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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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"That would be interesting."
imeanforever
"Or maybe Fairyland didn't come about, maybe it's just always been."
"There are worlds I could believe that of. Not yours. A world wouldn't run on rules intelligible to people if they were features of physical law. Someone made Fairyland."
"I don't know anything about it. It only has Men? Magic doesn't work there?"
"Men are very ill-designed. I'm tempted to ask Eru what he was thinking, while we have him. A world of only Men would not to my eye demand a creator. Elves yes."
imeanforever
"Where would the Men come from, though? Even if they aren't very well-designed?"
"Accidental transport like yours, from some world that they were designed for?" He shrugs.
imeanforever
"By that logic a world could have Elves and be undesigned as long as they were from here originally."
"Elves are bound to Arda."
imeanforever
"Is that the same thing as fading outside Valinor or will I have to look into it separately?"
"Separate. I don't know what it entails in terms of experiences we have, just that just like you knew when you were born you couldn't die, we know we're bound to Arda."
"We say 'awakened', for the ones who came into being fully grown. That's another complication of returning the dead, incidentally - some of them have been dead a long time."
imeanforever
"Do they get used to it or something, or is it just they'll have missed a lot?"
"They do get used to it. It's supposed to be a difficult adjustment. There are complications from them having missed a lot, like that they may not be used to the Sun and the Moon and no one will speak their language, but it's mostly the adjustment."
"Lórien has a big peaceful garden where the dead get brought back. It's - a little dreamlike, all you have to do is think about how you'd like things to be and they'll change. I think that was a pretty good system. Lórien also has them all brought back separately, with one person who they remember and who can help them readjust. I don't know if that's the best system but I'm disinclined to experiment, there's too much interpersonal variation and success is too hard to measure to expect that to result in a noticeably better one."
"Valinor. So you can use the original for dead orcs, which there are a lot more of, and design something similar for dead Elves."
"Something on your mind?"
imeanforever
"Not super looking forward to my next conversation with Eru, especially if I have to do something complicated like design a garden."
"I'm sorry. Hmm." You could ask him to answer the pleas of his children for the healing of their world, and then feel out whether that gets him into a more cooperative mood - he may still be able to hear us like this, incidentally, I have no idea - and then let me do the requests. Since I gather that cooperativeness is a bigger factor in success here than airtight wording.