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Confirmation reaches them in the spring that Elwing of Sirion has the Silmaril.
It takes as long as the spring only because they weren't looking. They can stretch the oath that far, they can be disinterested in knowing - but now they know, and so there it is. Elwing of Sirion is twenty-three. Half-man, so fully grown. Sirion is a city of refugees. Elves and Men and, since there are Men, children. Elwing herself has infant children.
They debate whether to send messengers. Debating is allowed, even protracted debating. The Oath, these days, is loud in their minds, and louder when they're pushing it like this, but they drag out the debate for a few months. Messengers will probably be shot on sight. The last time Elwing of Sirion received news of the House of Fëanor it would have been the news that her brothers, twins, aged seven, had not survived the sack of Menegroth.
They send messengers anyway. The messengers are shot on sight. They have good armor, Fëanorian armor, and return home injured but not lethally. Maglor's songs no longer stitch them together. War makes you worse at healing. Maglor's songs are more powerful than ever - he can knock back a wave of approaching enemies, he can make a blade's next touch deadly, he can make them faster and more impervious to danger, but he can no longer do healing.
Maedhros, when he thinks about this, thinks that perhaps there needs to be part of you that is not broken for healing spells to draw on. Or perhaps the Enemy is amused to strip that away first. Perhaps the Enemy finds it suited to the theme as the Oath tugs and yanks and twists them into violence against the lands they once defended and the peoples they once sheltered.
They send messengers to Sirion again. The messengers deliver a plea for the Silmaril, an offer of anything at all in exchange. The messengers do not return at all.
The Enemy is many many hundreds of miles from here but at night Maedhros can hear him in his head. Is it so implausible that I really let you go? the Enemy likes saying. You serve me better free than you ever would have willingly.
The Oath allows them to work slowly. They begin planning the sack of the refugee camp even more slowly than the Oath allows, so slowly that its currents are constantly tugging at them. Any slower and the currents would erode all the things they care about which are not the Oath, and it would be a disaster to go to Sirion once they've been stripped of their capacity to care about anything that is not the Silmaril. So they do not hold out forever. But they work as slowly as they can.
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Nothing much is going on. They are all kind of just sitting there.
"Yes," he says. "Do you need to eat? What do you want to do today?"
imeanforever
"I should eat something," she agrees. "You don't have to feed me anymore, although I'm not sure where to find food around here, maybe the orcs had something. I want to figure out what I need to know to sensibly address the dead people thing."
"When Elves and orcs' bodies are damaged beyond our capacity to repair them, we leave them. We can at that time, if we choose, go to the Halls of Mandos, or we can just sort of drift. You lose yourself, if you choose to just drift. In the Halls of Mandos, Námo, who is a Vala, tries to rehabilitate you and when he thinks the time is right return you to a body. People who he disapproves of don't tend to get to come back. I think it's better to bring everyone back, personally, and then resolve problems of antisocial behavior in some less dramatic way, but it will certainly cause political upheaval. I know nothing about orc social structures or what happens if you bring orc dead back to life."
imeanforever
Nod. "I made something that may have been a mistake yesterday so I'm going to have to be more careful, it might take me a while to tease out all the implications."
"The dead have been dead a long time."
"I have been fantasizing about this for a very long time. I apologize for not figuring out how to make it happen sooner and at a lower cost to you."
"Pretty obviously is. Could have done this the first day, if I'd known what I was doing."
"I knew, the first day, too. I was just - so tired of hoping. I appreciate that you don't blame me but it really would be a reasonable thing to do."
"Yeah, you will. That doesn't have much to do with it. What are your goals with the dead?"
imeanforever
"Well, being dead - and judged, by standards I am skeptical of - sounds bad and like it should stop, but I don't actually know where to put anybody. Or if the place can even sustain everyone; this is really densely populated compared to Fairyland."
"I don't know how many dead orcs there are. The place did sustain all of the Elves who are currently dead without many problems back when we were alive."
imeanforever
"And Eru is unimpressed with me about immunizing myself to orders and don't know how much I can rely on him for nonhostile commentary on things any more."
"Eru works on - narratives. The clever person outsmarting the evil monster to get the power to call on God in a moment of great need - good story. Gives you a lot of latitude. I expect he was inevitably going to stop regarding getting ordered around as a beautiful story."
He shrugs. "I still think our creator's less evil than yours."
"How else would your world have come about?"