Yeah. I think so.

Good. Good night.

The sky is silvery-streaked-with-purple by Elfsight when she awakens. Everyone is eating some sort of sweet-petaled flower that grows by the riverbank.

Mmm, flowers. She gamely tries them.

They taste sugary and dissolve on the tongue. Rúmil smiles at her again. The Valar are very confused that we didn't eat literally everything we saw. We had to explain to them that some things are tastier than others, and then they went around fixing a bunch of things they'd designed for us.

What, everything everything? Rocks?

No, just plants. Specifically just plants that had nutrients we needed, they knew that in a great deal of detail but didn't know how taste worked.

All the parts of all the plants? she wonders.

Yup. Mind, we can - we're meant to be able to use nearly anything for food - but we wouldn't innately.

A lot of plants are inedible or outright poisonous in my world.

I wonder if they'd be poisonous to us. We have a lot of control of our bodies. By Cuivienen the only things that were dangerous to eat were ones the Enemy'd planted.

What's Cuivienen exactly?

The waters of awakening, the place our people lived for as long as we can remember.

Why did you live there instead of here to begin with?

It's where we were, we didn't know where Valinor was or even that it existed, or that the Valar did. Same reason, I imagine, you didn't set off hunting for Valinor. Travel was dangerous and there was no reason to expect anywhere else to be so drastically different.

No, I mean - to begin with, why didn't you wake up here.

The whole world was supposed to be safe. The Enemy was supposed to, like the other Valar, use his powers to make the world good and just.

Oh.

The Valar don't know everything that's happening in the world, and they didn't even know we'd been born, let alone that we were in danger and suffering.

Oh dear. I'm glad they figured it out.

As soon as they did they went off to war with the Enemy, but wars between powers are terrible and they had to approach it very carefully to make sure the whole planet wouldn't crumble in the fighting, and that we wouldn't be in even graver danger. It took many centuries to defeat him.

That sounds awful.

He nods. Every once in a while the ground would shake. At the time we didn't believe the Valar, they'd offered to take us to Valinor already and we'd refused because we were terrified of them, so we had no idea what even to hope for as an end to the war.

Oh, so I'm not the only person they spook.