Cam adds a paragraph to his draft.

Curled up on the couch, Vanyel stirs restlessly. 

The soldier’s name was Galrich. He was twenty-two years old. Once he had been a little boy, leading a tame pigeon through the streets of Sunhame, and now he was dying on the gilded floor of the temple. Blood bubbled at his lips, and then the bubbles stopped, the light fading from his eyes. Everything that was him was escaping, a tide of warm, wild, living power–

–It tasted metallic and sweet and not like a node at all–

... 

What Cam will observe is Yfandes leaping up from the corner and bolting in Vanyel's direction, half a second before a tide of projected sick-horror washes over all of them, cutting off when Yfandes' muzzle touches Vanyel's shoulder, and Vanyel yelps loudly and sits up, staring wide-eyed at the fire. 

Lissa, who's been comfortable installed in a booth with her drink and her packet of papers, belatedly scrambles up and makes a beeline for her brother. 

"whatthefuck!"

"Sorry sorry sorry–" Vanyel looks mortified. "I – gods – I'm so sorry, did I – I checked my shields – sorry..." He trails off, and drops his head into his hands. Lissa is beside him now, muttering something that Cam can't hear. Vanyel seems to be ignoring her. Yfandes looks upset, which is an impressive amount of emotional range to show on a horse face. 

Finally, Vanyel frees himself from the pair of him and gets up, giving Cam a sheepish look. "I had a nightmare, um, about the war. Sometimes when I have a really bad nightmare I project it by accident, but it hadn't happened in ages so I thought it was safe. I'll, er, make sure to either sleep upstairs or with Yfandes closer by, um, in case it happens again..."

And now he's going to go get some coffee, because he probably hasn't slept enough but he's definitely done trying. It would be so incredibly convenient if he could use it to replace sleep like Cam does.

Lissa glances around aimlessly, lands on Cam, and smiles brightly at him. "Did you learn anything interesting in your reading?" 

"Uh. Yeah, lots of stuff, some of it even maybe relevant."

Vanyel stands with his mocha and glares at the fire for a while. He's having trouble even remembering what he was supposed to be doing before the very failed attempt at sleeping... 

:Newspapers: Yfandes helpfully reminds him. 

Right. Which is why he went to sleep thinking about the war, and proceeded to completely humiliate himself in front of Cam. 

Finally, he gathers up the courage to wander over– "Oh! Is that – I haven't read that book! The one on magic theory. It's probably from one of his private collections. Anything interesting?" He would be hurt that Leareth shared a book with Cam and not him, but that would be kind of dumb at this point. "Um, also, what do you think overall? Of Leareth, I mean." 

"It's interesting, yeah. Uh, he's. Very persistent."

Vanyel barks out a short involuntary laugh. "That's for sure. I guess not much else for him to – oh!" He spots the pile of title pages. "What's this? You've got – oh, you have a list! That's incredible, I should go through and check how many of my guesses were right." He blinks, shakes himself. "Er, is that all of the reading list then? Have you decided if you think it's worth sending a message?" 

"Definitely going to send something. Weird application of Gates might conceivably work."

Vanyel stares blankly at him for a moment, trying to silence the sudden litany in his mind of why does it have to be Gates, why can't it be literally anything else. 

"Oh," he says finally. He licks his lips. "Er, good? That's promising, right?" It's unclear. Cam doesn't look all that happy. 

"Is something wrong with Gates? This guy is apparently intermittently into magic powered by human sacrifice, so maybe he wouldn't have mentioned if something is wrong with them?"

Vanyel winces – now he's thinking about things that he really doesn't want to be and, uh, definitely meant to tell Cam about sooner but it somehow ended up not happening and now it's awkward. 

"...Oh, right, Gates. No, there's nothing wrong with them, er, at least not the same kind of thing as with blood-magic. They don't involve killing people or cause environmental damage or anything. They're one of the most costly spells in terms of energy input, so they're tiring, that's a practical issue. And, um, I do have a problem with Gates specifically, but that's just a me thing, it's a bit mysterious but it's probably because of how my Gifts were awakened." He sighs. "If it were anything else I'd be a lot more confident I could go from his description and invent the spell for you – I mean, hells, he's the one who taught me most of what I know about spell research. But not Gates, I'm afraid." 

"There are a million dead Maiar, so anything that goes through a single volunteer probably doesn't work if it's not as scalable as what I'm doing with Elves anyway. I guess unless we get one and they can get all the rest but if they can do that they might get the Valar and if they do that then all the humans and Dwarves on Endorë can't summon and die without afterlives."

Vanyel thinks for a minute. 

"I don't know how your method scales," he says slowly. "I suspect inventing a technique is something only Leareth could do, but it's a lot easier to train mages to cast a known spell – once it's defined enough, you can even build the hard parts into an artifact, skip most of the training. I'm sure Leareth would have people loyal to him he could bring in, if you were willing to trust them. Also, as long as time is paused in our world, and he had a power source," unfortunately the easiest one would be blood-magic and that's obviously not feasible and he's not sure if another world would even have nodes, "it's possible Leareth wouldn't mind getting the casting down to a minute or whatever and the spending the next decade casting it all day every day until he personally hit the full million. Like you said, he's persistent. So far he's spent fourteen years on the project of trying to convince me to work with him, and I don't think he even puts high odds on that succeeding. I don't either – er, or hadn't until now, the fact that he gave you so much information brings me a bit closer to trusting him."

Vanyel clears his throat. "Trusting that his goals are what he says, I mean – I still expect him to do horrible things to accomplish them, it would be understandable if you're not okay with that." And swing back to the second half. "The Valar... I think I don't completely understand what they are. Why would they prevent people from summoning? Er, sorry if you explained and I missed it. Also, um, I think I saw some references in the newspaper but I didn't follow up – what are Dwarves?" 

"Uh. The Valar were very conservative, didn't like summoning just because it was different and figuring out how to make it work with how they wanted things would have been hard? Dwarves are a species, yea high, beards, very capitalist, and they don't have machines in their heads like Elves do, so I can't bring them back. Elves I can do dozens every minute once I have the setup for it. I need personnel to shepherd them all away from my location because otherwise it gets crowded, and the personnel explain things to them, but the resurrections are just a few more months if I don't take breaks."

Lissa grins. "They sound like fun! I'd love to meet them. Ooh, speaking of fun – reckon you'd be up for having some for once? This is exciting, right? I mean, even if it's not definitely going to work, you've got a better chance of bringing your dead people back than earlier, so I think that buys you at least two hours of not being glum about it. Do you like getting drunk? Um, I mean, if you can, if your species can't then we could do something else." Her eyes light up. "Do you dance? That would be a good party. What do you think?" 

"...uh, I'm not wholly opposed in principle but you have managed to guess two things that would not be fun at all. I can get drunk but don't care for it and I'm too clumsy to dance without falling over."

Lissa goes quiet and thoughtful. (It's an odd look on her.) "Um... Music? You play really well." She shoots a sideways glance at Vanyel, who rolls his eyes. "I bet my brother would enjoy hearing some songs you've picked up from other worlds, and maybe he can play you some of ours." A sly grin. "There's some pretty good ones written about him, from the war. He hates them, though. You ever get songs written about you?" 

"Not under my own identity. Unless they've already published some about the black hole while I wasn't paying attention. Uh. There are songs about a thing I did anonymously."

"I'm guessing you don't want to listen to black hole songs for fun," Lissa says, "so let's not look. Anonymous adventures are neat! Are you allowed to play it for us? I promise I won't reveal your secret." She glances around. "Get your lute over here, Van. Want me to grab you a drink?"  

Vanyel makes a face at her. "No, actually, since I just woke up. If you want to buy me more of that coffee with Cam's counterfeit, go ahead, I won't complain."

"Is your water supply not safe at home?" wonders Cam vaguely. "There's no question of not being allowed, I didn't promise anyone anonymity."

“What?” Lissa says absently over her shoulder. “Oh - I mean, the water’s fine here except sometimes in bad storm seasons, and the Palace is safe too. Smaller towns can get iffy, and I guess during the war there wasn’t any safe water for years. Van has a spell to sanitize it but I don’t.”