Yes, but that constrains our research to things the Valar won't be tempted to intervene in.

I expect they'll be on our side, when it comes to the war in Velgarth. 

I think we may need to build Leareth's god.

I guess I could imagine the Valar taking away your Silmarils over that.

I could too. Go to Valinor. Keep them all alive. 

I'll do my best.

Stef starts to wake up a few minutes later. He's very disoriented and - something hurts - but not in the awful soul-destroying way he vaguely remembers feeling before everything went away.

Someone is singing. He recognizes Macalaurë's voice. Tries to speak but it's not really working. "Hnng?"

Vanyel was injured. We don't know more right now.

"...He's alive. Can't feel him but - I'd know - if he were dead..." Stef tries to drag his mind toward having any useful thoughts. "What are we doing now?" 

Getting out of here. Going back to Valinor, except for research projects that can't proceed there. We'll leave some information he can find if he comes back here.

"Oh. All right." 

All Stef can think, right now, is that it sounds like they've already lost. But Vanyel is alive and as long as that's true he's not, quite, willing to give up hope. 

Starwind is dead. 

Moondance can barely think through the screaming in his mind. Starwind is dead and it's his fault, he should have been faster - he should have been there but they didn't trust him because he's too closely connected to a Goddess who may or may not be on Vanyel's side. 

Starwind is dead but Vanyel isn't. Nobody's sure how Vanyel is alive, his injuries - weren't survivable - but he is. Moondance remembers Riverstorm whispering about divine intervention. Presumably not the Star-Eyed but Moondance doesn't understand anything anymore. 

Starwind is dead and the world no longer makes sense but he sits at his Wingbrother's bedside anyway. Vanyel survived a broken lifebond for decades. If he could do that, Moondance can hold it together long enough that Vanyel can wake up to a familiar face. 

Riverstorm is there. "He is stable," Moondance hears her say, as though from a great distance. "I am not sure when he will awaken. If he will. He took a blow to the head, his skull was cracked, there was bleeding inside... We can Heal the rest, eventually, but that is harder." 

Moondance nods without making eye contact. Reaches for Vanyel's limp hand. Starwind survived it once, he thinks - even recovered partially - but that was with Shavri and Jisa's aid, and eventually Lórien. Shavri is dead and Jisa is in another world. Trapped, now, because Vanyel was the last mage left in Arda. They can't get to Lórien. Moondance doesn't know the unaided inter-world Gate spell. Maybe nobody in Velgarth does. 

...It's too hard to plan for the future, right now. There's only the present, grey and hopeless and empty. 

The streets start getting loud long before the sun is up; the hours before dawn are actually the busiest time of the day, because if you can avoid being out of doors once the sun is up you will.

On the ground floor of an inn a family of four sleeps under insect-nets which deter only most of the insects, and wake up to pots clanging and animals braying and voices haggling. It is hot. It is humid. A fifteen-year-old boy is sleeping as far away from his brother as he can get while sharing the same narrow bed.

Tarek is having a perfectly normal dream about that nice girl at the inn back in Petras, Neeva, it's really unfair how his father doesn't just travel constantly to horrible countries with insects everywhere but also makes him come along. 

Meanwhile, somewhere else that isn't precisely in the ordinary world–

Something that isn't quite a person looks out at chaotic swirls in a void, from the vantage point of a pocket of even deeper nothing. Somewhere else, time passes, but time does not precisely exist, here. 

There are no thoughts except, wait. watch. not yet.

Tarek wakes up. Gods, stupid bugs. The stupid stick of incense they bought at the market, which is theoretically supposed to dissuade insects, has gone out. Father is asleep. There's a flint-and-steel but lighting the goddamned incense from the spark never works for him, and lighting the firepit appeals even less, it's already hot and the sun's not even up. 

...He could try his new power. Tarek hasn't told his parents, yet, he isn't sure, but he's been able to make odd things happen for a month, now, and is pretty sure he's not imagining it. It's awakening late, his sister is a Healer and got her Gift at twelve, when he was tested a year ago his Gift was still dormant, potential only, and the priest said he wasn't likely to be a mage if it hadn't woken by now. Apparently he was wrong.

So far he's only been able to move small objects and make a flickery light, but mages can light fires, he's read that. Tarek concentrates very hard–

In another place, a tendril of power twangs, and the ancient spell-web echoes. Now?

The hollow nothingness turns inside out, and the everything-else rushes in. The thing-that-watches – he had a name, before, what was it – he unfolds, stretches out, grasps at his new surroundings, instinctively crushes all resistance. Where am I? What– 

Leareth. That was his name, before. And - the memories are fragmented, confusing, he remembers dying in a storm of fire, remembers a voice that wasn't Mindspeech. Love you. Stars, but - clearer, more vivid, than human eyes should be able to see...

Leareth wrestles his new body to lie down and then stay perfectly still, breathing evenly, which is hard because his control of it is still iffy, and riffles through the memory-traces present in his newly inherited brain. Tarek. Fifteen years old. Son of a merchant-trader from Rethwellan, currently in...Velvar? Younger brother. Late-awakening mage-gift that no one knows about yet.

There's some particularly heated shouting outside, and his father gets up. Sighs. "Boys, the day's not getting any younger."

Leareth tries to reach out and– damn it, how inconvenient, his new body doesn't have Thoughtsensing. He doesn't think it's even there in potential - no, searching the memories again, priest testing the children, he's got Healing in potential and a just-starting-to-awaken, not yet very strong mage-gift and that's it. 

He gets up and does his best to look sleepy and teenaged and grumpy about it, hoping no one tries to talk to him before he finds a way to get away from here and find some peace and quiet where he can sort through the mess of memories he brought with him. He knows from experience that he has about a day to do so, and - even as disoriented as he is, something tells him that this time it's especially critical.

No one else seems in a talkative mood either, at this hour. His father tells him to straighten out his shirt and look more alive without particular conviction, and then leads them out into the streets of Velvar's capital, Ashuel. 

It's much denser than Rethwellan. The streets are a sea of people and animals, densely packed. The buildings are five, six stories tall with no breathing room between them at all. The bugs go after them with renewed enthusiasm.

...Leareth has presumably been to Jkatha ever, but he has no intact memories of it at all and also this is very overwhelming and reminds him of–

–why in all hells is one of the few dozen or so fragmentary memories he's dragged along from his previous life of literally being tortured, for one that's the least useful memory ever and he is absolutely not going to keep it, two, what happened, he is so incredibly confused right now. 

He watches for an opportunity to slip away without it being noticed. 

It is not too hard to slip away in one of these large crowds of people and goats and dogs.