Oh beautiful! I'll have to ask Lórien if I can have some wood to try to carve one of those!

The strings are usually made of animal gut, I think.

Cool. Oromë'd be the one whose permission I'd ask for that.

I should get a list at some point.

There are twelve. Manwë - lord of the airs, he commands the great Eagles, he lives on Taniquetil, he's the King of the Valar. Varda, who put the stars in the sky, lives there with him. Aulë you've met, and his wife Yavanna is the Vala of plants and trees. These are the gardens of Lórien and Estë - he is the Vala of dreams, she of rest and healing - and considered the fairest place in Valinor, and full of spirits.

Bella scribbles all this down. Spirits?

Write write write. Sounds like a pretty conventional pantheon, if gappy and with a focus on things Bella wouldn't assign a whole god to (dancing?) but that's par for the course. Thank you.

My pleasure. Rúmil says the gods of your world are no aids to your people, and all have something of Melkor in them.

They are, um, varied in how helpful they are and not safe to talk to directly for most people, definitely, but they are responsible for most of the healing magic we have so 'no aids' is a bit of an exaggeration.

Ah, all right. That's good.

Yeah. If they were all bad all the time there probably wouldn't be a world left.

She winces. The war was twelve-on-one and I still get the sense they barely held it together.

Is he more powerful than them individually, or was it just that he didn't care about collateral damage?

Didn't care about collateral damage, and has powers more suited to violence, and had time to build up his power before they realized they'd have to stop him.

It stockpiles?

They can invest it in the world, make their domains theirs. If he'd come to Valinor he'd have lost for the same reason, but they were attacking his stronghold.

Nod, nod.

Thankfully it's all over now, and evil thrown down forever, and now we just have to figure out how to make everything exactly as we desire it. That's a delightful problem to have.

It's the best problem!

Miriel's illness is less so. But we all have hope, and it is encouraging that this kind of grief is known in your lands, and solvable.

It happens sometimes, yeah. By itself, but it's also a known thing with new mothers, usually not so long though.

People were very frightened by it, they'd thought all grief was past them forever and now this. They speculated that Fëanáro'd been tainted by Melkor. It probably worsened things.

Eegh. That's... not actually plausible, is it...?

I have no idea. I think not, but I'm defensive of her and was angry they said such hurtful things. The Valar thought it could be possible, somehow.