I would really like to speak to his wife because I assume that she has all of the context on under what conditions the Valar saw fit to restore him to life and whether there's information he shouldn't have or a plan to introduce him to it gradually -

- but also I am pretty concerned? If he doesn't remember anything about the last five hundred years of his life, and they involved fighting a doomed war against an evil god and being tortured for decades and losing everyone he loved and then eventually losing himself to his terrible oath and committing lots of crimes - and the decision that has been made is to keep all of that from him for the time being -

- then he is in no state to get married!

:- I brought up the alternate versions of the world thing because it seems plausible to me that this world also has alternate versions, if mine does:

Oh. Maybe. 

We should talk with him and try to figure that out, I guess.

:Yeah, I think so:

So he has Maedhros, or maybe just Nelyafinwë Maitimo, the man who'd been dead a long time by the time Elrond met him, set up comfortably in a room in the houses of healing of Imladris, and gets a lot of paper for taking notes, and then they can go in there to compare them. 

"I am pretty confident that Leareth found his way to Arda by accident while doing magic research in 807. He is a secretive person but I think if he'd found his way over years or lifetimes before that there'd have been some things that went differently. His intervention precipitated the war, in some ways, but I don't think that was his fault, the gods saw a new piece on the playing field and sprung any plans they had in wait that they didn't want ruined. Melkor attacked Valinor and killed one person, my grandfather. My kingdom retaliated and killed - gods, tens of thousands of orcs. Leareth was on the side of my kingdom. I hadn't defected yet but my father and I were fighting constantly."

"In my world it's 803 in Valdemar, Leareth and I were lifebonded earlier this year when he was on a business trip to Petras in neighboring country Rethwellan, and there has been no contact with Arda except for my appearance here today. I was working on preventing Leareth from going to war with Valdemar and I think I got that mostly sewn up before disappearing, fortunately."

"I don't know all that much about the political situation back home at that point but Leareth felt the discovery there were other worlds obviated his original plans, and when he asked Vanyel to come help kill Melkor Vanyel agreed, so they must not have actively been at war.

Melkor captured Leareth, turned him to his side - through lots of iterations of attempted persuasion, I think, he can modify memories and other features of minds. Leareth did some work for him - only little bits that we saw, he Gated orcs into Valinor so the Valar panicked and banned Gating, which made it much harder for the Noldor to fight the war - I don't think they were uncomplicatedly allied and there was probably a lot of torture and mind-control involved -"

"I'm sorry.

Vanyel figured out a way to destroy Angband using - um, I'm sorry, using very powerful magic that I think Vanyel made the deliberate decision not to let Leareth know he had, just in case, so I probably shouldn't tell you -"

"...okay..."

"Leareth died when the war spilled over into Velgarth - this was in 813 - came back as Telumë, which is Quenya for the same thing - night sky - but for about a year we hadn't heard from him. Once Melkor was dead, the war turned into an excuse for everyone who'd ever wanted a war to have it. My father wanted to build Leareth's god, with or without him, faster than he'd originally planned, kill the peoples of Arda to do it.

I left the Noldor. It had been - while we were fighting Melkor it didn't really matter what I thought of my father or what I thought of all our allies or our end goals because obviously it was better than Melkor, but then he was dead and the war wasn't over and - I left. Went to Haven. There was war between Iftel and Leareth's people in the north, between Valdemar and the Star-Eyed's people - and by this point Valdemar and Karse and Iftel were all allied, I don't know if that's true in your timeline - I spent most of my time trying to stabilize the relationship between Rethwellan and Valdemar, the Queen in Rethwellan was assassinated and they looked likely to join the whole mess from some angle - they didn't, they're still at peace as far as I know -

- and Telumë and his allies made a plan to get me back. They - succeeded. I hadn't expected that to be possible. Kidnapped me right out of Haven and had one of the Star-Eyed's mages step through the Gate they dropped me through and do a Final Strike in the middle of the city so no one would know what exactly had happened. I woke up in Telumë's custody. That was about six months ago."

"The plan to build a god matches... uh, Elrond, the killing people is a power source thing, way more people are projected to die if nothing of comparable scope is achieved to deal with the next magical disaster expected in a couple centuries but I acknowledge it is very horrible... Valdemar has an alliance on paper with both of Iftel and Karse at this time since they won their war with Karse and endorsed a claimant to its throne instead... I am bewildered to hear he had an alliance with the Star-Eyed, she's historically been very hostile to him even for a god."

"I was confused by it too. She's having some kind of dispute with Vkandis but that's probably only one piece of the story. There was fighting in Lineas, which she was very upset about because there's a Heartstone there that's holding some kind of horrific magical fault line closed."

" - can we backtrack a little bit, is Telumë a man or a woman."

"....I mean.... in an important sense kind of neither, Telumë is the latest incarnation of a thousands-of-years-old mage spirit that takes new bodies when it dies."

"And you're - married?"

"We were not at that point married."

"Why did he want to capture you, anyway -"

"Well, Valdemar and Iftel and Karse were at war with his people. I didn't have any kind of formal position of power, and as I said my primary focus was relations with Rethwellan, but a lot of people listened to me, and I'd known Leareth and how he operated, and I helped them tried to find him. Reasoning backwards from - what would he be able to derive as soon as he woke up - cracked his system of supply caches - I don't actually know if this is what had them motivated to capture me or if it was mostly my father, who was furious. Or for that matter if they had a different primary target and I was a bonus, though I don't think they successfully got anyone else out. Or if it was just about war intelligence - Quendi - can pay more attention to things than humans, I can do the thing the Groveborn does a little bit - I knew a lot about the state of Valdemar's defenses and alliances."

"I mean as opposed to killing you."

"I think they spent several weeks interrogating me after I was captured. But I think this based on the growth of the hair of one of the humans who was guarding me, so I'm not the most reliable source here."

"Ah."

"I don't think it was all about -"

He looks at Elrond, looks back at Belrun, unhappily. "- I guess this is probably relevant too. While I was in custody Telumë married me. I don't remember any of our other interactions but I remember bits and pieces of that one, because after it happened I begged them to let me remember it so I wouldn't wake up to it every day and they agreed. I do not think that Telumë meant to marry me. It caused some diplomatic tensions. And it wasn't the first time -

- uh, Belrun, the way Quendi marriage works under ordinary circumstances is that when a man and a woman are intimate for the first time, they are married. It doesn't work between two men, and I wouldn't have expected it to work between a Quendi and a human, and Telumë says that it wasn't the first time and that we didn't marry on previous occasions of it. I don't know what made that time different. 

- anyway I think Telumë thought it was some harmless fun I wouldn't remember anyway and the part where we married was an accident and it would be very out of character for him to have made a substantial strategic expenditure for that reason and I doubt that was it."

"My Leareth - I'm pretty sure, since I can directly feel his emotions when we are near each other! - has not been attracted to people besides me-with-the-lifebond-operative in any of his incarnations thus far. I can kind of square most of this if I assume the most extreme possible circumstances were in play but that part makes no sense."