Within the borders of the empire the Enemy hasn't hurt anyone in nearly four hundred years. Once he learns you exist he will doubtless exert himself for you, but I think we'd still have enough warning to get you safe. I can get people congregated, too, if the range isn't affected by the density of people in that range - it's going to be ridiculously disruptive but that's the best sort of problem and one we can tackle once as many people as possible are alive -

Number of people in range doesn't affect it a bit. Assemble all the huge crowds you like.

Taliar likes Maitimo's approach to the concept of a city-sized healing aura. It's a good attitude to have. Emperor Esarkan is a little the same way, but less charmingly excited about it.

I will assemble very huge crowds! I will have to change our pension system, that will not be very popular, but somehow I doubt it will deter the huge crowds from assembling!

He laughs. I look forward to it. What's the trouble with your pension sytem?

Humans who serve in the war get to retire at 24 - he sends the approximate age-concept in case their years are different lengths - which seemed only fair, with their lives so short, but Elves get fifty years on ten off to grow and manufacture enough to cover for all those humans.

It seems like their years are about the same length. And yeah, that system is going to be kind of shaken up if old age stops being a thing. What do you think you'll start doing instead?

It'll probably take me more than thirty seconds to come up with a good idea. Seven on, seven off, with deployments delayed if you have underage children? Maybe? It also depends on whether we still need a large standing army, I suppose it's possible that your magic fixes this before it becomes relevantly pressing.

My magic fixes a lot of things. I guess you should tell me about the strategic situation in more detail, then I'll have a better idea of what I might be able to do to replace your standing army. I've only fought one war before and it was very short and didn't involve much long-term logistics.

Trust me, nothing would delight me more than this war being short from here. And he sends an overview of the tactical situation. The empire stretches from the eastern mountain ranges where there are Dwarven kingdoms to the western ones near the sea; there are fortresses encircling Angband insofar as this can be done with Angband dug deep into impassable mountains. They think there are around a million orcs. There are dragons; look like this; one got loose once and they expect he's eventually planning an offensive with more of them once they're fully grown. There are Balrogs, look like this, here is how they're trained to kill them, doing so is suicide, here's the crater they leave, here are the major Maiar that serve the Enemy and their capabilities and what sort of plots tend to look like them - Thauron keeps trying to instigate rebellions among his humans, none of them have been very bloody to suppress but all of them are a pointless waste of life -

Taliar wishes his family were here. His grandfather the war hero, his mother the master strategist, his father the two-thousand-year-old survivor of the Soul Wars. They'd be a big help.

But his family is not in fact here, so it's all on him. Just like the first time. The only reason that he's pretty sure his presence here isn't Esarkan's fault is because he'd expect to have heard about it if Esarkan had the means to send people between worlds. Assuming he had that and managed to keep it secret, and assuming he'd heard about this place somehow, dropping Taliar here with no warning or explanation is exactly the sort of thing he'd do.

Anyway, tactics -

Killing Balrogs from a distance looks like the kind of thing I might be able to manage at my current power level. Dragons too. Not sure what I can do about rebellions, besides make your empire a better place to live by existing in it with my lovely city-sized healing aura.

Perhaps I flatter myself, but I think it's already a pretty nice place to live? Aside from the retirement at 24 we have the best standard of living outside Valinor - perhaps your world has some technologies we don't that we could reconstruct, or if it turns out to be possible for people of our world to manifest their souls... The Enemy doesn't achieve the things he does by offering them something nicer, unless you count 'and all the Elves will be your slaves'.

I hardly know anything about your current standard of living, but the city-sized healing aura seems like an unambiguous improvement, and one that would be kind of hard to replicate elsewhere... For testing whether people of your world can become soulbearers, you should probably try at least one human and one Elf in case species has an effect on the process. The people who have the easiest time finding and extracting their souls will be people with a lot of self-knowledge. And they'd better be really sure they want soul artifacts - not just because it's irreversible; manifesting your soul is actually impossible if you don't genuinely want to do it, it can't be ordered or coerced unless you would've done it anyway, and I wouldn't know how to tell the difference between failing because of that and failing because it's not possible here.

I bet when people see the city-sized healing aura we'll be flooded with volunteers, we can make sure they're sincere and maybe have more than one tester per species. Can the soul artifact be damaged, are there dangers to manifesting it -

Humans shouldn't try it if they're younger than twenty. I don't know what the equivalent is for Elves - 'definitely out of adolescence and into adulthood', whenever that is. It's really, really hard to damage a soul artifact, it takes some serious magic, but if somebody does manage to destroy one, the soulbearer dies instantly. And most people have no special magical protection against having their soul artifact stolen, and I think I mentioned what happens if somebody touches one, plus if someone has your soul they can do magic to you through it. The actual process of manifesting it is safe as long as you're not too young, though.

Do magic to you through it? What does that entail? We could say a hundred, for Elves, to be safe.

Well, it depends what the magic is, but for example, if someone's soul was in range of my healing aura and they weren't, they'd probably still get healed. I'd expect that if my soul was in range of your mind-reading and I wasn't, you could still read my mind. That sort of thing.

So, keeping them out of Enemy hands is really urgent - could people who are going somewhere dangerous safely leave them behind? Guarded?

Yeah. But it's pretty rare for somebody to be able to use their soul's magic while they're not physically carrying it, so for anything where they needed to be able to do magic, that wouldn't work unless they were one of the lucky few. And of course if your soul storehouse got raided...

Yeah. I might be able to see if local magic can be engineered to - make them safer, somehow - just carrying it around seems terribly risky -

Yeah, it is a little. We're just short on better options. What might local magic be able to do?

At a minimum probably make mithril nets - we use it for chainmail, it's approximately indestructible - that you could tie around your waist or something...

Most people do have to touch their own souls to use their most powerful magic, but yeah, that would be somewhat of a security improvement on wearing it openly...

You're the one who is familiar with the risks and benefits, I won't divert resources to something you think is unnecessary, but - it seems like the Enemy might be able to summon it out of your hands...

If the Enemy can move objects around like that then yeah, that's a possible concern. I can devote a little bit of magic to making my soul disinclined to be stolen, but I shouldn't accumulate a huge long list of things I'm devoting a little bit of magic to, it all adds up eventually.

Safekeeping pouch it is, then, and I will start figuring out how you can travel through the empire and get everyone healed most efficiently - it's a population of about two million -