No - not yet - they need just a few seconds more, and Vanyel flings everything that he is into his shield - he blinks, trying to make his mage-sight line up, how much of Melkor can possibly be left–

By mage-sight it doesn't look like a Vala, nothing like Lórien. It looks like a - stone statue, actually.

Oh. 

That is when his shields give way, and he shouts :SHUT IT DOWN NOW: at Olórin. 

- I don't quite see how, he says calmly. Oh, hmmm.

And he relaxes, suddenly. The spell swallows him. 

The artifact drops to the ground.

Vanyel sags to his knees, then forward and half-catches himself on his hands. He's empty, in a way he can't ever remember feeling before. 

:S'over, Melkor, s'gone...: he manages, to Maitimo, and then collapses fully onto the ground, not quite losing consciousness but certainly not able to move. 

He wants to pick him up but - 

One more thing to do. 

The orcs are confused. The orcs are - oh, of course, the oaths are gone, they felt it -

We are going to search Angband for prisoners, he tells every Noldo in range. That's about ten thousand, now, but it'll be more shortly, they're hurrying towards here. We need to find Leareth in the next hour, we can't be sure he'll be stunned from the backlash longer than that. Get him - Vanyel looks in no state to either Gate or install a lot of compulsions. If it's been an hour or longer, hit him over the head until he's not conscious. Try not to kill him. 

It is not the worst kind of moment but it's a very confusing one. 

Leareth seems to be lying sprawled on something hard and cold, there's a weight on his chest, a sharp pain he can't quite locate every time he breathes. His head is throbbing. He's not currently being tortured, though. That makes it better than a lot of the other moments. 

–He can feel his mage-gift again. It's not working, but it's not-working in a backlash sort of way, not as though it's blocked. 

It's very confusing and Leareth isn't trying to do anything about that, trying isn't safe, reasoning from the evidence of his senses is ruled out as an option – but it's distantly occurring to him that this is different, doesn't match anything else in his jumbled memories, and maybe that means something, if 'meaning' is something the world still has. 

Some people burst into the room. They confer among themselves at the door. Someone steps warily forward to look at him. 

A few minutes pass.

Also weird. Leareth tries to lift his head to get a better look and then gives up, it's not as though what he's seeing now is likely to have any particular correlation to what ends up happening.

It's cold. He's starting to shiver. 

Vanyel are you in shape to do the compulsions on Leareth in the next five minutes or should we knock him out.

:–Gods. Um, no, sorry, I - don't think I can: Using Mindspeech is still pretty much the limit of his abilities. 

It's fine. He's alive, we can fix everything later. You did great. 

He walks into the room Leareth is in. Meets his eyes, for half a second. 

Gestures for someone to club him in the head.

With the help of Quendi healing songs, and sleep, and something to eat, Vanyel feels up for doing the compulsions twelve hours later. He's going to be extremely thorough, he tells Maitimo – it seems kind of excessive and he doesn't feel very good about it but overkill is better than underkill, here, and...it's true, that the Leareth he used to know would completely understand this as a path of action. 

"I don't know very much about how the compulsions work but - yes, please do absolutely everything you can think of and then some."

The first thing Leareth notices when he wakes up is that he isn’t allowed to move. Not ‘can’t’. He’s comfortable enough and doesn’t seem to be restrained, but he can feel the weight of the rather clumsily done compulsion on his mind.

Melkor hasn’t tried that one before. He can’t do a real one unless he has Vanyel now no, it’s unimaginable that Vanyel could be tricked the way Leareth was, and he wouldn’t hesitate to Final Strike before he could be captured. It’d be hard to fake just the sensory experience of it, Leareth thinks.

Evidence of something, if reasoning from evidence were safe, which it isn’t.

I think he's awake, can you check?

Vanyel nods, unshields and opens his Thoughtsensing. :Think so, yes:

He should've thought about what to say. No, he shouldn't have, that would have been a stupid thing to think about. 

You should be able to communicate with us by leaving thoughts public, he says. If you use that to inform us that you want food or water or a blanket or to walk around we'll arrange that. If you don't do anything we are going to make you eat and walk around at intervals that are vaguely healthy for humans anyway. 

Wanting anything isn't safe. And it's generally been better not to interact, in the hallucinations, it only gives Melkor more opportunities to twist it into something wrong and awful. 

Leareth is thirsty, though, he - can feel that his Mindspeech is there but he isn't allowed, but he is allowed to sort of let that thought drift in a way where he expects Maitimo to hear it. 

The compulsion will let him follow simple verbal orders. "Get some water."

Sigh. 

We did something we hoped and expected would kill Melkor and we have reason to think it worked. The oaths that Melkor had all the orcs swear are broken. I do not know of a way that could have happened other than him being dead. Vanyel and Yfandes are fine. No one in Velgarth is having a war, at least not on your account. Vanyel told your people not to listen to you if you contacted them and they seem to have believed him. 

Leareth finds himself sitting up – his ribs twinge and he flinches a little – there's water beside him on a sort of folding table and he takes it and drinks.

...This is by far the most realistic-sounding Maitimo Melkor has done that he's been allowed to remember, which is maybe evidence of something but Leareth is not especially interested in taking the next step with it. 

I consulted some people about what to expect. They said you probably wouldn't want to talk. - actually they were more confident than that but you are enough of a psychological outlier that I downgraded it to 'probably'. If you do want to talk I'm not busy. If you don't want to talk I will wait several years before I start trying to get you to come around on that, Vanyel thinks Quendi are more patient than humans and we do not need anything from you and there's a strategic argument that being irretrievably extremely boring for the first several years after rescue is correct, right, it means he has to invest several subjective years into every pretend rescue and that's a lot of time not torturing people. 

Leareth stares blankly at him – following what he's saying requires a few steps of inference and Leareth is not inclined to put effort toward that, but he is fairly sure that none of his confusing and contradictory false-rescue memories involved multiple boring years, and maybe that means something. He isn't sure what. Figuring out what it means requires reasoning about it and reasoning isn't safe. 

...This is a tolerable moment. He's not currently being tortured.

Sitting up is tiring, and he would lie down and turn to face the other way but the compulsion won't let him decide to do that, and decisions aren't safe anyway. 

That's fine. That's expected and doesn't mean he messed up horribly.  

"Lie down."

He goes to check on Vanyel.

Vanyel is sitting on the ground with his arms draped around his knees, staring vaguely out at the sea of tents in front of what used to be Angband. 

:...I feel like I ought to talk to him: he sends, wearily. :But - I'm just going to get upset about it. Won't I?: