Huh. 

...he doesn't stop. It's such an interesting power.

He is frozen in that moment of betrayal, barely able to notice time passing, terrified and violated and helpless, for longer and longer - in the scattered fragments of his thoughts he wonders if Maitimo can even hear him -

And then he - isn't. His mind is not there anymore. His soul is lifeless in Maitimo's hands. It shines bright and pale and tells him what kind of a person its bearer was.

....he's pretty certain he had nothing to do with that, which means someone went and murdered Taliar -

- he will ask the nearest person where Elaneth-imire can be found -

He's probably in Dawn, he usually is.

He'll go to Dawn and ask again -

And this person happens to know that he's working on magic artifacts right now! Try thereish!

Pop.

He glances up from his work. He sees Raika-seren's soul. He sees Midnight's face.

He immediately reembodies Raika-seren, with conjured clothing because he can do that now.

His soul comes to life - he collapses to the floor in the aftermath of intensely torturous soul contact -

"Do you know what happened - no, probably not - Elaneth-imire, will you go with us back to Independence and help us figure it out -"

"Yes, of course - what happened from your perspective...?"

He can make guesses. Midnight has Raika-seren's soul and doesn't know what killed him, and Raika-seren is insensate in a way that suggests his soul was just being touched and had been for a while, so Midnight was holding his soul - probably from Dawn or Nuime - and saw it die, cause unknown, and came straight here. Could be anything from 'a bookcase fell on him' to 'someone destroyed the planet'. Best to be prepared for the latter. He wraps the three of them in his healing aura.

"I was in Nuimë, I was holding him, then he - wasn't -"

He nods. Yeah, that's what he thought. Midnight'll have to be the one to teleport them there, Elaneth-imire still can't find Independence, but he's ready to leave anytime. Under the circumstances it might be best not to wait for Raika-seren to recover. Just in case it's closer to planetary destruction than a fallen bookcase.

Yeah. He takes Raika-seren with, though, he'd be upset to have missed everything -

Hop hop hop -

They land in what's left of Himring.

It's unrecognizable, a mass of rubble, no wall still standing as far as the Elven eye can see. Other nearby settlements have been treated similarly. The section they're standing on is melted, stone become lava, and still being actively bombarded - a blast of force from above smashes the three of them into the liquid ground. The healing aura leaves them all ultimately unharmed, but the heat and pressure are agonizingly painful. Elaneth-imire reaches out his senses and teleports them to the first bit of untouched landscape he can find, then collapses - but he doesn't have time for rockslide flashbacks right now - he reaches farther, expanding his healing aura at the same time, until he can see the whole planet and the fleet of alien starships bombarding it from space.

They're using some kind of energy weapons, blasts of heat and force and both. They have hit every civilization-resembling thing on the planet's surface, leaving very few survivors, and are currently concentrating most of their firepower on Doriath.

Now there is no longer a fleet of alien starships there.

And Elaneth-imire holds the whole planet in his mind, and at the intersection of landshaping and conjuration there's a way to just—restore—

Now all the destroyed places are back, good as new, every building, every book, every flower.

Resurrections next or what? he asks - he should go for general resurrection as soon as possible, Midnight had human citizens - where the fuck did these aliens even fucking come from and what is their problem and when is the next wave going to arrive, those are also important questions -

Being smashed against a pool of lava wakes Raika-seren up a little. By the time Elaneth-imire asks about resurrections, he's coherent enough to sit up and look around and sort through his memories. Now is clearly not the time to react to what Maitimo just did to him - Elaneth-imire's thoughts fill in enough of the context that he can tell Maitimo's entire kingdom was just bombed to ash and that definitely takes priority over his feelings on being unexpectedly tortured -

Did you kill all the aliens again - sigh - anyway, no, now we figure out where they came from, resurrections can hold a few hours -

Raika-seren goes to Nuime to fetch Nezhefena. Aliens attacked Independence, please come track them, and he comes back without waiting for a response because she is going to drop everything for this unless there's an emergency of equal scale going on in Nuime.

And sure enough, there she is.

Show me an alien, then.

They are stranded in intergalactic space. Elaneth-imire teleports her to them.

She floats comfortably in vacuum, wrapped in shadows, and studies the fleet.

As soon as they notice her, they all target her with their city-destroying energy weapons. It gets annoyingly bright for a moment before she pops back to Independence.

Friendly, aren't they, she remarks, sharing the visual memory. I can find where they came from, but I can't guarantee they won't notice me and they might be provoked to escalate.

How'd they find Independence at all -

The planet hasn't been here long enough to be visible from very far away, but they could've stumbled across it somehow, if they had methods of detection not bound to lightspeed or if they teleport around a lot...

Grab one and bring it back here -

Nezhefena retrieves an alien from the fleet. The alien screams and tries to attack her. Now the alien is unable to move.

Their body plan is more or less humanoid, but you wouldn't mistake them for a human or an Elf.