"I'm really not good at being mad at anybody. I wish my father hadn't disowned me but also I feel kind of like - I tried as hard as possible for an outcome, then it happened, what am I doing being mad about it -"

"...I think this entire situation is very confusing, for that." Telumë carefully doesn't say anything about how he at least hopes Fëanáro will un-disown his son once Maitimo is no longer 'Sauron wearing his skin'. It doesn't seem like it'll help, yet - it seems like pressure... 

"I guess so. I'm - sorry, that I hurt you, these last six months. I - knew I would, I wasn't trying to do it on purpose, if I'd seen a way to not do it I would've done that."

"I know." 

Sad. Lonely. 

He doesn't say anything.

...He's starting to feel hopeful, like maybe this isn't quite as broken as what his imagination had been telling him, when he had less information. Still, he's pretty sure that the fastest route to fixing them is - figuring out how to exist on his own, as a person, without Maitimo there to lean on. 

"I want to walk around and look at the city," he says softly. "I miss this place." 

- nod. 

"Go on."

Then Telumë will nod to him, and turn and start walking, so that Maitimo doesn't see him cry. The gleaming city fractures into diamond-bright fragments through tears. It makes it even more reminiscent of the metaphorical city that's now nearly always in the back of his mind. 

He stares down the street until it fades, and wakes up crying. 

Lonely, miss you, want.

Telumë wakes up in Haven, in a makeshift room in the outskirts, the part they're just starting to reconstruct. Wonders how far away Maitimo is, right now, and then curls up around his pillow and sobs. 

Maitimo wanders, and sings, and meets people. He is not particularly careful about national borders but he is somewhat careful about not venturing into the territory of any hostile gods. He tortures himself, sometimes, but not very often. He concludes rather tentatively that torturing people is not that important, or he would be more motivated to do it when it doesn't get in the way of any of his other goals. He is not going to be unprincipled and believe something like that torturing other people is important. Sauron probably believed that but also, Sauron in many respects sucked. He has a list of complaints about Sauron, and reads them sometimes. They vary in how convincing they seem.  

He sings healing songs and crop songs and tells stories and doesn't have a hard time convincing people to feed and house him. He wears out his clothes and trades them for ugly human clothes and mopes about it for two months. 

Sometimes his head hurts and he doesn't remember why he ever wanted to do any things and he has to work very hard to act like nothing is wrong, aided by the fact that no one in these villages know how much time Quendi are supposed to spend sleeping. Sometimes he cries for months; he goes away from people, when that happens, tries to satiate himself socially by mindreading them from a distance. 

He sends Kalira letters with sketches of birds. 

He talks to Telumë, in their dreams. He asks about how his country is coming along. He walks him through Tirion, tells him about every building. Who built it, who lived there, what colors and flavors and holidays and plays they liked. 

Eventually he picks a place - in Rethwellan somewhere - and builds himself a house, from scratch, without using any tools he purchased or borrowed from humans. It is made of stone and wood and it has a little courtyard and a garden and it's beautiful, once he has all the flowers blooming. He blows some glassware, fits some stained glass windows, makes inquiries about importing silkworms, takes up embroidery. 

He is not ready to go home but he is ready for something to happen that will make him ready to go home, not that he's sure what it is.

The first really happy thing that happens for Vanyel, a year or so after the victory, is that he finds out his sister is alive. 

Lissa Ashkevron fled west after the resistance forces were defeated. Ended up pretty deep in the Pelagirs. Communication between Vales is iffy at the best of times and she had no real way of getting in touch, but news that the war was over reached her, and then some ridiculous new songs about her brother reached her, and then she started making her way back. She's leaner and older than he remembers, with the half-haunted look she had after the Karsite war, but she's still Lissa. 

They rebuild Haven first. 

It's going to be a long time before the humans start coming back, the gods of Velgarth don't actually know how to make adult bodies, Foundation needs to talk to Mandos and then talk to all the other gods who actually had afterlife remit over the people. And King Randale might not be coming back at all, no matter how badly Treven wishes for it. For Jisa's sake if not his own. 

But he's a pretty reasonable King and Dara is a very good King's Own, and if it doesn't really feel much like Valdemar when there are only four Heralds left, at least it's not Sauron's country anymore. It'll be something new, eventually. 

(Vanyel really hates the stupid songs, though, especially the one Stef wrote to make fun of him, he had the temerity to make it good.) 

Jisa isn't really a Queen, officially, or wouldn't have been in the old Valdemar since she's not a Herald. She does a lot of the same work, though. When Melody comes back from Rethwellan a couple of years later, they try to piece together the old Mindhealers' Collegium that was just starting to exist before. 

Telumë bounces around between various countries for a while and eventually ends up back in the north. It wasn't a great place for a country before, due to being absurdly cold a very high fraction of the year and terrible for farming, but this is a lot easier to work with when Foundation can talk to the Star-Eyed Goddess and eventually trade to get the magic for Vale-barriers and other conveniences.

They build a capital city right on the coast, with a sort of blazing defiance, a Vale-barrier up around all of it so it can be a summer day while icebergs bump into each other outside. The city is a little reminiscent of Tirion. (It also occasionally reminds him of an unrecognizably abstract Tirion that Maitimo tried to draw once when incapable of spatial reasoning, what with the bubble around it and various experimental buildings that involve floating bits.)

Humans fortunately grow up quickly and Telumë doesn't have to spend that long running a country while looking like someone's teenage kid.

He talks to Maitimo in dreams, once in a while. The rest of the time he tries to anchor on a vision of his future that, while hopefully will someday have Maitimo in it, isn't built on that. He rereads thousands of books and writes some new ones and talks to his god, spreads the word for how everyone can talk to his god, and - he's reasonably happy, most of the time, at least after the first year. There's still something in him that isn't quite stable, but maybe that's only because the future doesn't feel known, yet, and he's leaving some negative space so that he can flow into whatever shape it ends up being. 

He spends a lot of time talking to his god. 

It's not completely clear what Foundation is up to, even though they're a way more helpful than average god when it comes to communicating this! They're collecting information, mostly. Properly building out agreements with other gods, those who helped them come into existence and those further afield. And they're resting, because even the gods of Velgarth aren't unlimited in reach or power, and all of them came out of the final fight pretty overdrawn. 

...The main noticeable effect of Foundation's existence is that suddenly there are no inconvenient coincidences for matters related to rebuilding the countries damaged in the war, only convenient ones. Presumably lots and lots of people are having their own private conversations with the god. Children talk about it pretty freely; adults usually don't. 

It's been a decade since the victory, Valdemar's population is still less than half what it was but there are a lot of children under eight, and apparently the Shadowgod is going to start trying to bring back some of the dead. 

Mandos spent a while helping the Velgarth gods with their problems but returns to Arda after about three years. The Noldor dead start coming back after that. None of the people involved in planning the mass slaughter on Velgarth come back, not at first. Mandos is characteristically silent on why but the general assumption is that he thinks mass murderers will need lots of time before they're ready to return to the world.

Turukáno did not volunteer, when the Noldor went off to die, because he has an eight-year-old daughter. He rules the few remaining Noldor competently enough. Ulmo helps. 

When it's been ten years, he gets his brother back.

         "Weren't you, uh, complicit in -" is the first thing the King of the Noldor says to his brother when he sees him, and then he feels awful about it. "I'm really glad to have you back! I just - I thought it'd be a while. We were bracing ourselves for - once we heard - Ages and Ages -"

"Mandos thought for a while to hold us until the harm was redressed, at least," he says. "It isn't, not yet, but that's - underway, now. And there's an argument, right, that the harms of - what the Noldor did here - are heightened, considerably, by long waits before we return - if we all died and all returned in the same day there'd be much less of a loss -"

        "I have made that argument but I didn't expect Mandos to buy it."

"He learned some things from the Velgarth gods, and they can change the passage of time, in their Halls. I think Mandos is using that to try to bunch us more than would be possible if we all had to heal at our own pace in real time."

          "Is Fëanáro back?"

Snort. "No."

        "Do you want to be King - does Father -"

"I don't. I don't know if he does. On the one hand you have a child. On the other hand if we pass the crown around like a throwing disc maybe it will be bad for the dignity of the office."

          "Itarillë loves this, actually, she takes audiences and she runs around scouting the city for problems for me. But if you want it - we're trying to let people take up their lives again -"

"And my life was being my father's very satisfactory heir who gets along with his terrible cousins and can run off to Velgarth whenever he wants and I would like to resume it."

         "The terrible cousins aren't back, unless they just got in with you."

"Maitimo's not in Mandos."

         "Maitimo's only one of the terrible cousins on a technicality. - I guess he's evil now? Is he still?"

"I don't know. I think I will go check."

          "Is he going to want to be King -"

"He's banned from the planet. Turvo, if you make a point of offering the crown to everyone but Fëanáro as soon as they start breathing it'll cause more problems than if you just go for, you know, general clinginess about it."

          "I guess that's true. I am not totally sure I won't offer it back to Fëanáro? Mandos only releases people healed, right? Do you feel very healed?"

"I told Mandos, and I guess he agrees, that the respects in which I still need healing involve - righting wrongs, talking to people. I have thought as many thoughts about this as I possibly can."

(Through the emotion-bond Telumë is suddenly deluged, for weeks, in JOY and LOVE and MINE and EVERYTHING TURNING OUT MUCH BETTER THAN COULD POSSIBLY BE EXPECTED and LOTS OF OTHER FEELINGS.)

Well, he isn't sure what that's about! It seems pretty good though! He could ask Vanyel if they Gated anyone in from Arda, because he has guesses, but on reflection he waits for someone to contact him and keeps running his country, which still doesn't have a name other than 'Foundation's country' even though it probably ought to at some point.

...He spends a lot of this time feeling vicariously delighted and also noticing all of the things that he's really proud to someday show Maitimo and maybe someday will actually be soon. 

He stops by it eventually. It's pretty. 

How's Telumë?

Well, they made the god and they won, that part was really good.

He admits that the first month after it was kind of awful - really the first year was - all right maybe several years were not great - but he built a country and several other countries rebuilt and the dead humans are going to start coming back right around now. Vanyel's sister turned out to have survived, somehow, that was one almost-miraculously good thing.

...Telumë himself is mostly pretty fine? He has a human-aligned god which occasionally possesses him with no warning to communicate things, that took a lot of getting used to, and he's - pretty lonely - but he's fine. He's really glad Findekáno is back. 

Is Findekáno being back pooooossibly related to several weeks of very loud JOY and LOVE that he's been noticing?