Heal -

He wants to so badly, but—

—can't control it like this—it'd cover the world—

No answer.

Oh, my love...

He can't even tell if he's crying. He can't tell what shape his body is in or where any of its parts are relative to one another. All he can feel is heat and pain.

Time passes. He doesn't know how much. Heat and pain and pain and heat.

He cannot afford to let himself lose hope. Maitimo is almost certainly dead, and Taliar is being perpetually crushed under a rockslide, and he has to stay functional because in a day he'll be able to get himself out of this and kill the Enemy.

Was that the world being destroyed? Did he deny Maitimo healing for no reason? He has no way to know. And he can't fall into self-doubt because the state of his soul has never been more important than it is in this moment. He has to get through a day of this.

Pain and heat and heat and pain. Absolute darkness, a kind he's only ever seen before when Maitimo blinded him - he misses Maitimo so much, it hurts so much, he let the love of his life die to save the world and he doesn't even know whether or not the world was already beyond saving -

No. Fuck it all. If the world is beyond saving then Taliar will save it anyway. He loves Maitimo so much, and he is going to get through this and kill the Enemy and then he is going to bring him back.

Love and resolve burn brightly in his soul. He hasn't given up yet.

Heat and pain and darkness. He thinks he might be drifting in and out of consciousness, now, or maybe his sense of time is just slipping farther and farther away, or maybe it's the total disorientation of not being able to usefully feel any part of his body. He tries moving and he can't tell if it works. He doesn't know which way is up or down, he doesn't know how long it's been. It could've been ten minutes or ten hours. If this was ten minutes he's not sure he'll still be sane enough to save the world after a whole day.

Can't let himself think that way. He will be sane enough to save the world. He will get through this. He has been through so much already. He is strong enough. When he brings Maitimo back, he should remember to thank him for demonstrating that. After some of the things Maitimo has done to him, Taliar knows in his soul that he can withstand anything as long as he is sufficiently motivated.

And he is definitely sufficiently motivated.

Time stretches on, and on, and on. He tries to check on the development of his powers, but it's hard to sort through the vague feelings from his soul when his body is demanding so much of his attention. He's going to have to work on that if he wants to be in world-saving condition when the time comes. But his concentration just keeps falling apart, moment by moment.

Darkness and heat and pain. It gets a little easier after a while, but not enough to make a difference. The constant burning heat and constant agonizing pressure and constant feeling of being intensely desperate for breath would each individually be intolerable; taken together, they're well past that. But Taliar has practice tolerating intolerable things. He does it every time Maitimo picks up his soul.

Maitimo, oh, Maitimo...

He wishes he could cry. For all he knows, he is crying. He wishes he could cry and notice he was doing so.

Is the heat getting less intense, or is he imagining things? He has no idea. How long has it been? No idea. How are his new powers coming along? He can't get past the pain long enough to understand and analyze the impressions he gets from his soul about them.

It's been a long, long time since he was this tempted to give up on anything. Giving up wouldn't even help, then he'd be immortal and trapped in this eternal agony and unable to ever get out, but it's so, so hard to make himself keep trying to think when he has no idea how much of more of this he needs to endure. He reminds himself again that he has been through - well, at this point, maybe not worse, but he has been through things on this approximate level of bad before and he came through okay. He let Maitimo rape him and made himself cooperate and didn't slip up once, not even when Maitimo sent him to fetch his soul. He got through Maitimo having countless strangers touch his soul for hours, and he was okay almost as soon as Maitimo told him to be. He can do this.

Pain, and darkness, and...

His new powers finally come in.

He stretches out his senses first, and it's an incredible relief - it doesn't hurt any less, but with so much information pouring in and his attention expanding to match it, his body takes up a smaller and smaller share of his awareness. Before anything else, he needs to know: is the rest of the world still there?

Yep. There's fifty scorched miles around Angband and this pass fell in but Himring's standing, most everything is still there. Fighting for their lives, in some cases, but still there.

Okay. Good.

The god-killing power turns out to be... almost an oblique variant on his combat power from the war in Atialemain. Sun's fire. But this version is thousands of times more powerful, and significantly more - metaphysical - it's clearly designed for the express purpose of destroying something that should not be possible to destroy.

He holds the whole world in his expanded awareness, rim to rim, ocean floor to mountaintop, and he gets a firm grip on it with his landshaping power, and he flings his healing aura as wide as it will go and in the same instant reaches out with the fire of his soul and burns Melkor out of the world.

The continent tries to crumble under him. It does not have permission to do that.

It does indeed not have permission to do that.

He holds on.

Things shake a bit, but his healing aura is blanketing the entire surface of the world at full strength; no one is capable of being permanently injured right now. Some people get buried in the minor earthquakes that slip past him here and there; he figures out how to do detail work and digs them all out. Only then does he excavate himself from under the mountaintop where he spent the last day-and-change.

His first breath of air in thirty hours is agonizing on a whole new level.

But then he's fine, he's healed, he's - barely able to pay attention to his body at all now that it doesn't hurt - he hangs onto the continent until it stops trying to shake itself to pieces, and then he tries to assemble his scattered impressions of events around the world to figure out what is going on and whether he needs to help with any of it.

The orcs that poured out of Angband at the moment of the attack, some of them besieging cities now, are faltering and confused. Maitimo's brother, King in HImring, is trying to check with a palantir what is going on. Doriath is opting out of his awareness-of-the-whole-world, thank you very much.

Doriath can be Doriath if it likes; he could push it, but he has better things to do.

Macalaurë has probably already figured out that Taliar is behind this - his healing aura is a deeply unsubtle thing - but it seems worth talking to him anyway. He reaches out with his osanwë, which is as world-sized as all his other powers now. Hi. I've been under a rockslide all day and I just killed Melkor. What do I need to know?

Any other survivors of the rockslide?

No. I will be fixing that as soon as I turn up a resurrection power. Probably two or three days.

You are sure Melkor's dead?

Yes.

How - 

My soul got a lot more powerful very quickly. Maitimo and I were trying to conceal the fact that it had done so while we waited out the three-day interval that it takes for me to acquire new major powers. I noticed that there was a power for holding continents together among the set, so we decided to head south, get me as far from Angband as possible before the time came, so I'd have more time to react to whatever I was going to need to hold the continent together against. And then someone dropped a mountainside on us and I had a really uncomfortable time waiting for my new powers to finish growing in.

Where are you now?

Same place, just on top of the rockslide instead of under it. He attempts to send a simplified map abstracted out of his awareness of the world.

Do you need anything?

I'm not sure. I'm sure there's more to handling this situation than 'kill Melkor, the end' but I don't have a clear idea of what the remaining steps are.

We are going to investigate Angband, free the prisoners, round up and kill the rest of the orcs - the Enemy still has Maia servants -

What do you want to know about Angband? he asks, focusing his attention there.

Is it still standing without the Enemy, how many orcs, how many prisoners, are the Enemy's servants still there, what kind of resistance should we expect...

Taliar shows him an overview of the current state of Angband with reference to these specific questions. He can't count every individual orc, but he can get a sense of the numbers - there are far fewer prisoners but still not few enough to count up at a glance - it tried to collapse, but as it is part of the continent, it was mostly not allowed. Some of the architecture did go to pieces.

And the Silmarils?