch anything, it's all psionics. Mind also couldn't be used to fire energy bolts, Soul however has been said to be able to attack one's soul in various ways.