He carries him through.

Leareth takes it down, fast and messy but recouping some of the energy, and then - relaxes. He's still conscious, barely, but moving or speaking or thinking all feel next to impossible, and given the headache, if he had a choice about consciousness he would probably prefer not. 

 - well, he can sing him to sleep, if that's helpful. 

If it seems like they are in fact safe, that would be helpful. 

(Leareth is, again, failing to shield his thoughts.) 

Well, if they're not safe there is not really anything to be done about that. But they're where they intended to go - the cave system where the locals are. 

HIs father is demanding a language lesson. 

He sings Leareth to sleep.

If undisturbed, Leareth will sleep for eight or nine hours, and wake up still in pain but much more able to think. 

Then he'll wake up on a fur with another one on top of him, with a pile of jewelry nearby where he can tap it and a not-very-delicious-looking bowl of stew next to that. 

Hey. You need anything?

Leareth sits up, rubs his eyes. :I am guessing we no longer have the painkillers here?: 

Nope. - there's alcohol.

:I will manage: He starts working on the stew. :...Do we know anything of what happened, back there...?: 

- yes, sorry, it's easily within my range. They're - mostly okay. Lost thirty-one people. They're not coming here because we don't think the Enemy tracked the gate and we don't want him to have any chance of finding us here. Lost more of the horses. Tyelcormo's angry with him about that. They're going to try to fight their way to the coast once they've had a bit of a breather and set up, like we planned. I think that was - everything the Enemy had to throw at us at least on short notice. Otherwise there's no way they'd be leaving us alone now, split and exhausted with a lot of injuries.

That's...better than Leareth had expected or hoped, honestly. :I do not think it ought have been possible to track the Gate: he agrees. :It is - technically possible to do using my world's magic: thus his experiment that landed him here, :but very difficult, and the magic is new to them:

He frowns. :The others no longer have functional wards, I assume. The shield-talismans will not last forever: At least the refrigeration will, and the weather-barrier stones might keep the linkage stable with transport. :But...I am in no position to help them. Ideally, we are right, and this place is safe, and I will have several days to rest fully: He's so tired. He's probably been more tired than this before but if so he didn't keep those memories. 

He turns, smiles at Maitimo. :And then, perhaps, I can begin working on a Gate back to my own world, to obtain us some additional help: 

That'd be nice. 

Leareth eats in silence for a bit. 

:Are you - all right?: he says finally. :It has not been an easy few days: 

- he hadn't given the question a lot of consideration.

He's ashamed of himself for leaving. It was probably sensible but it was ugly, it wasn't fair to the people who stayed, no one is going to have any idea how they're making decisions like that and he can't even sit down and explain all the relevant considerations because most of them are that Leareth wouldn't work as well with anyone else and he doesn't care to get into why. And also it's stupid to share information freely these days. Melkor knew - almost everything. Very nearly enough. 

People are dead. That's okay. Better than if something had happened back in Valinor. Murdered by Melkor's servants. That's something that has happened before, and they knew it was a possibility, and they wouldn't have been safe from it even in Valinor, and - 

- and as far as he knows Mandos won't need to change any of them too much. 

Leareth...doesn't really have anything to say, to most of that.

If they can stay in contact... Oh. :–Is osanwë detectable? Mindspeech is in my world, by a skilled mage, unless using a special variant designed to be untrackable. Could Melkor find us here if you are communicating with them and he thinks to look?: 

- not by any way I know of. I can't imagine how - I wouldn't try it with someone in Utumno, I guess.

Leareth nods. He certainly hasn't found it to be detectable at a distance – not unless he was using his Thoughtsensing to completely read a person's thoughts, including the osanwë words as they formed them, and even if Melkor can read minds he presumably has to be nearby for it. It's not enough to be sure, but... 

:What is Utumno?: 

Before - the first war against Melkor, he had a fortress. Valar always need - if they root themselves in a spot, they can make it magic, they can exercise far more power there. Utumno was destroyed, but he'll probably build another one, if he can. He tortured people, there, and bred them into orcs, and - whatever else. I think you ought to kill yourself, if captured. 

:...Noted: If such a place exists again, they need to find it and destroy it and rescue anyone they still can, but - that’s getting ahead of themselves. Later. Build an actual base of operations first.

That is, I think, uniformly the recommendation of the people who've been there.

He's sad, now, thinking about jumpy people who take a long time to learn how to exist around without hurting them, people set off by a smile or a sudden movement or the clink of a glass, in the dark now in Valinor. Knowing he's back. Probably dead, most of them, or if they're alive it's only because they aren't sure enough of what's real and what isn't to expect it to help. 

We shouldn't have given him a second chance. He'd been in favor, at the time; it'd seemed like progress, for Valinor to admit that people who were very evil might also belong within its borders.

Leareth feels...something more complicated than sad, flickering through his own memories of a few dozen lifetimes – wars he tried and failed to prevent, wars he chose not to prevent because his resources were allocated elsewhere, wars he waged himself. Costs paid, over and over and over. 

:It was not obvious: he says – Maitimo knows Leareth is reading his thoughts, he'll understand what he's talking about. :I - would not have done it, but then again, I have spent two thousand years in a world with - everything wrong with it that I mentioned, before, a world where every plan goes awry because the gods disagree with change for the better - and become the person I am. If I do build paradise, someday, I would hope that somebody after me could be less paranoid. Because there is a cost in flourishing to that, too – and I think it difficult to make that tradeoff exactly right, given limited information, it will either be done too late or too early: 

He sets his bowl aside, stares down at his hands. :I am sorry. I wish you had ended up in the other version: 

Thank you. 

On some level it feels like that's too generous an interpretation of his motives, though, right, it hadn't been a sense that Melkor might be the kind of person who deserved to be offered the opportunities, it'd been - that he was, himself, doing evil, and hoping to engineer Valinor towards being a place that didn't mind. That was why he'd supported paroling Melkor.

And it's always been kind of opaque to him why it was evil exactly but this certainly seems like part of the answer, that once you've aligned yourself against your world you have a secret prejudice in all the rest of your judgments - you stop working for people and start hoping to steer them - he doesn't like this line of thought because he doesn't want to spend much mental energy trying to explain to Leareth why the thing Leareth doesn't think is a problem is a problem. It's counterproductive and it's also just rude, right, to keep making someone think about it who is apparently perfectly capable of not thinking about it almost all the time. 

Now is probably still not the time to explain the entirety of how he thinks about ethics. But, damn it, it's hard to let it slide entirely. 

:I do not: Leareth sends, slowly, carefully, :generally like the word 'evil'. Though I am fairly comfortable applying it to Melkor. I think it - hides the complexity and messiness of the world, and nudges people towards thinking in black and white. And...: 

There's a cultural gulf here to cross and it's probably even wider than he realizes, in some dimension he hasn't caught onto yet. :Morality, considered as the discipline of 'how can people live together and treat one another well', is also complicated, and in my world there are dozens of different lenses on it that have been held by different societies at various times. There is a lens in which what the gods declare right or wrong, simply is that way, because they are gods and that is their prerogative: 

Leareth's fingers tighten over a fistful of his furs. :I do not see it that way. None of the gods of my own world agree with what you and I would consider to be right and good. The Valar, apart from Melkor, are much closer, I will admit that. In many ways they seem to have held your people's wellbeing as a goal. But - that does not mean they are right, about what people need – about what a world would need to look like for everyone to flourish. I think there is a true answer to that question, and it is reality itself that holds it, not them. And they cannot make a different thing true by stating it, any more than they can make two and two equal five. And...sometimes reality is inconvenient, sometimes there are tradeoffs there, and in a given arrangement of the world, what one person needs to be happy would hurt others. But that does not make who they are wrong. It simply means that the world is still broken. And in my mind, broken things are for fixing: 

Probably all of that is going to fail to land in some interesting and unexpected way. That's fine. He's going to be here for a while. 

Ethics is a field of study but - not one with much to say about that, really. It discusses whether things are good because the gods ordered them or whether the gods ordered them because they are good, and whether different things could hypothetically have been good, when the universe was created, and whether there is evil that didn't stem from Melkor. Most people figure that there isn't; on this topic in particular, all the original Quendi were married, right, so that's some evidence.

And Melkor's plans are subtle, they play out over thousands of years and it might be impossible in the moment to see how you're serving them. So you might have a heuristic like "if you did something you hid from everyone you knew because you knew they'd think it was very evil, and then it was very nearly disastrous, and you notice that in hindsight it influenced you to sympathy for the Enemy, notice that it's the reason you weren't KIng when you could've been, maybe consider whether everyone you knew was right". - but this isn't exactly the thing at the core of it, either. The thing at the core of it is that there are probably lots of worlds. There's at this exact moment a world that they're planning to go and fix up, as soon as they've saved their own. And if there are lots of worlds, then it's stupid to be possible to blackmail, it's stupid to have anything ongoing anywhere that might prompt outside intervention, well-intentioned or otherwise, the obvious thing to do is to cut it out -

- and this is far from the most important problem they have right now but here he is moping about it.