Leareth is, in fact, tired enough that he isn't going to complain about being plopped in bed. Whenever Huan gets there, though, he can go into trance again and view the past few hours of the storage warehouse. After making sure that someone is nearby enough to shake him back to awareness if someone tries to attack him. He does not, exactly, feel safe here right now. 

Larya'll stay. 


The warehouse had people going in and out loading things as they arrived at the gate from the surrounding farms. 

A woman comes up to it with a wagon full of olive oil. She unloads it, waits until the other people unloading things are outside, claps two stones together. They spark. She walks out.

Unfortunately, the spell doesn't allow Leareth to read her thoughts, but he can memorize her face and ask Nelyafinwë. He keeps watching, checking whether this is the spark that actually set off the fire. 

Yep; from there, the warehouse goes up in flames. 

I know her, Nelyafinwë says tensely. 

:And?: Does it give them any further information: her connections, her motives, etc... 

My uncle's household. Tutored his children. Can you follow her, see if it's someone disguising themself -

:Of course: He holds onto the spell. Rewinds it until she's in the warehouse. Then forward in time again, but this time he follows her rather than staying there. 

She walks away from the warehouse and down the street, around a corner, back in another direction. Takes a pastry. Hears shouting and joins the bucket line.

Leareth can hang on and speed the spell slightly, if she's mostly staying in one place. Is she still there when the fire goes out? If so, what does she do? 

She walks back through Tirion, towards the palace. Runs into the spectacle Fëanáro is making. Watches, tensely. Goes into the house once he's gone.

It doesn't seem like there's much point in watching further; Leareth freezes it. :I can go further back: he suggests. :No more than a day, and it will be very tiring, but if we wish to see if anyone met with her, spoke to her...: 

Yes, please.

Jump back to the moment that she came in. Then – backward, further, and follow her, a little faster than real time would pass.

Leareth can feel the reaction-headache from too much intensive casting starting to form. He blocks it out. 

Before that she left the city and went out to find the olive oil in crates in the countryside. And before that she went back to Nolofinwë's house. Spoke with Nolofinwë in the courtyard, at some length. Took a plate of food. Read a story to an adorable barefooted blonde-haired girl. Woke up. Slept.

The spell doesn't let him hear sounds or listen in on osanwë. And that's as far back as he can go. :May I drop it now?: he asks Nelyafinwë. 

May he, like it's not increasingly obvious that Leareth can do whatever he pleases. Yes. Thank you. 

Leareth can do whatever he pleases, and right now that is 'follow Nelyafinwë's suggestions' because, while he has the magic, Nelyafinwë is the one who has anything like full context on the political situation. 

:I could - observe her, later: he offers. His ability to read thoughts is one that he really especially doesn't want Melkor to know about, on the off chance that the god can listen in on osanwë and is doing so. :Currently I am tired and have a headache and I need to rest unless there is an actual emergency again. If there is, please wake me: 

I will. Thank you. 

:You are welcome. Can Huan stay?: If he can fall asleep with his hand on the dog's fur, he can draw some of that energy while he sleeps and wake up feeling a lot less terrible. 

Yes, of course. 

Then Leareth will grit his teeth to push through the headache and set some extra wards around the room, and then fall asleep with his hand dangling over the side of the bed and resting on Huan's neck. 

And now he has to decide whether to tell his father this. 

It's presumably a lose-lose, right, like everything else has been, either he tells his father and his father makes a mistake that the person orchestrating this (he keeps reminding himself not to think of them as "Melkor" for sure, he doesn't know for sure)  can exploit, or the fact that he didn't tell his father is itself something that person can exploit. 

But - right now they're not at each other's throats, and he's pretty sure they're supposed to be, and holding that off seems worth it. 

Hey, he says to Nolofinwë. I talked to someone who thought they saw Hereniel at the warehouse a minute before it caught fire. Is there any chance of that? I have no interest in alerting my father to anything he'd misinterpret, so I'd like to rule it out. 

       I can talk to her.

Thank you. 

...And five or six hours later, Leareth wakes with a start. Starting from the remaining ghost of a headache, it takes him about five seconds to work back to how the previous day ended.

–He didn't check mage-sight. 

It's not something he can really blame himself for; the spell can do it, it runs on magic after all, but it triples the cost of the spell per minute run, it wouldn't have been feasible to run it the entire time, and he was nearly out of strength by the very end, he certainly wasn't at his sharpest for reasoning.

But he can check the house, and then maybe the crowd if that turns up nothing. If he's not mistaken, there's still a bit of time, he's not past the day-long window. And his reserves are full up from sleeping next to Huan.

Leareth casts the spell again; start with the house, not the furthest-back moments where she was just sleeping, but the one with the little girl – in case it wasn't a little girl at all – and then with Nolofinwë. 

The little girl was a little girl. Nolofinwë was...not a normal Elf, not to his mage-sight.

:Nelyafinwë, I need you to come here right now: Freeze that moment. Go in closer – the spell won't give him perfect resolution but will it give him anything else?