He does not know anything about relations between the new god and Kernos in particular, and would be happy to ask the new god on her behalf.

Oh, wow, does the new god answer people's questions like that? She doesn't think gods normally do. Is he some sort of high priest for Them? Anyway she'd be happy for him to ask. 

He does not know if he will end up being a follower of the new god but the new god answers questions very frequently, that's a lot of what the aim of making him was, to make it easier for people to communicate with gods. 

He assembles his shrine. He doesn't super want to talk to Foundation, he hasn't made any progress, but - will it cause trouble for the locals if I leave your shrine here and introduce you? They are worried about offending Kernos. 

No, it will not.

The sense of Foundation's presence stays more distant, this time, maybe aware that he doesn't really want to talk right now. 

Then he will assure the innkeeper's wife of this and show the children the shrine.

The children think that's very neat! Is there a special prayer? Can they all talk to the god at once or do they have to take turns?

There is not, as far as he knows, a special prayer, though it is a good idea to have your thoughts organized so you know what you want to ask. They should all be able to talk to the god at once, gods have lots of attention.

There is a chorus of thank-yous and then the children are thoroughly engrossed. 

This is enough meeting the locals that he feels like he has stable footing, which means it is time to go and think. He heads out of the village for a while, maybe a mile.

There are fields; the harvest is in and the stalks left have been plowed under, so it's all knobbly brown mud, hard with frost. There are patches of ice on puddles and the small creek he passes has a rime of ice arounds the edges. Past the fields is forest. It's easy to walk through, the area under the trees clear and open, combed for firewood regularly. A bird chirps something above him, out of sight; somewhere else, a different bird answers. 

He sits down. 

Melody thinks that doing this will break his brain. So he had better have a plan now for what to do, in case later he doesn't feel able to come up with one. He is going to go back to the village at sunrise unless he's very confident that he has a better plan than that. He will act normal and be friendly with everybody. If he concludes that he should kill himself he will not do it right away, he will give himself at least a month to think about it. If he concludes that he should really thoroughly kill himself then - the logistics on that will take at least a couple of years to set up, probably, so he doesn't need additional commitments there.

He is proud of himself for how quickly thoughts like those are surfacing, thoughts that were wholly disallowed in his mind earlier because they'd make remaining in Telumë's custody so much harder. He was worried he'd broken his ability to think them but apparently he did it right, just buried it, and now he can excavate it and -

- okay, unthinkable things. Everyone hates him and this is irretrievable as he cannot even go back to Arda and try building it up over time. He is not a prince of the Noldor; he is not really even of the Noldor; he is going to live among humans from here forward and he will always be weaker than all of the ones who are Gifted and also all their stuff is so ugly. This is awful, and it would make sense to have some feelings about it though he's going to try to get through the rest of the unthinkable things first. 

It's Telumë's fault. Telumë wanted to have a good Maitimo back eventually; he should've been aware of how awful it would be for a good Maitimo to lose everyone and everything and be exiled for a long time from his entire home world. Telumë could've held him a prisoner or killed him or sent him back under compulsions that didn't let evil Maitimo burn all of that. It is sort of cruel, to have let evil Maitimo destroy everything and then try to grow a good Maitimo back out of him. Half the incentive is gone. Maitimo thinks that he was good Maitimo mostly for his people and he cannot ever get them back and it's Telumë's fault. 

Telumë is a badly traumatized child and it doesn't in general make sense to hold people responsible for the fact Maitimo can run rings around them. 

And yet the fact remains that Maitimo couldn't've run rings around Leareth, and that was important - that Maitimo can't run rings around Findekáno either, actually - that he doesn't really want a marriage with someone who he can - 

Telumë will probably get better at it, is probably already getting better at it, but Maitimo's busy thinking things he tried not to think, he doesn't want to check them too carefully for accuracy right now. 

Sauron is dead. Melkor is - probably no longer summonable from the Void using the same process Sauron planned to use, Maitimo imagines changing that would've been a priority of Foundation's and one he won't be told about. Maitimo could - try to carry on the mission alone, on a sort of frustratingly stupid scale, figure out where he can get away with hurting people and go there and hurt people. He is probably capable of doing some low-level version of this without getting caught. It sounds desperately boring. 

Maitimo could, instead, try to pretend to reform, planning to behave exactly like a good Maitimo in almost every context but, if he ever has the opportunity to betray everyone to something like Melkor or Sauron, do it. Except that this is exactly the sort of thing Foundation could see, the kind he's least likely to be able to get away with - and also it hurts to think about, spending centuries rebuilding that trust, to spend it again - for the last time, they won't let him start over if anything like this happens again -

- he doesn't like how much the prospect of their disappointment is weighing on them. He meant, by destroying all his interpersonal relationships and getting exiled from his planet, to remove that burden from his thinking, to stop being influenced by the knowledge that the people who loved and trusted him would be disappointed. But it doesn't seem gone; instead it has concentrated itself on the few relationships that he didn't manage to burn. If he wants to keep being evil he probably needs to keep evil company, to be around people who'd be proud instead of disappointed. But who are those, really. There are evil humans but they're not going to want the same things he does. 

Maitimo could instead try to stop being evil. This is the thinkable path, the one he's been implying to everyone that he is on. It is also, realistically, probably the one he is actually on, because Foundation probably would've tried to nudge him onto it. But it's not guaranteed. There were other paths, in that vision, paths that ended in other places. Mostly in darkness. And right here, right now, trying to decide for himself, he doesn't think Foundation can nudge him very much.

He could kill himself. This would be objectively the sensible thing to do if he expects to turn into someone who actively makes the world worse by the light of his current values. However, Mandos will turn him into a good person and eventually send him back, so it doesn't even work. Thus the thought that maybe he should kill himself more thoroughly. If he found a way to stop existing that would be an extremely compelling bit of spite aimed at everyone who made mistakes during the war, and it would foreclose the possibility of all the good that he would do if he changed his mind and became a good person. Now that he's allowed to think about it he likes it as a plan in some ways. It'd be tempting if he had a way to do it. But -

- hmmm - 

- if good Maitimo were expecting to turn into evil Maitimo he would try to destroy himself. He literally did try this, barely a year ago. It almost worked. But he'd been expecting to be forced to change his mind. Killing yourself to avoid changing your mind naturally feels like a really weird thing to do. He's not sure quite why, maybe the fact it feels weird is itself a mistake, but - he's not sure he is so attached to his values that he wants to kill himself to protect against the near-certainty that if he sits here poking them they will change and then he'll proceed to do stuff with the new ones. 

Also it's not obvious that Sauron would prefer it? Eru would. It feels like a very Eru sort of way for things to go, now that he has a sensibility for that. Sauron might well prefer that he - be good, and be impressive, and fix the world, and then of course Sauron would like it to all end in torment and destruction but the point is that he wouldn't want it to be middling in the interim. 

(This observation feels like it takes a lot of pressure off of something somewhere else in his brain. He is suddenly hurting less, and he hadn't noticed he'd been hurting.)

Are there more unthinkable things? He tries some on for size. He could be mad at Melody for using her horrible mindpowers to imprison him and help Telumë torture him and then help Telumë keep him. He doesn't think he is, once he's checked, except about the making him eat. He is still quite mad about that. He could be mad at...Vanyel? That feels ridiculous and pointless. He could be mad at Findekáno for saying he'd stay with evil Maitimo and then deciding not to. Except actually he respects that, it was smart. ...he could be mad at Findekáno for dying and closing off any possibility they could ever actually fix things. He thinks he's actually justified in being mad, about that. Maybe. Probably it is ridiculous to think that marrying someone else is the kind of thing a relationship could otherwise have survived; certainly he'd had vague hopes but he'd communicated them to neither of Telumë or Findekáno. 

Now he's crying. That's - okay, he's not going to do the thing Leareth did after Angband where he kept being surprised to be having emotions, even though it turns out that being surprised to have emotions is quite compelling when you're inside them. He lost almost everything important to him in the last year and he mostly cannot have any of them back and once he's free to think about that he wants to cry about it, that's fine, that's okay. 

At sunrise he goes back to the village like he promised himself he would and asks the children if they'd like to learn some crop songs.

They do! Also a lot of their parents do, actually. 

The kids are eager and put in a lot of effort but also have short attention spans and most of them are not especially musically talented. 

Even young Quendi hold a tune better. Well, if the crops are only actually getting anything out of his singing, that's fine. 

That evening he is tired when they are, falls asleep in their inn. Wakes up, to his surprise, in the late morning, hours after all the humans got up. That never happens. 

He sings to their crops. He answers their questions. He asks them to tell him their stories. 

In the evening he walks away again. 

There's another option he didn't get to the other night because he was too busy moping. It is to deliberately aim for the blend of Sauron's values and Foundation's that he can get away with, that everyone recognizes as a good Maitimo, but that smuggles in as many of his present values as can survive under these conditions. Hating Eru, for example, can stay; hating the Valar can stay; wanting to hurt himself can stay. The parts of him that aren't acceptable will have to actually die, the plan here isn't to hide them, but this way it's only some of them dying, and he keeps as much as he can. 

He feels less tense when he thinks about that. Which is, huh, a pattern - when he noticed that Sauron wouldn't particularly want him to kill himself there was a rush of relief from unnoticed tension, and then again when he considered a blend of values. Probably - he thinks back to Melody's metaphor - probably when he considers what values to have he is tugging himself loose of the way the oath bound his head, and when he finds a reconciliation he's relaxing it again.

This gives him the bizarre and probably counterproductive urge to do whatever increases the tension the most, see whether his head holds up to it. It's upsetting if after he went to all this length to not have unthinkable thoughts he's still having unthinkable thoughts because his brain is tied into knots. Probably he shouldn't do something that might wreck him just because it's tempting, and probably the knots his brain is tied into are "everything that he cares about in the universe", but - 

- he sets aside that temptation for a second. 

The last meaningful option is to try to derive new values from first principles, not strategically aiming at a good blend but just trying to believe whatever it is he actually believes. He's not...at all sure what to expect if he tries this. He pretended to, with his father, but it didn't touch anything especially; he suspects the arguments that work for his father are just really different from the arguments that work for him. But there presumably are some -

- and this option hurts a lot to think about, he draws himself back to consider it a bit - 

- yeah, it's probably the same problem he was observing just a moment ago, where considering whether he actually wants to love and serve Sauron and torture everyone in the universe puts strain on something. Probably a lot of his psychology is tied up in the fact that he loves Sauron and wants to serve Sauron and wants to torture everyone in the universe, and thinking about it threatens to tug down a lot of associated things. 

Which isn't sustainable. He can't go around with a vulnerability like that. Either he wants to torture everyone or he doesn't, and either way he needs to be able to think or what is he even worth - 

He grits his teeth and tries to think.

Where do the things that drive Maitimo as a person come from?

People. They gave him their loyalty and trust and obedience, as a prince of the Noldor, as his grandfather's presumptive heir, and he gave them a nice world to live in, and opportunities to shine within it.

And - still people, when he worked in Haven. They feared and obeyed him, and he rewarded competence and punished cowardice and made them capable of winning the war he thought they'd need to fight.

So maybe there is something useful to be found in the overlap - 

- predictability, being someone other people understood, so they knew what he'd want from them and what he could be expected to do for them - 

- admiration, being someone that people were impressed with, that people expected to succeed, that people expected it to be advantageous to impress - 

- generosity - contextual, of course, in Haven it was an act of generosity not to have people tortured to death for being annoying -

- trustworthy - someone it is possible to negotiate with, possible to cooperate with - 

It feels like a very unflattering picture of himself that he is painting here but probably that's what happens if you try to figure out what your good and evil selves have in common. Maitimo likes to be understood, admired, trusted, relied on; he likes to be generous, he likes people to be grateful for him -

Can he build something with that. 

If he declares that the core of who he is - and it's an aesthetically disappointing core, it can't really be his long-term plan, but as a temporary stopgap - what does that get him.

Well, it is pretty opposed to torturing people. Most people will not admire you for that. Most people will not trust you, if you do that, even if you only do it sometimes. Most people are not in such ridiculously awful situations that they'll find you generous - 

Really liking torturing people is terrible for all of his other goals. 

So was being gay, and he did it anyway. 

So maybe he has an incomplete account of how Maitimos work. Maybe sometimes they want something so much that it's more important to them than being - but it wasn't more important, he'd planned to get the fact that he was gay changed if he ever needed to, he wasn't willing to alienate the Noldor over it -  maybe sometimes they want something enough to take the stupid-in-expectation risk of smuggling it in with part of themselves even though if it ever comes out it will destroy them - that doesn't resonate quite right either, and everything hurts -

- different angle. 

He can torture himself. No one would mind, if he could work out a way it didn't hit Telumë. He did it, sometimes, while Telumë was unconscious. But - not very often. Why not? Because he didn't really want to.

And that's a weird thought, right, he does want to, he wants to with a fervor and intensity that you probably need an oath to achieve, and yet he didn't want it enough to do it when he could, for free. 

Would he have wanted to if there was someone else that he could hurt, but in some fashion that didn't inconvenience him? Probably, just because the downside wouldn't have been as salient - which isn't a very good reason, the downside is identical -

He tries that on for size. If he is ideologically consistent he should torture himself all the time. He doesn't want to. Therefore he doesn't actually consistently value torturing people. He - inconsistently values torturing people? Which isn't a reason to stop valuing it all together but it feels like a hitch in his thoughts, in the concept that there's some underlying truth here he's trying to read.

It is, at this point, hard to think; all the concepts are swimming, and they feel fake. He's not sure this is a route to make progress. Probably he should try it for more than one night before he gives up on it, though. He goes back to the town. Sings. Watches the sun rise. 

Everything is terrible. 

It...shouldn't be...they won - but that's what his mind keeps telling him. It's been five days and Telumë is still barely able to get out of bed, which probably isn't helping his emotional state either. It turns out that being possessed by a god, a baby one at that which doesn't know how to possess people carefully yet, and then eating a Maia and nearly four hundred thousand lives worth of blood-magic, isn't very good for humans.

Everything hurts, and he's having trouble fitting together the pieces. It feels...

...it feels like his side won, but it does not currently feel like he, himself, is going to be all right as a result of this. It's not mainly about all the murders, although that's a bigger component than he expected. It's - that Maitimo isn't here, and won't be, maybe ever. It would be very understandable at this point if he decided he never wanted to come back. If the Shadowgod could have made the marriage bond symmetrical then probably some combination of the Velgarth gods, maybe with advice from the Valar, could undo the marriage entirely. If Maitimo wants that then it's right for him to have it. Telumë decided a long time ago that this wasn't going to be a decision he had any claim over, or one he would even try to steer. He's relieved that Foundation thought letting Maitimo leave was a reasonable call, but honestly he would have leaned toward doing it anyway, just because keeping him captive here was awful and for a long time the alternatives were worse but that's not true, anymore, even if Maitimo somehow stays evil forever he can't bring Sauron or Melkor back and that caps the damage he can do and he's goddamned earned some freedom. 

The trouble is that it's almost intolerable to think about. Which is fine. They've won and no one needs Telumë anymore and he can afford to fall apart. He has to be able to think about reality, though, has to accept all the ways the future could go, including the ones where Maitimo makes the highly justified decision that he never wants anything to do with Telumë again. 

Probably part of the reason it hurts so much is that it's his fault. He made some very stupid and unconscionable mistakes and - they still won, that's the really important part, he didn't break the rest of the world too, but if it turns out he broke one of the things that's most important to him, personally, then that's a result of his own actions here.

He's not sure it'll actually hurt any less if he understands the other ways it could've gone, but it feels very important, that he try. That he find the parts of himself that were upstream of those decisions, and fix them, so that he stops being someone who breaks things just by existing near them.

...He's also not sure this is actually the kind of thing his god can help with, but he might as well try. Foundation?

The vague sense of a shining city - something like Tirion under the Trees, he has that memory again, through Maitimo's eyes - draws nearer. It's always there a little, now.

What do you need?

I need advice. But - on the past. Things that happened before you existed. I know you cannot trivially see that with Foresight, but if I give you the specifics I know... One of the things Foundation is built to do is to combine the kinds of knowledge people can have, particular facts and events, with...whatever it is in the fabric of reality within Velgarth that generates Foresight, that the gods mostly live in. 

It takes a while to convey. The city-metaphor is hazy that far back, at first Foundation can't even single out Telumë's existence let alone anything he did, but Telumë was there and he can fill in that blurred outline. (The process of doing that involves some amount of gritting his teeth and crying, but that seems useful, actually, obviously he has some processing to do and that means thinking about it.) And then Foundation can show him some slightly-less-hazy points of divergence, doors that opened or closed, crossroads where one path was taken and the others withered. Foundation doesn't have to explain that it's very much a guess; they're not looking at the past as it actually was, but a reconstruction of it, running Foresight except backwards.

Most of the possible futures from the point of Maitimo's capture were ones in which he died.

Telumë can see that himself, he's becoming surprisingly adept at interpreting weird Foresight city metaphors. Yes, but he would have come back. Were those futures actually worse for him? Eventually, I mean, if you run it further forward from here, and look for where he recovers...

Most of the paths where he died are much less recoverable than the one we are on now.

It's more complicated than that, the cityscape shows the nuances but also isn't something Telumë can put into words either. Some of those paths do eventually wind back to something fairly bright, but 'eventually' is a long time and the moment of the war ending is vastly more stark. Which he supposes points at the oath breaking with Maitimo in Mandos' hands, without a helpful Mindhealer to try to prevent it from ripping him to shreds. In comparison, the current path is one where the end of the war shows up much more subtly. An inflection point, but not a discontinuity. 

And - were there possible futures where he ended up not exiled from Arda and with his father disowning him? Telumë has pretty wide uncertainty on how the other Noldor will feel about Maitimo when they come back, now that he's no longer oathed, but Fëanáro probably matters the most and Fëanáro doesn't exactly forgive people easily. 

Some, yes. Though the paths where he could have both stayed alive and also in Arda were always very few and narrow.

The city shows a point of divergence. It's not at all clear from the structure what decision it was, but Telumë can guess.

If I had not - taken the actions that resulted in us becoming accidentally married, then I could have sent him back to Arda with far more precautions, and he would not have had the trust he needed in the first place to betray it. 

Yes. There are some paths there - though not all - where he comes to the end of the war both alive and in his homeland, with the love of his people if not their trust.

Telumë grits his teeth. That would have been better for him. Right? It feels like obviously it ought to be. 

Foundation doesn't answer in words, at first, just moves their imaginary viewpoint further along through the city, showing a different starting point on the possible paths.

Actually it is not clear at all. Better in some ways, he would be much happier, but subtly worse in other ways.

That much is evident in the cityscape, though it's annoying hard to tell what the specific differences there are.