:No. We are a very long way from the fighting: He looks sad again. :Nobody is hurt now, although if healing helps with tiredness, some of the mages are going to be tired from traveling here. Other than that - if plants and decorations will help your people, do that: 

Some people know a song for Velgarth-mage exhaustion and can hang around doing that; most of them will focus, though, on the decorations. Once the Crown Prince Macalaurë arrives this work goes quicker, not particularly because he is a fantastic singer (though he is) but because he has a natural advantage at getting everyone to go along with his choice of songs. 

By the time they are ready, the camp is full of waist-high wildflowers and butterflies and lightning bugs, blinking overhead. The Quendi are singing some extremely complicated beautiful song that has no magical effects but is, non-magically, keeping everyone cheerful and distracted. 

Whenever you're ready -

Terse messages are passed back and forth along the communication-artifacts. 

Telumë is on the Arda side, in front of a crystal large enough that it's going to need a cart to wheel it across. It's glowing. 

He's been talking to it. Talking to an infant god is pretty disorienting, even if this one is almost entirely cut off from the Foresight machinery of Velgarth. Which is arguably an advantage of having birthed it in Arda. 

It communicates via something vaguely like osanwë, which is neat, he and his people wouldn't have been able to build that in before meeting the Noldor. 

We are ready, he tells it, not quite in words. Are you? 

What he gets in response is a mostly-wordless, indescribable flood of information. 

Ready?

It's more like talking to a Heartstone than a person, or perhaps a very weird Maia, which is accurate. The godlet doesn't particularly have a sense of self, the way a human would; the patterns and scaffolding built into it are drawing the outlines of something much, much bigger. That outline is exactly the shape it should be, they've checked everything, and he's a lot more confident in those checks given that Fëanáro's teams reached the point of actually being confident in all of his work. Thirteen hours since the ball dropped - a little ahead of schedule, actually, but both the logistics of moving volunteers and the checks here went flawlessly. 

Telumë is, nonetheless, very scared. This is arguably the most dangerous part of the entire process, filling out those empty outlines as though turning an architectural sketch into a palace, bringing the godlet from small and incomplete and mostly blind, to - well, it will be a god, basically, after this. Just a very tiny one, that wouldn't stand a chance against the other gods of Velgarth if it came to a direct fight with all of them. 

After stage two, maybe twenty-four hours to go. Twelve hours of franticly verifying that everything in the scaffolding held up; if they got it right, and they really should have, the god will be utterly cooperative with all of this. And then - well, however long it takes to get the power they need for the rest. They just received confirmation that they'll have access to the Heartstones. That's less than half of what they need, though. The rest... Well, they're going to be fighting Sauron and possibly Vkandis directly, depending on how His upcoming talk with Karis goes, to murder the populations of several countries before Sauron can.

(Telumë's past and future selves can take responsibility for having emotions about that part. Right now, he doesn't have time. They can get the people back, eventually, and that's a problem for after the war.) 

"Ready," he tells Vanyel, standing.

Vkandis is angry. He's basically blind now - all the Velgarth gods must be - and his sources of information have no idea what they're talking about. They don't know how their enemies started flattening cities in Rethwellan. They don't know if they're going to be able to keep doing it. They don't know what their enemies want the power for. 

He's nearly halfway there.

He can't count on it lasting. Vkandis isn't stupid, and it would only take a few pieces of bad luck for him to realize what must be happening. It had better be too late by the time that happens. The plan was to keep picking off small towns, if the local gods seemed too shocked to react at all, but to go for bigger ones, if they looked like they might be pulling themselves together to make a real fight out of it. 

He heads towards Petras. He'll show up, to mage-sight, as a blur, racing faster than even a Companion. If people aren't stupid they'll be fleeing the city, trying to spread out, trying to minimize how many can be taken in one explosion that will by now have abandoned the semblance of a mage's Final Strike. But people are stupid so maybe they'll be sitting nicely at home, waiting, gossiping about the first and fastest-moving batch of rumors that their world is back at war. 

Two hundred fifty thousand more, off Petras and the little villages he'll swallow up on his way there, and then he will have enough.

Petras is not Vkandis' territory. Rethwellan is under the remit of a different god. One who almost never speaks directly to mortals. One who works at an even greater remove than most of the Velgarth deities. 

(Shadow-Lover, never seen by day, the popular Valdemaran song goes, only deep in dreams do you appear–)

Vkandis is - not exactly subtle, as deities go, but the mostly-nameless god of Valdemar and Rethwellan and partially of Hardorn is. 

And Rethwellan borders on the Pelagirs, the domain of another deity. Not one who has generally been allied with the nameless Valdemaran god who works in mist and shadows, but - times have changed. 

He arrives in Petras. He circles the city, setting out the boundaries of what he'll do, leaving traces that are visible to Velgarth mage-sight - not that they'll have enough time to do anything about it. He observes no opposition. The local gods are blind, and stupid, and useless.

He circles the city again. He takes it up in flames, the buildings and the fields and the streets and the people, two hundred thousand of them, enough for -

- not enough for anything, actually. 

They are his people, his souls, almost two hundred thousand of them when you include Petras itself and the outlying nearby towns that were struck in the last seconds and minutes. The Shadow-Lover is going to be very busy for the next little while, which is fine, he's built for that - usually not so many at once...

(The Shadow-Lover takes them in, with a gentle hand and a sorrowful smile, in two hundred thousand simultaneous instants outside of time, and he holds onto everything, memories, hopes and dreams and disappointments - it won't be quite as thorough as Quendi resurrection but it turns out that the fundamental limitations on how much can be saved in the Velgarth afterlife were much further out than it's always appeared, especially if it won't be for very long on the timescales gods count things, and Mandos has been very helpful.)

- they are his people and his souls and that means the power released by their deaths, as the bonds holding bodies and spirits together are torn apart, is - something he has a claim to, in some sense, and -

And in a single timeless instant, two entities that are most senses closer to forces of nature than people, will metaphorically reach out and link hands. 

–and the blood-power that should have been released into Sauron's hands, from two hundred thousand deaths, is instead gone.

In a place outside time, a little girl is crying in a white place, she's confused, her mama isn't here, and - 

- and a figure in white, with hair the same mahogany shade as her mama, kneels in front of her, bringing his head level with hers. Sorrowful blue eyes look out from a face hidden in shadows.

The figure holds out his hand. "I am sorry."

About forty Rethwellani mages sensed something, and - well, the rumours haven't made a lot of sense so far, but when there are rumours flying that your country is being destroyed one city at a time in fiery conflagrations, and then something baffling appears in your mage-sight, possibly the wise thing to do is to get out while you still can. A dozen Gates spring up, to anywhere they can think of - it might not be far enough, most of the mages don't have Gate-locations outside of Rethwellan– 

Their Gates do not end up at all where they expected. 

....what. 

If they can do that everywhere, every time, he has a problem, but he should try some more cities - Vkandis's cities, maybe, since whatever that was it wasn't Vkandis -

He heads for Karse.

Karis, the Queen-in-exile and supposedly rightful holder of the throne in Karse (though it is unclear if Vkandis still agrees), tumbles through the Gate. Vanyel's Gate - he's the only mage still alive who's even been to Sunhame - it's not ideal for him to Gate right before what's about to happen in the north, but he has one of the endurance artifacts, they're being distributed right now, and - and if they don't get Vkandis on their side again, they are probably going to run out of time and lose after all. 

She has to hope that Sauron isn't here - that the priests don't have orders to kill her on sight and if they do they'll hesitate - has to hope that she has five minutes to do what she needs to do–

The temple is ahead. Gilded everything reflects the midmorning sunlight into her eyes - it's like stepping into a furnace... 

She tumbles to her knees in front of the altar. 

Prays, a prayer she has never said in earnest before. Vkandis, my Sunlord, I call on your aid and your mercy...

She's afraid, but she sets that aside. Makes herself an empty vessel. She knows what it feels like, to have a god fill her–

Yes, daughter?

...Honestly, she didn't expect this to work. 

There's no time to explain in words. She's an imperfect container filled with the light of a thousand suns and all of her belongs to her god - always has, even when He had turned away from her - and so she holds it up, everything that's happened, everything that they've learned...

I see. 

And he holds onto her, which is fine - this is her only mission, here, she isn't actually expecting to survive it, isn't expecting to see any of the others again. 

(She wishes there had been time to say goodbye to Vanyel. Wonders if she's going to see Randale again, but they belong to different gods, if he belongs to any god at all...) 

(She wonders, desperately, if there'll be time to see her daughter again. Arven will be eight by now. She's probably grown. Is she scared. Does she know what's happening?) 

Sauron reaches Karse and can't get in. He tries impatiently, for a few wasted seconds, to cancel the magic at the border. He can't. It's like Iftel's. The plan had been to destroy them with agents seeded internally, because once Vkandis realized he'd been betrayed they would be unable to get in. 

He tells those agents to move anyway, because why not, but he won't get any power off it -

An elderly man in the simple robes of a local village priest steps across the barrier. 

His eyes are glowing. 

What are you doing, Vkandis Sunlord speaks through the mortal's lips. 

Ugh do they really need to talk about it -

Betraying your world to eternal torture and suffering. The alliance can only stretch so far, and will have its breaking points. He only needs two hundred thousand more. He can shatter villages as he goes, see what works and what doesn't, map out the boundaries of the alliance against him - 

A deity of Velgarth looks out at him through the man's eyes. Seems to be thinking.