It might actually be more obvious to Leareth's mage-sight what it is. It's showing up there as empty space against the brilliant splash of magic from the trees. It has legs - a lot of legs - and a black thick body. It slurps away the magic around it. As it does that, it grows. Or maybe that's just that it's getting closer. Nope, both getting closer and also growing.

Leareth stays calm. It's not as though not being calm would be productive. 

He shares the sense-impression directly with Maitimo. :It is consuming the magic. Maybe consuming the Trees themselves. Move. Get through the Gate, now. I will not be able to hold it for long if the Trees cease to - be there. I can...try to hold it off...: 

He's not sure mage-attacks are going to do much. Whatever it is, it eats magic. He tries a shield against it, though – from the magic still all around him, he has plenty of energy to spare, if not any finesse. 

There's no good way to leave the less necessary supplies, not without blocking the Gate with them. Everyone tries to proceed through faster. 

The shield halts the spider, temporarily. It stops short, rears up on two of its legs, and presses the other six up against the shield, battering gently at it, feeling for something. Then it flings its whole bulk at the shield.

The shield bows but doesn't give – instead, the creature pushes the entirety of it forward, closer to Leareth. 

He tries putting in more power. Not enough. It's stronger than him and he can't use cleverness to cheat because he didn't, until seconds ago, know that this was possible. Damn it, worlds that he's been in for less than a month instead of having two thousand years of learning everything there is to know, he wouldn't have missed something like this in Velgarth–

Leareth grits his teeth. :I can slow it but not hold it off. Go go go – if the Valar want to help us now would be an excellent time–:

And then there's a Vala emerging from behind the spider, and, at the same time, a darkness beyond the darkness of nightfall rising around them like a tide coming in. 

In pursuit, apparently, he says, and two hundred through.

Leareth squints – he saw the fourteen Valar before, is this one of them or is it the one whose location was unknown, that he hasn't seen before, it's not clear to him yet that the Vala is attacking the spider – do his mage-senses have anything to say about the darkness-beyond-the-first–

–Focus, power to the Gate, power to the shield, pour the entire remaining force of the Trees through himself and hope that he can bear it for long enough – he measures out his strength, if he's too close to exhaustion then he's going to shove himself and Maitimo and anyone else close enough through the Gate and then drop it as fast as he can–

It doesn't have one of the physical forms he saw before. It's circling around the side of the spider, and around the side of the magic barrier, its magic-shape is coalescing rapidly into a spear. 

That's not Tulkas and Oromë they're caught in some kind of shadow on the mountain

The spear lunges for the Trees, the gold one first. It slashes through the wood of the trunk, batters at it over and over. Golden sap spills out, far more than the tree could reasonably have held, and coats the ground in a sticky golden puddle. 

The spider rears up and shoves at the shield again, harder than before.

The shields skids closer. And Leareth can't shield against a Vala. Not for more than a few seconds, not even with the Trees – the remaining Tree – behind him. 

 :Running out of time: he snaps to Maitimo, :going to try something–: Almost nobody else in Velgarth who ever lived would be able to do this, certainly not under battlefield conditions, but Leareth has certain advantages, such as immortality and having trained under Urtho.

He throws one last bolt of power into his shield, to buy a few seconds, and then concentrates as hard as he can, and - moves the Gate. It skims the ground, catching everything and everyone in its path – not perfectly cleanly, wagons of supplies tumble over, but enough, and then it reaches him and he dives through and makes sure Maitimo is in as well and if not he'll catch him with a net of magic, catch anyone else standing around or behind him, and then all of them are through, and he rips the Gate down, no time to do it properly and capture that energy even though he sorely could use it–

–and he has about three seconds of remaining consciousness to get out a frantic, not-quite-in-words Mindspeech yelp to Maitimo, and then everything fades to black. 

He catches him. Stands up - accounts for everyone by flipping frantically through all their heads - 

And then they're ambushed. Orcs stream out of the brush, out of the hills, out of the ground, out from behind illusory trees and illusory shadows, hundreds of them, thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands, and they drop Leareth's magic warding stones on the ground and activate them.

When Leareth awakens he is under an overturned wagon while there's frantic hand-to-hand fighting with the orcs who made it in before the protections went up. Maitimo's assistant Larya is lying on top of him singing a healing song so quietly humans can't hear it. 

It takes him long seconds to claw himself fully back to bleary awareness – it's pretty obvious something is wrong, for one he has a splitting headache, and two he doesn't recognize where he is, and three, fighting. Which is making a racket, ouch. Also someone is on top of him and that's making it hard to breathe.

He's alert enough within seconds to check that his personal shield-talisman is working, which it is (and using mage-senses hurts so he stops trying). And he's under some kind of shelter and there's a person there he recognizes. He can't manage to orient any more than that, yet. 

(Also, he isn't wearing an artifact to shield for Thoughtsensing, and he's drained enough that his usual personal shields are down and all of his half-coherent thoughts are 'public', not that he has the energy to project them any further than Larya.) 

Maitimo thought it might be hours before he was awake. She smiles encouragingly at him, keeps singing. Notifies Maitimo.

They ambushed us once the Gate closed, he tells Leareth. Don't make a lot of noise.

Leareth isn't planning on it. He lies still, focusing on breathing through the pain in his head. :Wards?: he eventually finds the wherewithal to ask. Presumably they're up. Maitimo is competent. 

Up. A couple dozen of them got through before they went up. Should be over shortly. 

Killing people is upsetting but he is trying not to send this because probably Leareth will think it very childish. 

Leareth senses the edges of the emotion, at least, and – well, he's personally long past the point of finding it upsetting, most of the time, but he doesn't think it indicates anything bad about Maitimo, at least not given that he's willing to admit necessity and do it anyway. 

It is over shortly. The orcs outside their barrier try stabbing it, try hurling burning sticks through it, try digging, and retreat once none of these accomplish anything; the orcs inside the barrier are better-armored than the emigrants and more experienced with their weapons, but they're badly outnumbered and all the important Quendi are invincible right now.

If Leareth is paying attention he can catch fragments of thoughtspeech as they straighten up their camp. People want to know what happened to Valinor, whether everyone in Valinor is okay, whether the Trees survived. People want to know what the plan is, if the Outer Lands are full of orcs now. (The plan, Fëanáro says, is to clear it of orcs, and war with Melkor, and then settle it properly once Melkor is defeated.) 

People want to know how soon the rest of the Noldor can be reached. 

Leareth can't help following some of it whether or not he's trying. He feels terrible right now, he's muzzily trying to think through the headache to remember how long the ward-stones are good for once they activated the emergency power level, but he's cold and can't stop shivering. Which is a fairly predictable consequence of the amount of magic he had to throw around before their departure. 

...It could have gone a lot worse, there is that. He vaguely tries to hunt for Maitimo's mind to ask if he remembers how long the ward-stones are going to last, so he can make a guess at whether he'll be rested enough to redo the links with the Quendi artifacts, thankfully he thought ahead enough to find a way that they won't need a full power-up. Lots of thinking ahead. Not enough to avoid whatever in all hells just happened back in Valinor. 

Maitimo is fielding a lot of questions but keeping some attention on Leareth, just in case. You said less than twelve hours. 

:Get me when it comes close. Will do my best. May not be able to redo in time: He tries to sit up and remember the Quendi vocabulary for 'water' or 'thirsty' to ask Larya, but it's not coming to him.

(His thoughts are, however, still completely unshielded.) 

She gets him some water. They're setting up tents, now, and when he's had some water she can carry him over to one of those so he can rest in an actual bed. 

That is preferable to the ground and Leareth mumbles his thanks to her. 

:Weather barrier?: he asks when he fails to remember the Quenya words for it. He can't figure out if he's cold from the actual temperature or just from how drained he is. Oh, right, there's an action he can take about that – or might be able to take about it, rather. :Did Huan...?: