Nod. "I think you can manage fine. I would be more worried about most people but you're not most people." 

"I have a perfectly good model of the Maitimo you liked and trusted. I expect I will continue having access to it whatever feelings I have. I am not planning to do things that will upset anybody, because if I were then it'd show up to Foundation and I couldn't go away in the first place."

Melody nods. Looks like maybe she wants to say something else, but doesn't. "Well, I'll be around until you leave but I won't bother you unless you ask for anything. After that I think I'm going to Rethwellan, probably. Valdemar somewhat shockingly managed to keep all of our exactly six Mindhealers through this entire war, I am kind of mystified as to how, but I think Rethwellan's in worse shape than that. So I won't be here if you end up deciding to come back. But - well, good skill." 

She waits to see if he has any other questions before leaving. 

He doesn't.

"You too."

He sings some more. Tries not to think about anything too complicated. He doesn't want to break anything while he's still here.

The next few days are uneventful. There's no sign of Telumë, his mind isn't even findable with osanwë. A dozen more random logistics staff who aren't shielded or doing private thoughts trickle in. The mood is very subdued. People are shaken and grieving and it all happened so ridiculously fast, months and months of careful planning and then less than a day of frantic final preparations. All the deaths across Velgarth happened in an hour. They're very relieved that building a god in half the time given by even the most rushed actual plan for it ended up working out this well. A lot of them have mixed feelings, but everyone agrees Foundation turned out great. 

And then Vanyel arrives, looking less tired but if anything more distraught than before, he's hiding it well but not hiding-things-from-Maitimo level well. 

"Gate?" he says. "Any preference for north, south, east, west...? North is less of a mess, Sauron didn't head past Haven before turning around. Southwest is the worst off." 

"I think north. If I'm more sure I want to be around an awful situation later I can walk."

"That makes sense. Are you packed? If you're packing anything, that is. North should also be easier to get Foundation's attention if you end up wanting to. Although we're hitting winter so it'll be cold. You're going to want warm clothing - I hope someone thought of that because I really didn't..." 

"I have clothes and supplies."

"All right." And Vanyel will Gate him to a sleepy little town called Polsinn, on what used to once be the northern border of Valdemar (said border is now another two hundred miles north, after the last major annexation of unclaimed-by-any-state territory in the preparations for a potential war with Leareth.) He remembers it pretty well. It's where he did his first ever away mission and it hasn't changed much. 

Polsinn is very ugly by Quendi standards but it seems completely intact. Maitimo lands right next to the town square and inn. There are some children throwing corn to chickens, which seem to be wandering around freely rather than penned in. They all turn and give him a startled look. 

"Are you a mage?" the oldest, a little girl of eight or so, says. 

"No. My name is Maitimo and I am a Quendi, we're from very far away. I asked a mage to send me here."

"Oh." 

Some looks are exchanged. The biggest girl seems to get priority to talk to him, by dint of being older. She steps forward. 

"My name is Clari and this is my papa's inn!" she says proudly. "We just made a new ceiling in summer. It's a good ceiling. You're tall. Are all Quendi tall like you?" 

"I am an unusually tall Quendi but all Quendi are taller than humans once we are fully grown. My father thinks that might just be because we grow slower and we never go hungry."

A smaller boy, probably the girl's sister judging by his matching shade of brown hair and eyes, bounces. "Oh! You're from the other world! We heard about the other world." 

"I heard the other world is very nice except for the part where for some reason it has gods that're evil," the girl says, with all the dignity a very small eight-year-old can muster.

The children start bickering amongst themselves about whether any of the gods here are evil or they just fight with each other for other reasons. They seem to have heard about the Vkandis takeover but have only the vaguest sense of how it went down, and they got word something happened recently in the south but they're very hazy on what.

"Well, it doesn't have them anymore, Herald-Mage Vanyel fought them and he won."

"There was a song about him doing that but we didn't know if it was true," the girl says seriously. "Sometimes songs have things in them that aren't true, you know." She starts singing it, not with particular skill but with great enthusiasm. 

He sits down cross-legged on the ground to listen. (He would like to go away from the village and think but probably first he should make sure he's friends with everyone in it.)

"We have some songs about it too! And there was a second war more recently that I bet no one has written songs about yet." And Vanyel will hate them, even more than he always does.

"Ooh ooh ooh can you tell us?" the younger boy says. "Please please?" 

"Papa says stories about the war aren't ap-" frown, then very careful enunciation, "appropriate for littles like you. I'm not too little though. I'm almost nine."

They argue about this briefly but then seem to settle it with 'all of them can hear about the war if the stranger wants to tell them.'

"The evil god of Arda, Melkor, had an evil - helper-god, a smaller god, Arda has lots of those, called Sauron." He can do accompanying osanwë visuals. "And he came to this world, and he wanted to do a terrible evil ritual that would hurt lots of people, to bring back the original evil god. But he disguised from everyone that this was his goal! And he claimed he just thought that the worlds should not mix, that Quendi should be Quendi and humans should be humans and they should live separately how the gods intended. And he had Vkandis's sympathies, in this, because the meeting of the worlds had made the future very noisy and confusing, and the gods are afraid when the world is noisy and confusing.

So he allied with Vkandis, and tried to kill the Quendi and kill the King of Valdemar and kill the Hero of Many Names, who had helped Vanyel win the war in Arda, and tried even to kill the Queen of Karse, who was loyal to Vkandis and wiser than he was, and saw that this alliance would serve him terribly. But Vkandis, half-blind from all the strange changes in the world, saw only that he would oppose her in this, and so he tried to have her killed. 

And they attacked Haven, and since Vanyel was not in Haven their attack was mostly a success, and Vkandis thought that the disruptions to the world would be over, and Sauron thought that soon he would succeed in his evil plan to raise his master from the dead. And in Arda, even King Treven and Queen Jisa of Valdemar and Herald-Mage Vanyel despaired, because so much had been lost in the attack on Haven, and because against Sauron and Vkandis together they feared they were helpless, and because the first victory over Melkor had cost them dearly and they could not see a path to defeat him again.

But Valdemar's own god was not dead, and was waiting patiently for the path to victory to open. And at last he found it. The Hero of Many Names had died in the attack on Haven, but the Hero of Many Names knows a way to cheat death, and he returned to life again in Velvar. And in him, Valdemar's god saw two opportunities. Firstly, he is proof that death can be cheated, that the dead can be returned to us, forgetful and altered but mostly whole. And secondly, long before any of these things happened, he had foreseen that it might be necessary to go to war with Vkandis, to go to war with all of the gods allied, even - and he had devised a plan to do it. 

His plan was very terrible and dangerous, and so he had discarded it when Arda was discovered, hoping to achieve his aims through peace instead of war. But the plan had not been forgotten. And when the Hero of Many Names made his way from Velvar back to his home, when he made contact with Vanyel in Arda, when he learned how desperate Valdemar's situation was, he realized that it would be necessary after all. 

His plan was to make a new god. The gods of Velgarth find it difficult to talk with us, and we find it difficult to talk with them. But he had designed a way to make a god who understood us, and could speak to us, and would listen to us. The people of Arda volunteered to help him do it. King Treven, too, said that the people of Valdemar would help, if they were asked. And while they worked on their god, Sauron prepared to summon his. 

And on one evil day, Sauron struck. He destroyed cities for blood-magic, hoping to use them to have the power he needed to bring back Melkor. Everyone was desperately afraid, because they were not ready yet to build their own god. But the good gods of Velgarth joined to help them do it. Valdemar's own god gave them time outside of time, to make sure that everything would go as planned. The gods united to steal from Sauron the blood-power he would have used to summon Melkor, and use it instead to create our own god. And the Quendi god of death came to the gods of Velgarth and offered to teach them how to return the dead to life, as is done in Arda. And the peoples of Arda and Velgarth agreed to help build the god, even if it meant their own deaths, knowing that afterwards they would be restored to life in a world freed of evil gods forever. Then the new god and Sauron fought, with Herald-Mage Vanyel and the Hero of Many Names helping the new god, and the battle was long and very terrible but the forces of good were triumphant, and King Treven and Herald-Mage Vanyel returned to Valdemar to rebuild."

The children listen in awed silence and by the end he's collected a substantially larger audience of people who were wandering past, mostly children of various ages. The children pepper him for more mind-pictures of evil Sauron and of the battles and really anything he saw, it's very exciting. Some adults eventually arrive and shush them and someone asks if he knows how many people died, and then a woman who seems to be the mother of the eight-year-old girl and younger mother arrives, gathers them up, and asks if they're ever going to leave the poor visitor alone.

"You don't need to entertain them," she says to him, with fondness. "We don't get strangers here often, and if you keep being this nice and patient with them they'll never leave you alone." She ruffles the little girl's hair. 

He can give the adults an estimate, quietly, of how many people died, because he knows how many it would've needed to be. He's pretty sure it was all the major population centers in Valdemar, Karse, Rethwellan, Iftel, and Jkatha. And Vinyamar, in Arda. 

Does the mother of the children happen to know a place where he could stay a few nights. 

They take the news in half-stunned silence, not really reacting much; it'll need time to sink in. 

There are lots of rooms available at the inn, she tells him. No one is traveling up their road much lately, it never got as much traffic as the main North Trade Road and the war affected things too. If he'd rather stay out further of town where it's quieter, she can suggest some friends of hers who have room to host visitors. 

He'll stay in town. He likes towns. 

If any of them want to meet the new god he knows how to build a shrine to it.

Wow, really? The children are SO EXCITED about that! The innkeeper's wife does ask him, worriedly, if this will be all right given that most people in the town go to the Temple of Kernos still (the priesthood of Vkandis never quite made it this far though they heard news of the temples built elsewhere). She doesn't want to offend the new god though.