He's in a field of plump squashes. Yellow and orange and green and purple, covering an acre or so, with a big wooden house visible at one far end. 

Two things are notable: firstly, it's ridiculously pretty, more like a landscape painting of a field ready for harvest than an actual field ready for an actual harvest. All of the squashes are in glorious good health, all the surrounding leaves are green, all the trees at the edge of the field are tall and vibrantly autumn-colored. Spaced evenly through the field there are stone children in stone dresses with their hands flung up to the heavens. 

Secondly, the light is off. It's bright and golden like noonday sun, but it comes from the western horizon. 

Bizarre and alarming.

It doesn’t seem like anything or anyone is leaping out to attack, but he shouldn’t be here, and all his senses, mundane and magical, are immediately on alert. Sounds, movement? Ambient magic or mage-artifacts? Minds detectable to Thoughtsensing?

(A quick memory-search through all the religions Leareth knows of doesn’t turn up anything with iconography that matches the stone children, so that’s no hint to his location either.)

The statues are magic! There are some people in the house! One of them has noticed him and headed out onto the porch to check who is in the squashes.

Leareth flashes through and discards a dozen different reactions, including 'immediately Gate out again' and 'hide behind an illusion until he knows what's going on'. He still doesn't know where he is, which means it may not be within range to Gate at all without a source of free magic to replenish his reserves, which the statues don't seem to offer. 

He'll settle for readying all his defensive shields, and then talking to whoever lives here in hopes that they can at least tell him what country he's ended up in. He still can't think of any explanation for the light being so odd. 

"Greetings," he says, on the off chance that he's still close enough to Valdemar for them to understand the language (seems unlikely). "I apologize for landing in your field." He keeps his Thoughtsensing open, not actively probing but listening for surface thoughts, trying to pick up on the stranger's reaction to his presence. 

The person has expensive silk robes and long black elaborately-braided hair and brown skin and a politely befuddled expression. He is thinking that there is a small god in his squash garden which is embarrassing because he's not dressed for it at all - and the small god looks kind of winded, or something - and if that's the small god's first shape it's a really good one! Though he looks frustrated so maybe it isn't. 

"We're very honored," he says in his language (he did not recognize Leareth's at all), and bows, and contemplates which squash is the best one to offer as a present.

Do they wear even fancier clothing to greet whatever kind of divinity a 'small god' refers to? He can pick up some of what the stranger means from his thoughts, but the sounds, though very beautiful, are completely unfamiliar.

:Can you understand me?: he tries in Mindspeech. 

Yes, the person responds immediately, expecting that to be heard, expecting the rest of his thoughts to be private, but not actually blocking mindreading in any way.

Maybe they ought to serve a six-course breakfast, if the smallgod is new at taking Quendi form - smallgods new at taking Quendi form like eating. He suggests to his son, back in the house, that he wake his mother, and maybe go ask the neighbors for eggs and rizwah flour and so on.

:I think we have a misunderstanding: he sends. :I am a human mage, not a 'smallgod'. I intended to arrive somewhere else; I would appreciate if you can tell me where we are now:

(He's going to wait a bit before clarifying that 'expecting your thoughts to be private' does not actually work as a technique for shielding; he doesn't know enough of what's going on yet to be sure that he isn't thirty seconds away from facing sudden hostility, and he would prefer to have some warning.) 

Oh! I'm sorry! I don't know what a human is and usually all of the people here who aren't Quendi are smallgods. You're about thirty miles from Tirion, in Valinor. In the universe, he adds as an afterthought. 

One assumes that they're still in the universe, but neither of the other place names is useful at all. :Why is the sun like that, here?: He points, not really expecting a useful answer at this point. 

The Trees? I don't know what they're like where you're from. In Valinor the land is lit by the two Trees. Laurelin is golden - the one we can see now - and soon Telperion will wake. Telperion is silver. 

On reflection, it's starting to seem less likely that he's still in 'the universe' after all, at least the one he's familiar with. Has he ended up in some undiscovered plane, rather than just routing through the known ones? It...seems like it might take a while to figure out.

:Those are not familiar to me: he admits. :Where I come from, the sky is lit by the sun – something like a very bright star, if you have stars here?: 

We have stars here! If you go far enough east you can see them. Some of them are brighter than others but not anywhere near as bright as the Trees. When we lived only by starlight we were preyed upon by monsters.

Perfect, now Leareth has twice as many questions. Now that he's paying attention, it's increasingly obvious that the stranger isn't human – the physical differences are subtle, but the mental differences less so. Though meeting a nonhuman sentient being is much less strange than a world with glowing trees instead of a sun. 

:It may take some time to figure out how to return home from here: he sends. :In the meantime, if you are willing to offer a place where I can sit and rest, and perhaps tell me more of Valinor, I would be deeply grateful: 

Of course! Our house is right back there, and you can stay as long as you'd like. 

- probably.

It crosses his mind for the first time that actually Yávië has been saying they should leave, and even though she is probably overreacting he should not promise the stranger that he can stay forever when actually there is debate about that. This is accompanied by a burst of irritation that this is even in question, kings have one job and it's to make sure that no one has to worry about open-ended commitments...

You can stay for a couple of days at least and I think it's very likely that you can stay much longer than that if you'd like but I would need to talk to some people, he corrects himself.

Well, they're certainly very hospitable. That's convenient. Whatever potentially-messy political situation he's glimpsing the edges of, is less so. 

:Is there some complicated situation there?: he sends. 

Oh. Uh, I don't expect you should need to worry about it but my oldest daughter lives in the city and hears all the gossip and - it's hardly my place to criticize people, mind, when I have no understanding of what all the difficulties they are going through, but I think that if even if you've invented lots of lovely things, and even if you're very wise and very courageous, it's additionally your responsibility to make sure little girls studying biology in your city don't ever get stopped in the street by men with swords who want to know whose side she's on, don't you think? 

That definitely sounds like something Leareth needs to be oriented to, if he's going to wander around this world for a while trying to find a way out of it. 

:I agree: he sends, a little absently. Privately he's thinking that the King in question sounds woefully unprepared for the role. 'Inventing things' isn't a leadership qualification, as Urtho found out the hard way, and wisdom and courage are hard to quantify. :That is quite an alarming incident to hear about in connection with your own child. What are the sides in question here?: 

Sigh. So understand, the King has led us well and wisely for a very long time, and we've grown to be the greatest of the peoples of Valinor, and while from what I know it sounds like there were some mistakes in how this situation has been managed, there's much I don't know.

The King has three sons. His eldest, Fëanâro, is by a different mother - she died, and she refused to come back, and the King's grief was very great and drove him to remarry, though perhaps it was unwise, and with his second wife he had two more sons, and two daughters.

And for a long time they all got along tolerably, I think, if not exceptionally well, but then - Yávië says that she heard that Nolofinwë, the King's second son, was saying that Fëanáro was ill-suited to rule and ought to step aside, and that if he didn't something ought to be done about it, and that's - well, it's terribly rude, and unwise to mention, but it could've been offered in the spirit of constructive criticism, right, or he could've favored Fëanáro eventually stepping aside in favor of Fëanáro's son, who is eminently suitable for the role. But somehow it got about that he was considering persuading Fëanáro to move out, instead, with his family, a proposal to which Fëanáro objected vehemently. And Fëanáro runs a guild of metalcrafters in the city and he set them to forging swords, and carrying them, gods know why, and so Nolofinwë did that too, and now it's a fashion in Tirion and everyone has those horrible swords and everyone is tracking who is in favor of who and spreading dreadfully stupid stories about one another. 

And - the city has lots of fads, right, they went through a time where everyone went around with their eyes closed to expand the other senses, they had a raging fight about the shift in phonemes from th- to s-, one year they declared that it was a bad year for having babies because of something strange in the air from their workshops, and no one had a single child until the Valar'd been called in to fix it. It's going to be fine. everyone will apologize to each other and calm down. But I still think, in the spirit of constructive critique - swords are a silly tool to make this kind of point with, they're menacing. Someone could hurt themself accidentally.

He is sincere in all of this including his conviction that the likeliest way for harm to result is someone hurting themself accidentally. He is worried he's giving Leareth such a bad opinion of the King, who doesn't deserve it.

The notes of confusion are piling up and Leareth has slid through disbelief and right out the other side. Are the Quendi all like this? He's - going to move cautiously, because he seems to have landed across a vast cultural gulf and is missing pretty much all of the context. 

:In my world: he sends, cautiously, :such a situation would be alarming and likely to end with: bodies littering the streets :at least some injuries: he corrects it to, better not to cross too much of the cultural distance in one step. :Perhaps your people are more skilled at: being absurdly naive :the spirit of constructive criticism, and ending such disputes with apologies all round. However, I wish to note my concern:

Leareth thinks for a moment. It's possible he'll be able to find a way back to Velgarth by tonight, but it's seeming more probable that he won't, in which case an unstable political situation is worth paying attention to. And maybe doing something about.

...Not to mention that, from one example at least, the Quendi seem...good. And so does their world. For now. It also sounds like, accidentally or on purpose, they're about to stumble into an end to that goodness. 

:In my own world: Leareth sends, :I once advised a King: He's been a King, or Emperor, at least a dozen times, but he won't go into that for now. :If you think that your leaders might listen to, well, constructive criticism, from an outsider's perspective, then perhaps I can offer it: 

I should hope they'd listen! But you'd probably want to get Yávië's account of everything, she's been paying it far more attention than I have. 

They reach his house. It's three stories tall, made of wood, with squashes and spices hanging from rooftop beams and gorgeous tapestries on all the walls and a woman at a stovetop that has no visible fuel, cooking something delicious. 

Hello! she says. Do humans eat the same things as us - did Tehlan even ask -

I got caught up in explaining the nonsense in Tirion, her husband says.

Oh, that. You mustn't worry about that, Tirion's just always too caught up inventing things to ask whether they needed inventing.

:If the food comes from your beautiful crops outside, then I suspect that I can eat it. And I apologize for not introducing myself properly – my name is Leareth: 

Is the stove magic as well? And is the woman also expecting her thoughts to be shielded without actually doing anything about it? 

The stove is magic. The woman is also expecting her thoughts to be shielded without doing anything about it; her thoughts are, however, exactly what she just said.  

I'm Wilindë, she says. This is Tehlan. We have four children but only the youngest still lives with us, and he's out fetching eggs from the neighbors. 

Leareth can have some spiced squash dish.

It's good! Sitting down is also good. He thanks her politely. And continues to not mention the fact that he can read all of their thoughts including the private ones. He's getting a little more relaxed, but he's not comfortable, yet. It seems safe and friendly and almost perfect in every way, but something here isn't adding up, and the part that he's missing could well be a threat.

:I would be curious to know more of the history of your world and your people: he sends while he's eating. Mindspeech is convenient that way. :Also your magic – you do have magic, yes?: 

We only have a little bit here personally, Wilindë says, making dumplings, but they have all kinds in Tirion. Yávië has a friend there who did our sprinklers. I - wouldn't even know where to start, with the history of the world -

In the beginning, Tehlan says, Eru, the creator, had a vision of the world, and he showed it to the gods and the smallgods, and invited them to take part in its creation. And they did, and they sang in a beautiful symphony that wrote the history of the world. But one of the gods, Melkor, sought to tell his own story, rather than Eru's, and when he learned that he couldn't he was angry, and sought to destroy Eru's, and sang discord and horror into the world, until Eru turned it all towards beauty and good. And Eru sent the gods down to shape the physical world, and Melkor went also, and whatever they built he would destroy - they would build mountains and he would explode them with molten rock, they would build rivers and he would fling the water up into the sky. And many of his changes added to the beauty and variety of the world, and the gods saw that he, too, had a needed role in its creation, but eventually they tired of losing all they created to him and retreated to Valinor - this place - and made it perfect.