The first thing he notices is the lights; they're dazzling, stunning, beautiful in the way things have not been in a long time, may never be again - at first he thinks somehow a Silmaril, though he can see the man in front of him perfectly well and see that it's no Silmaril he's holding, because that's the only association he has with that kind of beauty. 

The Enemy can take beautiful forms, but there is something about this form that screams not an Enemy. He tells the guards to stand back. He watches, silently, breathing it in, so beautiful, so soothing -

- not wise, to relax -

"Excuse us," he says, "who are you, and what magic does that work?"

The light falters, drawing in and dimming down, from city-wide blazing brilliance to a soft glow that fills only a single room. The stranger opens his eyes and blinks, startled, only getting more startled as he takes in the details of his new environment.

He doesn't seem to have heard of the concept of private thoughts, so it's perfectly clear that he doesn't understand a word Maitimo says, and equally clear that when he replies he's saying, "Sorry, what—? Where am I?"

(He's small. Human, probably, but an unusually healthy human - not much of a surprise given the city-sized healing aura - and an unusually short one. He does not recognize the people around him as Elves, just notices the height and the prettiness and assorted unfamiliar cosmetic details - doesn't recognize the language or the architecture or the clothing, not as any of half a hundred examples he thinks to compare it all to. He concludes that he is very, very far from home, and has no idea how he got here. Somewhere in the back of his mind he wonders if this is in some way the Emperor's fault.)

HI, he says. You're in Himring, in the palace, and appeared here at random. Can you explain the magic and assure us it's not going to hurt anyone - there are a lot of people in the range it's affecting -

Um? he thinks, confused and slightly wary but adapting rapidly to the idea of mental communication. I'm Dawn-shining Taliar and that was my healing aura... I guess there's no reason why you should recognize either of those concepts any more than I recognize your palace... it's not going to hurt anyone, though, it's kind of exactly the opposite of that. Where do I need to begin the explanation? My soul in particular, soul artifacts in general...? I don't see any soulbearers, but that doesn't necessarily mean you don't have them.

We don't have them. That'd be a good starting point.

Okay, let me think - this mind-talking thing we're doing, does it always have to be structured sort of like language, or can I send complete thoughts?

Thoughts work fine.

Great, that'll make explaining soulbearers much more convenient.

And it implies that this friendly strange probably-a-king of the beautiful pointy-eared tall people might just be able to read Taliar's entire mind, but whatever, if that's true it'll just speed up the process of demonstrating his trustworthiness.

People in my world have souls, and we can manifest them into artifacts. This is mine.

He lifts up the pendant slightly, displaying its fluid abstract bird-in-flight shape and soft golden glow streaked with blue and silver. Even without his active attention flinging its light out as far as it will reach, it still shines beautifully.

For the rest of the explanation, he abandons the structure of words and works directly in thoughts and memories.

A person's soul is the expression and embodiment of their self, their personality, their flaws and virtues and hopes and dreams. Externalized into an artifact, it gains magic that is both functionally and aesthetically linked to those things. Someone who values honesty and communication is likely to get magic that aids them in communicating honestly; someone who values strength and victory in battle might get destructive warlike magic; someone who loves flowers might get an artifact shaped like a flower, or magic for helping plants grow, or both. Your artifact can change if your personality changes; neither its appearance nor its functions are static. But the changes are usually gradual, occurring over the course of years, months, weeks, or at minimum days.

Once you manifest your soul, you can't dispel the manifested artifact and put it back where it came from; you're stuck with it for life. It will always broadcast an accurate sense of your personality to anyone who sees it. Some artifacts have also been known to make sounds, and they carry the same information. If anyone touches your artifact, that's very bad news for you: it's overwhelmingly, incapacitatingly painful, in a way that no one who's experienced it can even manage to coherently describe afterward.

The nature of your soul's magic depends on your own nature, but its strength and scope depends on your actions. To exalt your soul is to cultivate virtues you admire, act in accordance with your values, and generally strive to be the best version of yourself, the person you most aspire to be. To debase your soul is to do the opposite. The more you exalt your soul, the more its power grows; the more you debase it, the more it weakens. And you will know when you do either of these things; your soul gives you a sense of what it needs. If you do something that exalts or debases it very dramatically, gaining or losing a lot of power at once, it can even react in a way that's outwardly visible.

Normally, it's not considered safe to manifest your soul until you're twenty years old. Taliar did it at seventeen, six months ago. There were circumstances. He can get into the politics later; it's not directly relevant to this explanation.

Relevant things: The three main themes of Taliar's magic are integrity, problem-solving, and exaltation. The integrity theme doesn't give him a lot of direct active abilities; he can detect lies, but it's a passive power, showing up when he needs it and subsiding when he doesn't, rather than answering to his conscious will. Problem-solving is a highly flexible theme: with a three-day lead time, he can pick up whatever set of magical powers his soul finds most appropriate for dealing with the situation at hand, whatever it is. And exaltation is both the source of his healing aura and the reason his healing aura can fill an entire city. Taliar is deeply and powerfully invested in helping and uplifting the people around him; his soul responds to that by magnifying its own power in proportion to the exaltation of his friends and acquaintances, regardless of whether or not they themselves are soulbearers, an unprecedented arrangement that makes him the most powerful soulbearer in history by a factor of at least a hundred.

Did that all come through okay? Any questions?

It is....almost too good to be true, someone showing up with war-winning powers and a complete guide to his personality and how to get along with him. That came through very clearly, thank you.

We're at war with an evil god. And he sends everything he knows of Melkor, every escaped prisoner he's spoken to, every orc, every battle, every battalion marching off to war - 

...wow. Wow.

I'm going to want to hear about this from more than one person just to be absolutely sure, but - that sounds like exactly the kind of problem I'm made to solve. Except I'm not sure if I'm up to the task yet. I've never fought a god before; there aren't any at home. Can you introduce me to large numbers of exceptionally virtuous and fulfilled people, or people who have the potential to be exceptionally virtuous and fulfilled?

...yes, definitely, though our understanding of virtuous and fulfilled might be different than yours, being a different species - will that be a problem? 

He shrugs. I guess we'll find out. 'Virtuous and fulfilled' isn't quite the thing anyway, the thing is 'exalted and personally compatible with me such that we can be good friends', but 'virtuous and fulfilled' is a reasonable summary under most circumstances. Exaltation of the soul is a surprisingly difficult concept to pin down and it rounds off to virtue pretty well most of the time.

The war's been going on for four hundred years. Those are hard circumstances under which to feel - exalted, or fulfilled, or anything in that vein - but we're fighting it for a good reason, and when we win it we can build a good world, and I am very hopeful that we can find lots of people who are compatible with you in that way. 

There are plenty of people who have no trouble at all exalting their souls while at war. It was kind of a big problem at home, a couple thousand years before I was born.

He doesn't explicitly send the surrounding context, but it's easy to pick up on the part where an army of soulbearers fighting an army of soulbearers has been repeatedly proven to end badly for everyone involved.

Can it be learned? Is it likely the Enemy could do it? Because if so, you need to learn to guard your thoughts quickly.

...it would be pretty bad if your Enemy became a soulbearer, yeah - although maybe not as bad as you'd expect; approximately, the more evil someone is, the less powerful their soul - I'd expect that if it was possible for people in this world to do it, someone would've figured it out already, but I can tell you how and you can have someone try and then you'll know within a day or so. And I guess in the meantime I can learn how to guard my thoughts.

(Looks like he was right about the mind-reading being more general than it initially appeared. He can just hear Esarkan dryly asking him why he's trusting this stranger so thoroughly so quickly, but then again, Esarkan would know that better than almost anyone - Esarkan guessed ahead of time that Taliar would have his unique relationship with exaltation; Esarkan is deeply aware of how Taliar relates to people and how well he can make it work for him.)

For anyone accustomed to interacting with people who have it it's purely communicative, but if you've never heard of it before then you're likely keeping your thoughts public by default. I can tell everyone to stop listening but then we shall have to confront the language barrier.

And even a weakened Vala-soul might be a problem, since they're so much in the first place. 

Might be. I don't know anything about Valar.

His guess is that the muchness of Valar won't translate to a more powerful starting point, but he's not confident enough in that guess to articulate it. ... He has had access to this method of communication for all of two minutes and he's already going to miss it dearly if he learns how to restrict himself to sending only the thoughts he chooses - is there a way to restrict himself to only sending thoughts to the people he chooses, instead, or some combination of those things, what's the mechanism here...?

That'd be possible, yes. What you do is pick a metaphor, and you could pick one conducive to keeping your thoughts private only from strangers and the Enemy...and he explains how it works.

That's pretty straightforward, I guess...

He ponders metaphors, and after a few seconds he settles on a house: thoughts he wants to make public are announced at the gate, people he wants to share all his thoughts with are invited in, and if he wants to share more than the public allotment with someone but not quite give them everything, he can send them a letter. His thoughts vanish for an instant before he imagines Maitimo into the figurative house. Did that work?

Yes, that's the idea. You generally have to practice maintaining the mental habit for a while before it's present consistently; I can ask people to let you know if you slip up.

Thanks. I'll keep in practice.

And in a few days - maybe less, it seems like it would be a pretty tiny power - his soul will probably start enforcing the boundary for him regardless of how well he's keeping it up himself.

Incredibly useful, that. I appreciate how you're using the telepathy - it does a lot for trust, means we'll notice faster if there are misunderstandings getting in our way -

My thoughts exactly, he says, laughing a little at the not-quite-a-pun.

So to-dos: get you a chance to introduce yourself? Osanwë range is ten miles or so by default, or I can tell everyone within three hundred miles enough about you they'll know you well enough to tune in, and then we can figure out how to help you work with everyone you need to pull this off. You wanted a chance to confirm this: do you want to go outside the kingdom to do that, you could verify that the Dwarves also think very poorly on the Enemy but they're a couple hundred miles away and the language barrier'd be a real problem there...

No osanwë among Dwarves? he guesses. Yeah, I think I can pick up enough verification just in the process of getting to know enough people to hit the right power level. Did you want me to explain how to manifest your soul so you can have someone check if they can do it? And uh, speaking of introducing oneself, I don't think I caught your name...

Maitimo. 

Pleased to meet you, he says, very sincerely. Of situations I could've landed in after inexplicably vanishing from my world, this is one of the better possibilities. I could've landed somewhere I'm no use at all, I could've landed near unfriendly people or people with no workaround for the language barrier, and instead, friendly telepathic king with an evil god in need of solving.

And we are certainly outrageously lucky to have had you land on us. And everyone is lucky you landed here rather than a couple hundred miles north. It's really lovely to meet you and I am outrageously excited about all of this.

Taliar grins. It's so delightfully affirming when people are excited about his ability to help them solve their problems!

Can I assume that you need the same things in terms of accommodations as humans on this planet, or will that leave us with some sort of terrible omission?

If you have humans and they match up pretty well with my idea of humans, minus the soul part, then I can't think of any terrible omissions I'm in dread of, but of course if I could think of them they wouldn't end up omitted...

Well, if anything comes up you should of course raise it to our attention right away. We do have humans. You are shorter than our humans and look like you'd be of a different human racial group but I think the same species.

I'm shorter than my humans too, I am in fact just short.

He thinks of other humans he has known - his family, his emperor - and they are indeed all within approximately normal human height range. There's variance in racial groups, too, and some of the examples that cross his mind match the locals more closely than he does.

(Oh, and he bruises really easily - which is again a personal quirk and not a species thing - but these days he can just activate the tiniest fraction of his healing aura and be cleared of accumulated injuries in short order, so he doubts he will ever be majorly inconvenienced by that particular fragility again.)

Yep, those look like humans! We should exchange geopolitics and histories and so forth but I would rather like to introduce you to everyone first. I am very eager to have this war ended.

I will be delighted to be introduced to everyone! And subsequently delighted to end your war!

So he makes an announcement, and broadcasts it to Taliar as well, explaining the healing aura and his presence and that in order to win the war he will require lots of people in their capacity as their best selves, and that he can heal people and people in need of healing should come by the palace in the following organized manner.

Taliar helpfully remembers for Maitimo the trajectory of his healing aura's range - he's been able to get a pretty consistent few more feet per day out of it even in between making new friends, although that might be borrowing from the problem-solving section of his powers, which hasn't seen much use lately because his whole life is now structured around touring the world with his city-sized healing aura. By rough estimate he's currently working at a power level somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and twenty times what he'd have if he wasn't cheating, and every new friend is approximately one more person's worth added to that multiplier, with variance depending on his personal investment in them and how exalted they are. So they should expect that in the course of him getting powerful enough to fight an evil god, the maximum size of his healing aura will expand by about fifty feet per friend. It's not always that precise or immediate, but that's what his memory suggests.

Okay. And will the problem-solving bit sort out how exactly this can be used against the Enemy, or do we need to figure this out ourselves?

The problem-solving section of my soul is generally pretty good about landing on a set of magical powers that will solve the problem in front of me, although sometimes I have to think for a bit before I figure out what my angle is supposed to be, my soul is apparently cleverer than I am. The Enemy is definitely the biggest problem in front of me right now. I'm not sure exactly what it's going to look like, but at some point I will turn up with a set of magical powers capable of solving the Enemy, and it will probably be reasonably obvious when that has happened. If we're really outrageously lucky it'll happen three days from now. I don't think we're that lucky; I think I'm going to need to work pretty hard to get up to an Enemy-solving power level. And I don't think I'm going to get the powers until they'd be big enough to actually work. It - wouldn't fit, for them to show up in advance and then grow to the right size.

Huh. Okay. Making friends it is, then. Is the healing thing only physical or does it affect psychological damage or manipulation, do you know? The Enemy's servants are all sworn to him...

(and he'll need to keep Findekáno well clear until the war's won if the aura is oath-affecting -)

Sworn?

He can tell that that means something ominous in the local context, but he's human, from a world populated entirely by humans; he's never heard of the local kind of oaths before.

Elves and orcs can bindingly give their word. We usually use this to do things like promise to abide by agreements that are beneficial but otherwise hard to enforce, or promise we're telling the truth, or similar. But the Enemy has orcs, as soon as they're old enough to speak, swear to obey him. So they do, all of them, no matter what.

...

That is completely unacceptable. It might in fact be the most completely unacceptable thing Taliar has ever heard. And he is certainly going to find a way to solve it. But it's not the sort of thing his healing aura could take care of automatically, at least not yet, maybe not ever; it sounds like a magical effect, and it has to do with minds, and both of those are harder to manage than ordinary healing - he's only recently gotten the healing aura to the point where it can restore memories lost to time or injury or disease, and it needs sustained focused personal attention on specific people to do it, he can't just turn it loose on a city and have everyone start remembering things they've forgotten. If - when - he gets anywhere on erasing forced oaths, it's likely to be more like that than like reversing aging and fixing broken bones.

Do you get a sense of progress - will you know when you're close -

Sometimes, yeah. But I'm not even sure I should be trying to liberate the Enemy's soldiers yet. If it works really well it'll be useful, but if it doesn't work well enough and I get attached to the idea anyway...

It would be strategically unwise for Taliar to get personally invested in rescuing hundreds of thousands of orcs from their forced oaths if it turned out that he could only do it one at a time with great effort. A small population of freed orcs sounds like a huge vulnerability without much practical benefit. But Taliar's soul does not care very much whether things are strategically unwise: erasing forced oaths is definitely the sort of thing that would exalt his soul, and abandoning people he cares strongly about rescuing is definitely the sort of thing that would debase it. If he starts seriously pursuing orc freedom, there will come a point where he can't stop seriously pursuing orc freedom without having a moral crisis and setting back his power growth timeline by months. Probably best to save it for cleanup.

Makes sense. We can appeal to Mandos, after the war, so once we can do it at all we can do it for ones we've had to kill in the meantime as well.

Wow - wait, who's Mandos? You have an afterlife?

The closest thing to an afterlife in Nuime is the tendency of soul artifacts to persist after the soulbearer's death, for a duration anywhere from a few weeks to a year or two. If you can get the soul to someone with resurrection powers while it's still solid, you can bring the person back. No one's ever been able to resurrect someone without that person's soul right in front of them - Taliar means to get to it eventually, of course, but he has no idea how powerful he'll have to be before it starts working.

Elves and orcs live forever. If you destroy our bodies our souls linger, and Mandos is a god who can build you a new body. Humans here die just like humans in your world, mostly very young, though we've been trying to change that - your healing aura should help a lot -

I've been around the whole empire with it. Even with me gone, nobody's going to die of old age there for at least eighty years. Do you have any disembodied friends I should be trying to resurrect, or does Mandos have it covered? And I can definitely go on healing tours here, to whatever extent that's possible to do safely.

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 -

Huh, that's way smaller than Nuime. Should be pretty easy.

World's new, about four hundred years old. Is yours older than that?

...his father is older than that, never mind the rest of the world.

Elves are older than that, but the Sun rose four hundred years ago and all of the humans arose after the Sun.

Oh. Yeah, my world has had humans for much longer than four hundred years. We're not sure how long there were people before the Soul Wars, but it must've been a while because their population was much bigger than ours, and it's been about two thousand years since then and there's something like a couple hundred million of us.

Wow. Soul wars?

A long time ago, it used to be much harder to manifest souls, and soulbearers were really rare. The first time that large numbers of people all manifested their souls at once, they were in a country that was at war, and they almost wiped out the entire country they were at war with, until the losing side got their own army of soulbearers together, and then it was a huge mess and both sides ended up getting completely destroyed. Everyone decided that an army of soulbearers against an army of soulbearers was a really bad idea and they definitely shouldn't do it ever again. Then a few centuries later someone decided that they wanted an army of soulbearers and didn't care about the consequences, and by the time anyone else was willing to fight them they'd already conquered like half the world, and it was an even bigger nastier mess, and that's the Soul Wars. They didn't so much end as get to the point where there weren't enough people left to fight on a wider scale than individual warlord against neighbouring individual warlord.

And what policies are in place now to make sure that does not occur again -

That's kind of a long story but I can tell you if you want!

It seems like it might be pretty important!

Well, the really short version is 'Esarkan is emperor of the world and won't let anybody get away with trying to muster an army of soulbearers'. But the context goes back through two previous world emperors, and forward through that time when Esarkan's son Seofar tried to steal one of the southern provinces and I had to manifest my soul to fix it.

I am very looking forward to it but in that case perhaps it'd be wiser to get all the logistics in motion first. 

Yeah, I think so too.

So he settles down to work on that, sending Taliar a line to what he's doing as he does - though if you're not used to juggling eight conversations at once, it'll come out a little muddled - and they spend several hours sorting out how to safely get everywhere in the country and how to bring human laws in line with the ones for Elves now that both are immortal.

He's not used to juggling eight conversations at once, but it doesn't take him long to get up to speed. Listening in on Maitimo having eight conversations all aimed at establishing a safe healing-aura tour route and updating the laws to reflect the new status quo is utterly delightful.

Good, because apparently his good mood and his conviction that he's acting righteously is of literally magical importance. Maitimo smiles at him. Another hour of this, then I think we can let the gears grind for a bit and you can tell me the history of your world.

I look forward to it. Though watching you work is pretty amazing in its own right.

I cannot imagine how one runs an empire without telepathy. 

Esarkan makes it look easy but I bet he'll be consumed with envy when I eventually go home and tell him about your telepathic empire-running skills.

Sadly we have yet to find a way to give them to humans!! Perhaps by the time the war's won and we find a way to send you home someone will have sorted that.

That would be amazing. Sign me up.

Dwarves have immunity to all mind-affecting magic, which definitely has its benefits, but I'd miss osanwë terribly. The ability to really connect with people.

I'd have a hard time giving this up even for immunity to all mind-affecting magic. Even if there was some mind-affecting magic to be pressingly worried about. Like you said, the ability to really connect with people. And no language barriers! And no delays trying to find the right word for something or figure out how to explain it! And no time wasted on you figuring out if you can trust me!

It would have been a lot of time wasted! The Enemy can pull some elaborate things and we cannot afford to be incautious!

So I'm really glad I can skip all that by cheating with telepathy!

An adoring smile.

And an hour of logistics. 

And then - I can't wait to hear how your world handles ensuring there aren't soul wars.

(The adoring smile makes him glow a little inside, but he doesn't quite notice. It's hard to tell why, because he isn't thinking about it, because he isn't noticing.)

So, he starts, for a couple thousand years, the world was mostly just a bunch of scattered territories controlled by whoever'd won the latest bunch of fights. Every so often someone tried to grab a bigger piece, and it didn't work, or it worked for one generation and then they'd die and their kingdoms would fall apart. Then came Tezru Zierni Diakor, the First Emperor.

('Tezru' is a Nuimena word that translates as something like 'true, strong, right, just'; Taliar helpfully includes the meaning.)

He did two things nobody else managed before him: conquered the whole entire world, and built a government strong enough to survive his own death. Unfortunately, he left it to his son Alo-tentire Zierni Arime, who promptly went paranoid and started assassinating all his relatives for fear that they might threaten his power - a set of people that included my grandmother and nearly included my mother, who was a child at the time. My grandfather, Indre-rithal Kazaryne Fariol, got together with another survivor of the purge, Dekha-fanshel Zierni Esarkan. They decided Arime had to go. So they went to war with him. No armies of soulbearers - a few on each side, but not enough to add up to another Soul War. It helped a lot that Esarkan is exceptionally immortal - his soul is self-resurrecting, so if you kill him he just pops back up again with a sarcastic comment.

(Alo-tentire - 'far-seeing'; Indre-rithal - 'broad oak'; Dekha-fanshel - 'all-enduring'.)

Esarkan fixed everything Arime broke, made restitution to the families of the other victims, and spent the next few decades building on the foundation Tezru Diakor left for him. He's a really good world emperor. But then he had a kid, Tekhesin Zierni Seofar.

Tekhesin means 'mighty'. It is not a very creative soulname. Seofar was that sort of person.

Seofar decided he didn't feel like spending his whole life as a prince, waiting for a crown that could never pass to him. He mustered some political support and headed down to Atialemain, an island province off the south coast of the continent, where he declared himself the local king. Esarkan was kind of stuck. He could've gone to war, but he absolutely did not trust Seofar not to try to raise an army of soulbearers against him. He could've tried assassination, but Arime was a little too fresh in everyone's minds for that to be a comfortable option. And Seofar was pretty awful - didn't care about his people at all, just wanted to live in luxury and order people around and occasionally torture somebody - but he never quite got bad enough that deposing him by force would've been worth it. Esarkan was just about resigned to waiting him out and taking back the province once Seofar was safely dead of old age. And then I came along.

He's still not sure how Esarkan managed to predict subsequent events so accurately. Esarkan just smirks whenever he asks.

He paid a lot of attention to me growing up because I'm Fariol's grandson and he's been really consistently impressed with everyone in my family so far. So he noticed what kind of a person I am, and he made some guesses about what might happen if he sent me down to Atialemain and I saw what it was like there. Seofar has a daughter about my age, Princess Kelora. Esarkan arranged a marriage between us.

The conversation went, pretty much verbatim: "How would you feel about marrying a princess?" "Do I get a choice?" "No."

And I went down to Atialemain and met Kelora and her family, and... it was really bad. Kelora was just about the only person there with a detectable conscience.

He is eliding over the details because he really doesn't want to think about them.

I manifested my soul - got lucky and didn't hurt myself doing it - and asked Kelora if she'd prefer a revolution to a wedding, and she said that sounded like a much better deal all round, and I figured out why my soul was more powerful than it had any right to be, and three weeks later Seofar was dead. I took Elaneth-imire as my soulname because, well, he gestures at his soul. 'Dawn-shining' is a very accurate description.

That is an incredible story.

And suggestive that he should tread carefully. Well, Findekáno's out west, under orders that'll encourage him to confirm whatever story's needed. Everything else he's done has at least looked justifiable, and Taliar trusts him already - congratulations. You said your emperor might somehow be the reason you're here - is that because sending you somewhere you could fight an evil god seems in character, or does he have that kind of magic?

Purely because it seems in-character. If he has magic that can send people between worlds, I've never heard of it, and I'd expect to have heard of it, he'd be all over establishing trade between worlds and stuff. But it does seem very much in character.

Esarkan is amazingly competent and deeply invested in the safety and happiness and prosperity of his subjects and all together he makes an excellent world emperor, but he does not really have any scruples as such. If he heard about this world and happened to be able to throw Taliar at it, he would not at all consider it necessary to warn Taliar first.

It is good that he considers those the criteria for an excellent world emperor. Well, let's hope it was that since otherwise I do not know our prospects to send you home. 

We have eighty years before I need to start worrying that people will be dying of old age again. I don't expect it to take me eighty years to defeat your Enemy, and once that's done with I can turn my attention to interworld travel.

I like the way you think. Okay. I will ask if there's anyone who'd like to try to become a soul bearer, and I will introduce you to some people who I expect you to get along with well...

Sounds like a plan. At some point I should also eat something - it was midmorning in my world; what time is it here...?

Afternoon. I don't even know if our days are the same length - he sends vaguely what could get done in a day - before the Sun they weren't.

Sounds like about the same day length. Also sounds like I have totally missed lunch.

Taliar is not always the best at remembering to take care of himself. In his defense, watching Maitimo run his empire is really distracting.

He has someone bring them in a very generous lunch to make up for its lateness. My father had the same problem. My brothers and I would trade off responsibility for making sure he ate and slept and got some light sometimes.

That sounds like Maitimo's father is not currently around forgetting to eat and sleep and go outside. Perhaps Mandos does not in fact have the reembodiment thing covered.

My father's good at reminding me. Kelora, too, nothing escapes her.

Your would-have-been wife?

Yeah.

Taliar is in fact in love with her, he discovered that not long after they met, but having grown up in Seofar's court Kelora is inclined to stay far far away from the entire subject and Taliar wouldn't dream of trying to convince her otherwise. They're very good friends, it works very well for them, his soul shines brighter whenever she's in the room...

Awwwww.

Taliar grins. Being in love is very good for my soul!

Good to know. 

Everyone's, or just yours?

Mostly just mine. Some people get a little bit of an effect, if they find it exalting, but I'm the only one who can draw power from other people directly. Kelora is... you remember I said most people I make friends with are one more person's worth of soul-multiplier? She's... more than that. A lot more.

Why's that? Extraordinary compatibility, or personality in its own right?

It's hard to define or explain, and he only has the one example to go on, but it seems like what's happening is that being in love with her magnifies the effect she has on his soul - something to do with the way he feels about her, something like his soul being wrapped up in her in a way that doesn't happen with friends he isn't in love with. There is an exceptional amount of compatibility going on there, but it's not just that, he's exceptionally good friends with Esarkan too and Esarkan does not make his soul shine.

Either way, it's lovely. And the more I understand the people you end up close to the better-advisedly I can introduce you to people you can become friends with...

Does that mean it would be a valid strategic use of both our time for me to spend the next several hours gushing about Kelora and all the other amazing people I know?

Yes, I think it totally would!

Excellent.

So, this is the princess Zierni Kelora. Isn't she pretty? When they met, she was so sad, living in a constant storm of fear and frustrated compassion. He hasn't actually asked, but it's possible that the first time he made her smile was her first smile since early childhood. She was so stifled on so many levels by her father's court, and when she finally got to leave, it's amazing how fast she blossomed. She's actually happy now. Still very very quiet, shy, closed-off, you'd barely know to look at her that she has feelings at all - but Taliar can tell. She gets along with her grandfather - they're not close, but they work well together, and Esarkan has confided in Taliar that if he had any use for an heir he'd have no qualms about appointing Kelora. She is close with Taliar's father, Corino. They clicked really well from the moment they met. Both of them are wise compassionate thoughtful types, and Corino is... restful. Taliar is many things but restful definitely isn't one of them. It's good for Kelora to have friends who are closer to her energy level.

Kelora is not a soulbearer, but Taliar can imagine what her soul would say about her if she held it in her hand. It would call her wise and thoughtful and fair-minded, shy and reserved and slow to make friends but deeply loyal to those she cares about. It would tell people about her courage, her patience, her incredible sense of responsibility, how careful she is about making sure that she's doing right by people, how dedicated she is to learning from her grandfather how his empire is run and pointing out when she doesn't think he's doing a good enough job. (People willing to tell Esarkan he's wrong about something and worth listening to when they do are a rare commodity. Taliar's family, Kelora, and not many more. He values them highly.)

He can't comment on pretty, but the rest of what'd make Taliar fall for her is very apparent. As well as the general case what-sort-of-people-does-he-work-with, and the answer seems to be people with no personal vices at all, or perhaps he's very naive and they're all hiding some.

He goes through his family next. The scarcity of personal vices continues to be a theme.

Linsi-kelen ('bright flame') Kazaryne Aeleva, his mother, is an eloquent visionary with a sharp mind and a kind heart. She works for Esarkan as a solver of oddball problems, things nobody else can figure out. She wrote up a plan for conquering Seofar by force, back when that option was under discussion. Taliar has read it. It was brilliant. Having actually fought and won that war in three weeks, he still wished he'd had her around to help. Together they probably could've done it in two.

She is not, in fact, literally flawless. Hang around her long enough and her soul will point out her temper, which she keeps very well controlled but which has been known to get the better of her once in a while. Taliar wasn't actually present, he'd been on the road for several days by that point, but he has heard stories about Aeleva's reaction when she learned that Esarkan had sent her son to Atialemain. Rumours that she actually literally killed the emperor are probably false, but she definitely did storm into the palace with her soul burning hot enough that a couple of doors needed replacing and there are still footprints scorched into the stone floors.

Madai-almerind ('high-flying') Nirahn Corino is thousands of years old, born in the early days of the Soul Wars, in a country that was at the time unaffected. He left the continent and flew around the world a few times when things got bad, which is how it's conclusively known that there aren't any more continents hiding somewhere out of sight. His soul looks like a round pale cloud, shimmering blue and white by turns, and he is wise and patient and deeply loving and occasionally given to mischief of a mostly benign nature. Taliar has never met anyone with a deeper insight into the human mind than his father - a skill hard-won over those thousands of years of losing friend after friend to the ravages of time. Corino broke down in tears when Taliar reported his first success at de-aging people with his healing aura.

Grandfather Fariol is definitely where Aeleva got her temper, and he doesn't keep nearly so tight a hold on his. He's good friends with the Emperor, and the things they have in common include a ruthless streak. But he is still a good person and Taliar still loves him. His soul looks like a gnarled brown tree, with hints of autumn fire where its shape suggests leaves. He is intensely stubborn and frequently rude and he loves his family more than anything else in the world.

You positively glow with how much you care about all of them, and I don't think it's a soul artifact thing.

It's a me thing. I care a lot about my friends and family. I care a lot about most people I encounter, really, but I care about my friends and family even more than that.

And they sound like very impressive people in their own right.

That too. But I think most people can be impressive under the right circumstances. It's finding the circumstances that's the trick.

My favorite part of my job is putting people in circumstances where they will discover themselves really good at things.

Isn't it just the best? I love when that happens.

And I think I have a better idea of who you should meet. Competent people, in essence, with some care not to grab ones who are openly racist or favor slavery but competent people and trust the shared objective of war-winning to do the rest...

Oh good!

But perhaps tomorrow? It's pretty late.

Yeah, good idea.

I will have people show you some nice guest rooms.

And people walk in to do that.

Taliar thanks them very cheerfully for showing him to the nice guest rooms, and transmits his enthusiasm for how nice the guest rooms are, and does not at any point disinvite Maitimo from his head.

He has good dreams.

He comes up with a list of lots of people Taliar should get along with, and coaches them very mildly, and in the morning has one of them bring him breakfast and a whole spate of questions about his world.

Taliar is happy to have breakfast and talk about his world!

Lovely! Then Taliar can have a whole morning of introductions while Maitimo sorts out logistics for humans being immortal. He doesn't want to lower their birthrates, he wants them to keep multiplying. Hmm, how to do this...

He gets along very well with all the people he meets. The engineer-like Noldorin mindset and general intensity both suit him very well.

And the loyalty of Maitimo's people reflects well on Maitimo, although at lunch after his morning of introductions, Taliar reviews everyone he's met that day and wonders where Maitimo keeps his Kazarynes. Anyone who's going to rule a significant fraction of the world needs somebody around who's willing and able to constructively point out their mistakes. Esarkan uses Taliar's family for this, but if Maitimo has anyone like that, Taliar hasn't seen or heard of them.

Because he's out of town, he thinks back fondly. My consort, Findekáno - and a mental image, in which the impression of being distinctly unimpressed comes through clearly - I couldn't possibly do this without him.

Aww! I like him already.

I expect you'll get on splendidly. He's the best person I know.

That's a pretty strong recommendation! When's he going to be back?

The plan was for it to be another eight months but with the strategic situation, um, changed, I will probably call him back a little sooner than that. Not too much sooner, you're not a panacea for the problems he's sorting around Mithrim and they will still require sorting.

I don't know yet what I should be expecting from the timeline on winning your war but I suppose it would be optimistic to think I can do it in eight months, unless you've got another Kelora around for me to fall in love with...

A thought tugs on a mental sleeve. He pauses. He compares how he feels about Maitimo with how he feels about Kelora. That's... well, potentially awkward, but also really weird, even adjusting for the fact that he doesn't know Maitimo that well yet, his soul should be reacting and it hasn't at all, is it some kind of species barrier, do Elves have the wrong kind of soul...? But he's already gotten a bit of a boost from the friends he made this morning... You're not secretly evil, are you? he jokes, puzzled and embarrassed in approximately equal measure.

Taliar mentioned he's got lie detection. 

There are lots of people who would say, if they knew, that I'm secretly evil, but if you are in love with me then you are unlikely to have their objection - homosexuality is illegal and considered disgusting among the Eldar, the Valar will forcibly correct your brain for you if they find out -

They do what—

Why are there so many completely unacceptable things in this world - Taliar is torn between wanting to find and un-correct all the victims in reach, and suspecting that he shouldn't let himself get too attached to that impulse because the side effects might include enough social unrest that it would be better to wait until he can figure out how to get people to stop thinking of it as disgusting.

I'm working on it. The social aspect, that is, can't do much about the mind-altering. After the war. 

Anyway, if you exclude my terrifically evil having a boyfriend I am definitely not secretly evil.

Yeah, he didn't think so. Maitimo does not really come off as a secretly evil sort of person. Taliar doesn't know him well enough to state that with absolute confidence, yet, but - the way he reacted to Taliar's arrival, the way he handles his empire... yeah. It is wildly unsurprising in retrospect that Taliar managed to fall in love with him in under a day.

In that case I have no explanation for why my soul isn't as excited about you as I am, which is a real pity because if it was that would seriously accelerate the power-gain timeline.

Are there soul-exciting things I can do? I can work on healing logistics more - I got a lot of that handled this morning, but it's hardly all set already -

Well, far be it from me to discourage you from working on healing logistics, it certainly excites me, but I honestly have no idea what you could possibly do that would get my soul to pay attention. It should be paying attention already! It's really confusing that it isn't! 'Secretly evil' was the best theory I had going and it was a terrible theory!

At least it doesn't seem to be making things awkward. It is very important that he be able to work with Maitimo and it would've been really unfortunate if falling in love with him had gotten in the way of that.

I'm - going to need more than a day to disentangle 'overjoyed and deeply delighted you're here because this endless horror of a war will end' from 'overjoyed and deeply delighted you're here because I like how you think and what you care about' but it's definitely not going to be a problem in the meanwhile.

That's - definitely one of the better ways he could have responded. Taliar decides to just not think about potential complications until Maitimo has had his more-than-a-day.

Okay.

Do you want to hear our terrible and war-torn history next? Did anyone bring it up this morning?

No, mostly it was mildly unsettling questions about how soul artifacts work. Do tell.

So Eru - the creator of this world, he doesn't intervene in it very often but he's the one who adds new species occasionally and who enforces oaths - showed the Valar a vision of the world and sent them into it to make it. They did that, rather clumsily, because one of them - Melkor - really wanted the 'smoldering hellscape' aesthetic. They built lights, he knocked them down, they built valleys, he had glaciers eat them, they built ecosystems, he threw giant rocks at the place and caused extinction events, etcetera....

Poor guy, having his artistic vision thwarted at every turn. The rest of them too. Maybe he should've been given his own planet, save them all the trouble of having to deal with each other.

I have a sneaking suspicion Eru likes drama. But anyhow, eventually the Valar make this really nice world and two of them want to get married and they have a spectacularly magic Vala-wedding which Melkor crashes in the form of a literal supervolcano, and the Valar get fed up and retreat from the world to a magic portion of it they can keep Melkor out of. They make their new continent absolutely flawless and ignore the rest of the world entirely, except for Oromë who occasionally shows up to hunt the monsters Melkor's pumping out.

And then Eru puts Elves in the world. 

And Melkor finds us.

He takes prisoners, he breeds them and magically alters them to create the race of orcs, he tortures them, he subtly tweaks them and then sends them back just a little bit damaged, and then they either snap in the night and stab everyone around or else they start talking one tribe into war with another. Lot of wars. Ugly wars. We can't even blame them all on the Enemy, probably a lot of it was just people in scary and desperate circumstances. In the older generations everyone remembers raiding another tribe - kill the men and married women, that's how they did it - or being the victim of one of those, or both, several times -

- eventually Oromë wanders across us and finds out Elves exist. 

People in scary and desperate circumstances do tend to go to war against each other even when this is going to end badly for everyone; witness the history of Taliar's own world. But wow, he really intensely dislikes Melkor. That is not at all an appropriate way to respond to the thwarting of one's artistic visions.

And what did Oromë do about you?

Went to war with Melkor. The rest of the Valar, too. The war lasted two centuries and the whole world shook with it and when it ended the whole north of the world was uninhabitable. Melkor's monsters were still wandering freely, too. The Valar invited us all to come live in their idyllic paradise continent.

I've heard only one thing about how that turned out but it does not make me think highly of the Valar's idyllic paradise continent.

Most people thought it was a trap. A few people, including my grandfather, talked to the Valar and were willing to give it a try. So they went. To - to what we'd been used to - it was idyllic. There was enough food, enough water, there was light - this was before the Sun and Moon and after Melkor'd destroyed the Lamps, the rest of the world was lightless...there was no scarcity, there was magic healing, the Valar promised Mandos could bring back our dead.

My grandfather came back and united the Noldor - one of the, hmm, ethnic groups of Elves - and persuaded many of them to come to Valinor. The other two major ethnic groups did the same. In the end about half left, half stayed.

And how'd they get from there to nonconsensual mental alteration?

Well, the Valar'd designed themselves a paradise, and then they'd invited in a bunch of traumatized people used to war, and they were appalled by us. They had a lot of laws about acceptable conduct and they handled all the trials personally, and they were merciless - they just didn't understand - and eventually even decent people started covering up crimes, since the alternative was the Valar trying them with whatever disastrous results - they'd exile people from the continent, abandon them in the freezing hellscape parts of the continent, to their deaths, for crimes like theft or assault or blasphemy - 

- and then they came up with the idea of fixing all of us. So they did. Or tried. If you committed a crime they'd fix you. Once every yeni - he sends the concept, 144 Years - they'd correct everybody, just in case people had criminal thoughts they hadn't been caught acting on. And they weren't even very good at it - 

What an utter fucking disaster. He can still sympathize with the Valar - they sound like they were bewildered and helpless and grasping at straws - but that doesn't excuse what they ended up doing.

Yeah. They meant well, really, and I give them a lot of credit for fighting Melkor and stopping him the instant they learned what was going on, and then trying to invite us to their paradise - but they shouldn't have done it at all if they weren't going to be able to cope with a society that wasn't perfectly obedient and law-abiding.

And the promise Mandos could reembody people turned out to be hollow. Mandos would reembody people who'd consent to correction of all their faults, and practically no one was satisfactory. 

Bet I can do reembodiments, when we get to the point where that's the next problem to be solved. And I am not going to try to "correct" anyone while I'm at it.

Congratulations on being a better person than the gods, not that it's hard! Anyway, then the Valar parole Melkor.

...They carried out mandatory mental corrections on the entire population in case of criminal thoughts, and then they paroled fucking Melkor?! What?

He swore he'd been reformed! He somehow faked it, obviously, but he swore he'd seen the error of his ways and was wracked by horror at the evils he'd done and wanted the chance to undo them and, if he could be permitted to go free, would be the humble servant of everyone in Valinor. And they bought it. 

To be - extremely fair to them, which I don't usually bother doing - the orcs were all sworn to him, they were all going to be bound forever unless he told them that he now ordered them to go lead their own lives free, which he did...

Okay, that does make more sense in context.

(He appreciates Maitimo being fair to the Valar. It may be more than they deserve, but if you're only fair to people who definitely deserve it you end up with, well, Valinor.)

Still, you'd think that out of all cases where they might try nonconsensual correction in case of criminal thoughts... or could they just not do it to him at all...?

Couldn't. He's a Vala like them, they can't read his mind or tamper with it. Or vice versa, thankfully. 

Anyway, the next thousand years he's closely supervised and he lives in Valinor with us, being the humble servant of everybody.

And, obviously, determining the strings to pull to shove the Noldor into a civil war.

Obviously.

He had a thousand years, he was able to do a damned good job of it. And when he was ready he put out the Trees that lit Valinor, burned down the library, stole all my father's notes and most of his prototypes and instruments - my father was brilliant, he invented writing and he invented the enchantments we use for modern weaponry and given enough time he'd have invented a way to kill the Enemy -

- and assassinated the King, of course -

- and the Valar sat atop their holy mountain grieving their dead Trees. For twenty years.

The Valar are an enormous disappointment on nearly every conceivable level. I would make such a better god.

I know, right?

He grins. That is a pretty excellent thing to hear from Maitimo.

Okay, so what was the next horrible thing?

The King had remarried after my grandmother died and the Valar refused to reembody her. My father had two half-brothers who he'd never liked and Melkor'd spent the last couple centuries planting evidence that they both were plotting each others' murder... There were spontaneous outbreaks of fighting in the streets, my father tried to convince his half-brothers to announce they had no claim on the throne, they wanted the same thing from him, things disintegrated, people declared themselves, my half-uncle had my father assassinated -

That's awful, I'm so sorry.

The thing is that I could have ended the war before that, I knew what to do, I just - wasn't ruthless enough, wasn't in the habit - I am now - and Findekáno is my half-uncle's son, I was worried he'd never forgive me and I knew I needed him -

- I had twelve people assassinated in one night and ended the war and crowned myself the King of the Noldor and requisitioned some boats and arrived here just in time to stop orcs from overrunning every settlement on this shore. I won the war for Beleriand in three weeks. And then we settled into a stalemate that eliding a lot of back-and-forth has lasted for four hundred years.

...well, now Taliar kind of wants to give Maitimo a hug.

A hug would be nice.

So Taliar goes and hugs him.

He's sure Maitimo doesn't need to be told that assassinating a bunch of people is not a good solution to most problems. Taliar likewise does not need to be told that sometimes it's still the best one available. And all of these people are Elves so Taliar is reasonably confident he will eventually be able to steal them from Mandos, so it's even fixable, someday the war will be over and they can deal with all the secondary problems piled up behind it and build a real actual paradise where no one is forcibly deprived of their criminal thoughts and no one is incentivized to assassinate each other...

That'd be lovely. 

Won't it just?

Hugs.

Since then I have been very focusedly doing exactly what was needed to win the war and stay sane while I did, it'll be - a strange transition -

Yeah, I can imagine... well, I'm here now and I'm going to win your war for you. And if I mysteriously vanish again I will find my way back and then win your war for you anyway.

Thank you. And in order to do that, you need to meet more lovely people, so I should let you do that!

Yeah, probably.

So Taliar should probably stop hugging him. For valid strategic reasons. Even though he has not even come close to the amount of hugs he feels like that story requires.

Okay, there, he lets go. Self-control: it's a virtue!

And virtue is apparently how he wins this war.

Yes it is.

He attends all of his afternoon introductions. He gets along very well with all of the people thusly introduced. Maitimo made the right call in choosing to populate the list with unusually extraverted and idealistic people, but he also made the right call with that one engineer who's very shy but a lovely person once you get to know her; they hit it off right away. Taliar is in his element. He starts turning the conversations more toward the people he meets, the things they're passionate about - they're Noldor, they're mostly passionate about engineering, which is awesome because it turns out that Taliar loves talking about engineering, almost as much as he loves talking to people about their passions. All in all, it's a wonderful afternoon.

He can arrange eight months of those, if necessary. He meets Taliar for dinner. What a useful way to grow stronger and develop new abilities. 

I like it a lot! It suits me really well! How was your afternoon?

Productive! Humans get the next ten years off, then a couple decades of training and integration - see, part of the motivation for the old system was that humans really couldn't be useful except at menial tasks it seemed unfair to make them work a life at, most Noldorin specialties expect a century of experience and lots of it is built for Elven schedules and abilities. Now that can change.

A century of experience, really? Wow.

Magic items are hard - he sends the context, briefly, learning the mental resonances you can learn to write the laws of the universe and the ways to handle them into a piece of metal - and with magic music use for agriculture and construction, precision and consistency are very important,  and most of the logistics of the empire are handled telepathically - we have yet to figure out how to give humans native osanwë...

You mentioned that already, it's terrible, I want native osanwë so bad. Which reminds me, in the meantime, I'd like to learn a local language or two at some point, I feel like only being able to talk to people who themselves have native osanwë is an unnecessary limitation...

I can teach you Quenya.

I'd appreciate that! Although I might start to worry that you have better things to do. Then again, I guess when you can have eight conversations at once it's not such a big deal if one of them is teaching me Quenya.

I assure you that I will not spend time that is better spent elsewhile! "I can speak aloud and project the translation; it's not the fastest method but you'll pick it up that way eventually."

Oh, it's so pretty!

(Although part of that might be the influence of the speaker... no, when he checks, the language is legitmately beautiful even when he imagines it in someone else's voice. Also, wow, he is falling in love with Maitimo very far very fast. Good thing Maitimo doesn't seem to mind.)

Maitimo likes it. He's still trying to think how to make Taliar's 'make your world a paradise' ambition happen neatly in a way that doesn't lose him anything, but it's certainly going to go better if Taliar's in love with him. And he has all his thoughts, he's hiding nothing, it's so compelling... "It is pretty," he agrees, "We cultivate it for beauty, it is something we care about very deeply as a people."

I've been picking up on that. Your architecture is amazing.

And so is their fashion... and so are the Elves themselves, really... although Maitimo is definitely the prettiest, but that's mostly his personality, he has such an excellent personality. Taliar speculates that his soul would be gorgeous. Which reminds him - when am I going to be describing the soul extraction process to somebody...?

"I can set that up for tomorrow if convenient. We have people who are interested."

Sure!

Huh, he's picking up on the language faster than he expected - can't be a new soul power, it hasn't been long enough, maybe he's just better at languages than he thinks he is. Or maybe it's a side effect of being in love with his language tutor.

Osanwë probably helps but he can't help but wonder if it is a power, seeing as he's said all of three sentences. "How do you tend to notice when new soul powers manifest?"

It varies by person. Mine are sometimes really subtle, I didn't notice the lie detection until someone lied to me while it was active, but this languages thing is really unlikely to be one, I wouldn't have had any use for it at home and it hasn't been long enough for it to have developed since I got here.

"What's the development time like?"

Mine is three days for anything really new, and that's amazingly short, comes of having an entire major theme of my soul dedicated to coming up with new powers to handle new situations.

"So we'll know pretty soon once you're powerful enough to take the Enemy."

Yeah.

"If it's - not possible even in principle - would your soul give you powers helpful for evacuating, or something, or would we just be waiting and assuming it'd be doable eventually..."

Taliar's soul glimmers, a hint of silver-blue light playing across its surface.

Interpret that as contemptuous laughter at the thought of things being impossible in principle, says Taliar, patting it fondly. But if it was going to take long enough that evacuating everyone out of his reach would be a reasonable intermediate step, then yes, I'd wake up one day able to transport large numbers of people between worlds or something along those lines.

"Good. And aware of that, or would you have to check -"

I'd find out somehow, it wouldn't wait around for me to happen to try transporting large numbers of people between worlds. My soul's good about these things.

"I shall trust it and stop worrying so much. And set up a chance for you to explain the procedure to some interested people tomorrow morning."

Sounds like a plan.

And tomorrow morning there are intrigued Elves and intrigued Men!

So Taliar explains - to the Elves, he doesn't have enough Quenya yet to explain to the Men directly - how to go about contacting your soul, which is the first step in the process that eventually leads to manifesting it.

What you do is, you sit quietly in a situation where you're unlikely to be distracted - easily distractible people might need a room to themselves with nothing else going on in it; people who are good at maintaining focus might be fine doing it just about anywhere - and you think about what sort of a person you are, what characteristics your soul will embody, and you try to figure out what perceptible aesthetic characteristics your soul will have when manifested, and while you are doing these things you also try to reach for it. As soon as you're reaching for it in the way that's right for you while thinking about at least one true aspect of your personality and at least one correct aesthetic detail and no wrong ones, it'll work. Perhaps this will go better with examples:

Taliar's mother imagined her soul having red as a dominant colour theme and thought about her fondness for interesting puzzles. She tried reaching in a lot of different directions, but the one that ended up working was imagining her soul as sitting right in front of her, just out of arm's reach.

His father doesn't remember the process very well anymore because it happened a couple thousand years ago now, but he did mention once that the direction he had to reach to look for his soul was up.

His grandfather hasn't said much about how he manifested his soul, but he imagined it as shaped like a tree and the direction where he successfully imagined reaching for it was down into the ground.

Taliar himself, armed with all these stories of members of his family looking outward for their souls, wasted an hour or two on that before he found his correct direction: inward. You always know very unambiguously when you have succeeded in finding your soul. It tends to be hard to articulate the experience, but Elves have osanwë so he can just show them his, like so—he calls up the memory and shares it.

He was sitting up in bed with his eyes closed, concentrating on on his sense of his own personality and on the idea of his soul glowing with silver light, and he finally tried looking towards himself instead of away, and it was like suddenly discovering a piece of the sun coextensive with his body. He was filled with light and fire, blazing gold with just a hint of silver, and unlike every story he'd ever heard about reaching for your soul, there seemed to be no distance at all between him and it. It was right there with him, filling up his skin, closer than his own shadow. He opened his eyes and half-expected to find himself glowing, although he knew it doesn't work like that and in fact he wasn't.

So! That is how you look for your soul, any questions?

Lots of questions. The Elves are overwhelmed with how pretty, they all want to try it.

He answers questions and reminds them about the vulnerabilities inherent in being a soulbearer, and he offers to help people guess what kind of aesthetics their souls might have, since none of them grew up in a culture where soul artifacts were a thing at all and they probably don't have a frame of reference for it. Here are some examples of soul aesthetics! His father's soul like a shining cloud, his mother's like a curl of flame, his grandfather's in the shape of a tree, the Emperor's tidily geometric black-and-white crystal...

And they all set to trying it.

Hours go by. No one can find their soul.

They don't know to be discouraged by this, and keep trying.

Sometimes finding your soul does take a while!

But when it's been all day and not a single volunteer has managed it, Taliar is pretty sure it's because they can't.

That's too bad. Souls are so pretty.

It's true, they are very pretty. Taliar is proud of his beautiful soul.

It's conceivable that he might one day be able to do something that would let people from this world manifest their souls, but he would kind of rather save that for after he defeats the Enemy because it sounds like the Enemy having a soul artifact might be a huge disaster.

Yep. Enemy dead first. His volunteers reluctantly disperse.

Oh well. In a way this is promising; at least it makes it really easy to keep the ability to manifest souls out of Enemy hands!

They are still pretty disappointed, but yeah, true.

Taliar promises that after the Enemy is defeated he'll definitely find the time to put some effort into letting people from this world manifest their souls. Maybe all they'll need is to visit his world, which he's sure he'll be able to arrange someday!

This cheers everyone up somewhat. They thank him for his time.

They are very welcome! Taliar is always happy to help!

He wonders when he'll get to deploy his healing aura again. It's kind of weird going a whole day without it.

Well, we can start you on a tour of the country now, if there's nothing more pressing, maybe send a couple people you get along with to continue making friends at while you work.

Sounds good!

He will miss being around Maitimo but it is a little ridiculous to miss being around Maitimo already and getting to go on a healing tour is unquestionably worth it.

We can still talk for at least half the tour, osanwë range once you know someone well is three hundred miles.

And you know me that well already? I guess my soul helps.

And the not keeping any of your thoughts private! You make yourself very very knowable.

I like being knowable! It saves so much time and trouble!

It really does! And now it conveniently means I should be able to find you at range. Have a lovely trip.

I definitely will.

He's looking forward to it already. There are few things Taliar loves more than getting to help people.

So he tours the kingdom. It is a kingdom set up for a war; there are fortresses, and outlying communities never so large that they couldn't all fit in the fortress at need. The roads are well-maintained and wide and spotted with guard towers, all of them exquisitely pretty, all of them populated with neatly uniformed soldiers who pop out eagerly to see him. People who live more than his healing radius from a fortress are rare, and have been told to come get in range. The fortresses are artwork, all of them, artwork designed to be defensible but scarcely less pretty for that. And big. Everything is big. It would be big enough to swallow you, the glassy black floors and unimaginably high ceilings disconcerting, if they weren't full of excited people scurrying back and forth.

The southern cities are hidden. Caves with magic guarding their gates. Inside it is like being outside; Elves don't live well underground unless it is spectacularly beautiful.

Maitimo has six younger brothers. They each command a territory; he meets them all. They are joyful and intense and ask him very earnestly to convey their regards to the King.

Taliar thinks he may be falling in love with this kingdom. It's so beautiful, and so well-organized, and so - so Maitimo.

A couple of days into the tour, he notices that he seems to have acquired something very like native osanwë. In retrospect, it seems obvious that his soul would decide he needs to have it, but he hopes his soul isn't going to do that too often, because if it fills itself up with borrowed goodies there'll be less space left in which to fit the power that's going to defeat the Enemy.

He flings out his healing aura as wide as it will reach at every stop - it's growing pretty well, his new friends are coming along nicely - and basks in the joy of getting to heal all these people. So he's very chipper when he first meets one of Maitimo's brothers.

"I'd be happy to!" he says. (He's been working on his Quenya.) "He's a pretty great King, I'm very impressed!"

"He's the best." Fervently. "Except my father, and he was murdered."

His Quenya isn't up to continuing this conversation; he switches to osanwë. After the Enemy's dealt with, I think I'm going to try resurrection. From what I've heard, no one should have to put up with Mandos.

Definitely not. You can do that?

I haven't had my soul artifact for very long, but in theory there isn't a whole lot I can't do! Resurrection via reembodiment is pretty routine in my world when a soulbearer dies and their soul can be recovered in time; I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be possible here.

What counts as in time?

Depends. Souls always stick around for at least a few weeks, but if they're more powerful or belonged to people who were very attached to life, they can last as long as a few years before dissipating. Anyone with the right powers can resurrect somebody given their soul; nobody's ever been able to resurrect somebody without one. I'm planning to work on that too, of course. There's already at least one well-known weird edge case: Emperor Esarkan has a self-resurrecting soul, so whenever he dies he pops back up immediately, no outside intervention required.

That sounds like an incredibly stabilizing power for an emperor to have.

It really is! He's a very good emperor, too, I wouldn't be nearly so happy about him otherwise.

I suppose there are lots of people who'd be shit emperors either way, but lots of people'd be shit emperors because they knew they'd be dead if they eased up, not having that problem makes it much easier to be a good one.

Yeah, I see what you mean. Esarkan's not like that at all; I don't think he'd care if he died as long as the long-term good of the world was secure. He's kind of terrifyingly dedicated to the long-term good of the world.

Huh.

Which is occasionally uncomfortable for the rest of us, but very good for the long-term good of the world, which is a priority I can get behind.

The Valar were really big on tampering with people for the long-term good, I'm pretty not okay with it. But your emperor can do what works for him on his world, I guess.

...Tampering with people just seems so obviously inherently opposed to their best interests that I have a hard time imagining anyone trying it with that goal in mind. Reminds me of the funny story about the thief who burned down the famous artist's house - the punchline is, delivered while looking sheepishly at the ashes of the painting he wanted to steal, 'well, it got me in the door...'

Not 'their best interests', 'the good'. Don't think the Valar think of those as the same thing.

Well, Esarkan's definition of the long-term good of the world is based entirely around the interests of the people in it.

That's something, then. I still think I'd rather just live somewhere where no one gets to decide what's good for me.

That seems really weird but maybe I don't understand what you mean?

I want to be the person who decides what's in my best interests. Maitimo gets to do it, now, because he's really good and there's a war on. But when the war's over, I don't want to be in good hands, I don't want to be in any hands. I want to go lead my own life.

Hmm, I think maybe I see what you mean. The list of people I trust to have meaningful authority over me is... short. Luckily most of the people who've ever tried to have meaningful authority over me are on it.

I have not gotten that lucky.

Sorry to hear it.

The Valar are only not literally the worst because the Enemy exists.

I am deeply offended by almost every single thing I have heard about the Valar!

Luckily they've mostly washed their hands of us.

Yeah, if they were still trying to mess with people's heads I'd have to fight a lot more gods.

I like the way you think.

Thanks! It's always nice to be appreciated!

And on with the healing tour. They're out of Maitimo's range by now, out east where the Dwarven kingdoms are hidden.

Taliar's Quenya is improving by leaps and bounds. He is friendly and chatty and continually delighted by the opportunity to heal this many people. He misses Maitimo, but adores every new part of Maitimo's kingdom he sees, which helps.

And meets more brothers! Who explain magic artifact development, and how Elves do it and how Dwarves do it and how they once imagined it might be usable to win the war - but his father, the genius, is dead...

"...I wonder if I can learn magic artifact development," says Taliar. "You use osanwë, I have that now, sort of... and if I start trying, my soul might come up with a power that lets me cheat at it somehow, which sounds like it could be really useful."

"You're welcome to try, usually takes a week even to make something very simple even just working from a script..."

"Well, tell me how to make something simple that'll take a week and we'll see if it mysteriously gets easier three days in."

So he sets him to making a ring that will glow.

It's fascinating and Taliar is delighted. Magic artifacts are so cool!

"You should have met my father."

"I plan to, someday."

He shakes his head. "Good skill."

"That is my favourite Quenya phrase."

"Oh?"

"In Nuimena we don't say 'good skill', we say 'good luck'. I like your version much better."

"What's the point of wishing someone good luck, they can't control that..."

"Well..."

His Quenya's not quite up to this; he resorts to telepathy. I mean, I can see the logic. Assume that someone is already going to succeed at all the parts of the situation that are under their control, and express the hope that the parts not under their control will fall in line too. But 'good skill' feels like a much nicer sentiment somehow.

Bring all the parts of the situation under your control, and then succeed at them!

"I like the way you think!" he says, grinning. What a great family.

And he is left with lots of detailed instructions for artifact-making!

And he patiently sets to making that glowing ring, in his free time between healing tour stops.

Three days later, he wakes up in the morning and picks up the ring and just... pours the whole rest of the instruction set into it. He doesn't have a clock on hand, but it can't have taken more than a few minutes.

"Well, that'll be ridiculously useful. You could give everyone good armor, the best we have, the kind that makes you practically untouchable, and there's lots of projects we haven't even bothered with because they'd only be helpful at scale and they'd take a year each..."

"I'm going to love this, magical engineering is great."

And he shares all his project notes and things-in-progress and things discarded as too hard to be useful.

Taliar absorbs it all with immense enthusiasm. Magical engineering seems to fill a hole in his life that he hadn't known was there. It's so intricate and fascinating and challenging and useful! He would probably be frustrated if he had to spend weeks making each item but he doesn't, he can do a year's worth of magic item creation in less than an hour!

It's really useful! All the interesting work but none of the tedium! It'll still be years to design new items, though.

Oh well. Can't have everything. Yet.

Eventually he does have to continue with his tour. Healing everyone in the kingdom is important and he shouldn't delay it no matter how much fun he's having.

He is welcome to come back when he has more time, or correspond.

He will absolutely do at least one of those things! Curufin is great and Taliar definitely intends to keep in touch!

And onward.

At some point they circle around Doriath and the Valley of Dreadful Death and both these places are explained. Valley of Dreadful Death: full of giant man-eating spiders. Three times they've gone in with the army and killed every last one, but they always come back. There are said to be horrors worse than spiders there, too. Vampires and so on. 

That sounds like a problem. Perhaps at some point Taliar will solve it.

Doriath: Maia Queen and her Elf husband/accessory. Can't enter. Perfectly nice place but they'll shoot anyone who comes near them.

That sounds much less like a problem, although 'husband/accessory' is uh, mildly worrying...

He was on his way to a secret meeting with Finwë when he ran across her. She was so powerfully magical he forgot his name; they found him two hundred years later, happily married. So. 

Yes that is super unsettling. But probably not something Taliar should be looking into until after he kills the Enemy.

Probably not, and honestly, possibly not even then. The 'fix everything' mindset is admirable but Doriath has been perfectly clear how they feel about outside influence and it's a horrifyingly bad place to try sweeping in and staging a coup.

Sweeping in and staging a coup does sound like a really bad way to handle Doriath! If and when he ever gets around to considering this problem he is likely to take a way more diplomatic approach than that! But anyway let's talk about something else, dwelling on problems he shouldn't solve yet is a terrible use of Taliar's time.

Sure. Here's the next city on the tour.

Healing aura time!!

And after about five weeks they'll have completed the circuit of the empire. 

And they can go back to the capital and Taliar can see Maitimo again wow he is so gone. It would be embarrassing except that Maitimo has never given him cause to be embarrassed about it.

Maitimo will greet him formally and look at the soul artifact as if, if he looks closely enough, he might notice whether it's growing to Enemy-defeating proportions and then he will invite him in for dinner - you have to tell me all about it -

Taliar's soul is as beautiful as ever, the fluid abstract bird-shape with its wings outstretched in flight, glowing softly gold with hints of blue and silver.

"Your whole family is amazing! And your kingdom!" He excitedly shows Maitimo his memories - the fortresses, the roads, the people - everything so perfectly arranged - it was honestly a little like getting to look at Maitimo's soul. "And I can do magical engineering now, I made a bunch of things while I was with Curufin, it's so much fun, I love it."

I'm touched. I do rather feel as if the kingdom is my soul. And that's an absurdly useful ability, give them a couple years to develop all these new things that would formerly have been intractable and we'll have a lot more flexibility - can make the war a lot safer, give everyone good armor...

"I'm so happy!"

He really is. It's all over his thoughts, a fountain of delight. He loves being useful, loves healing people, loves helping people, loves giving people opportunities to pursue greater successes.

It can easily enough keep being arranged! Do you want to hear about the iterations on our plan-for-humans-now-they're-immortal? We were able to refine it quite a lot!

"Yes, definitely!"

Logistics! It's so cute when you can seduce people with logistics! He wants to get Taliar back to thinking about how hopelessly in love he is, that was a very satisfying state.

He is so very hopelessly in love. And still utterly delighted. These things are in fact very closely connected.

Well, then, after dinner he will say 'we should go outside' and then he will scoop Taliar up and carry him out to the balcony where you can look out on the whole city and then he will kiss him.

!!!

He squeaks adorably when picked up, and part of his mind is remembering being told about Maitimo's consort and wondering if said consort is okay with this sort of thing because Taliar wouldn't like to upset him, he sounded so nice, but by far the majority of his mind is entirely occupied with being uncontainably delighted. He loves Maitimo so much, Maitimo is so pretty and brilliant and his kingdom is so well-managed and, and, and, eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

It's so - intense - he doesn't get this from Findekáno unless he's got him under an oath for that specifically - he did, once, but when he was much more innocent -

- he doesn't think he'll be able to be properly cleanly happy until the war's over but this is certainly the closest thing -

- Findekáno will get on absurdly well with you, don't worry, he says, knowing Taliar'll know it's true -

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. He wraps his hands around his soul so Maitimo will not run the risk of touching it, and then he snuggles adoringly into Maitimo's arms. Everything about this situation is so good and he is so happy and in love.

And he can just - have this - if anything it probably helps with the war - more thorough kissing seems in order - 

Yes what an excellent idea.

The view of the city is beautiful, and Maitimo is also beautiful, and you'd think that Taliar would at some point get acclimated and stop being so absurdly overjoyed about Maitimo kissing him but no that does not seem to be happening witness his continued state of absurd joy.

And he relaxes, and holds him, and basks in being so intensely adored.

The adoration is very intense. His soul glows with joy; a little of the light leaks past his fingers, blue and gold and silver, making everything it touches a little bit more beautiful. Taliar thinks that Maitimo's face in the light of his soul is the most amazingly, transcendently lovely thing he has ever seen.

You should see a Silmaril, he says, once we've won the war. 

Humans require sleep, I should take you inside.

Yes, humans do require sleep, that is a feature of humans. I love you. What do Silmarils look like?

(It would be very reasonable to go inside and go to sleep but he is not actually sure he can muster enough reasonableness to prefer that to staying in Maitimo's arms forever - some part of him seems to half-expect that being scooped up and carried out to the balcony and kissed is just a one-time thing, and if that's the case it's definitely worth losing some sleep to extend the moment a little longer...)

No, no, we can do this every night. He sends what Silmarils look like. He carries Taliar inside to sleep.

Taliar contemplates the image of the Silmarils, gazes up at Maitimo, opens his hands a little to let the light of his soul shine more directly on Maitimo's face, and declares with serene confidence, This is prettier.

He is tempted to not let him sleep after all but that's such a perfect moment -

- Elaneth-imire, he says, shaking his head. You are a delight and I want you to end my war and be mine forever. 

I can think of nothing that would make me happier.

Competing ideas spring to mind as soon as he says it, of course, but they all revolve around the same essential theme of solving problems and helping people while loving Maitimo and being with him forever.

Good night.

Goodnight. I love you.

He dreams about his soul finally noticing how amazing Maitimo is. In the dream he becomes something very like a god, and he erases the Enemy with a thought and bridges the gap between this world and his own and blankets them both in healing light, all while curled up cozily in Maitimo's arms.

Awww. 

He sleeps well too. He arranges for Taliar to be sent all his favorite things for breakfast.

Of course he does because he is amazing. Taliar definitely notices that this is a particularly excellent breakfast, and definitely guesses who is to blame for this happenstance, and he feels that the best response is to eat his breakfast and enjoy it immensely and glow with love and happiness.

(It's so weird that his soul has not noticed how amazing Maitimo is. How can his soul not notice how amazing Maitimo is. Maitimo is so amazing.)

Vaguely worrying, but it seems like Taliar'll still be able to win the war, so. He works all day and shows Taliar what he's working on and tries not to worry too much about which mess the soul magic is holding against him.

Taliar talks to his new friends and learns more about magical engineering and listens delightedly to everything Maitimo shows him, has he mentioned that Maitimo is amazing, what a brilliant king...

He has mentioned. It's so delightful. They can get dinner together and compare notes for the day that they didn't hear from each other anyway.

Taliar keeps gazing adoringly at Maitimo and/or being distracted by their conversation and forgetting he has food in front of him, it's kind of a problem.

Eating is important. Perhaps Taliar can sit in his lap and be fed, then he'll remember the food exists.

!!!!!!!

Yes that is an excellent solution Maitimo is so clever.

In addition to making Taliar uncontainably delighted again, it also does in fact succeed in getting him to eat and enjoy his dinner.

Good. And it means it's hardly any maneuvering at all to steal him away outside again after dinner. Different balcony, different view.

The balcony is gorgeous. The view is gorgeous. Maitimo is the most gorgeous of all gorgeous things.

Is he now.

Yes. Taliar is extremely confident in this assessment. Maitimo: the prettiest. Accept no substitutes.

Well, who is he to argue. 

He will kiss him instead.

What an excellent idea. Taliar holds his soul in both hands and kisses back.

And after a while or so of that he will carry him back inside, this balcony is not adjacent to his bedroom but it is adjacent to a lovely empty one, and plops with him down on the bed - you're going to have to find somewhere to put that...

He takes off the pendant and puts it down on a small table near the bed. It glows beautifully, filling the room with light. Maitimo looks amazing in it.