"Welp. How exactly were you planning to fix this, anyway?"

"Win the war and kill Sauron," Telumë says flatly. "Our plan at this point is to try to build the god, under alarming time pressure, but - he wants to bring Melkor back. He has a spell for it, we believe." 

"And hope breaking the oath leaves something left to put back together. I did some Mindhealing-scaffolding on it, which ironically will keep him, er, evil for a while afterward, but I think things will tug into a less bizarre arrangement once they're not welded like that, and it's better than it ripping his mind apart." 

"If you say so. Have you got a lot of god research done over the last decade, then?"

"I have not personally accomplished very much due to - being distracted - but the Noldor are helping. Fëanáro lent us some mathematicians to check our work. If Sauron gives us another six months I will feel - not uncomfortable with it." 

He looks pretty uncomfortable about it, actually. He's a lot more expressive than her Leareth was with Vanyel in the dream, if not with Belrun, and his body language radiates misery and genuine fear. 

"Is there currently a Groveborn alive."

"Rolan is. He's been really useful, actually! He's - we think he has some sort of problem, from having lost the Web and the rest of the herd, he's not very proactive, but he's been useful." 

"Some sort of problem. Okay, my idea was to try asking your Rolan if he could talk to some gods for us, ours having been dithering unhelpfully on the subject, but that makes it sound less promising. - does he still have Dara -"

"Yes - wait, does yours not?" 

"Uh, I was doing amateur diplomacy because I did not want Valdemar and Leareth to wind up going to war and it kind of involved a lot of talking about how the gods aren't good at their jobs and Rolan and Dara had a fight and he accidentally repudiated her. She went home to her mom last I heard."

"...Oh no." Melody's voice is still mild, despite the flicker of alarm. "That's so unfortunate. In our world, Van had a problem with 'Fandes due to talking about, well, fighting gods, and she got close to repudiating him by accident, but she stormed off instead and spent five days getting her head together and came back. That was in early 806 so it won't have happened yet in your timeline, I assume, but...if your Leareth decides to tell your Van about his, er, plans, be aware that's a risk." 

"- oh, uh, it's only an insurmountable problem with Rolan, everybody else's Companions can cope fine with like a little psychological rigamarole and then something snaps and they can think straight about gods ever after, Amshalan took about fifteen minutes and then since Yfandes was having issues we walked her through it and Kellan's done it too with their help. I don't know it to be zero-risk for non-Groveborns but it's navigable. Though this didn't require plans disclosure, just general anti-deity sentiment."

Melody gives her a thoughtful look. "Interesting. It'd seemed hard to push it to a breaking point accidentally – in our world no one ever did except Van. Companions get weird and cagey in conversations about gods, but everyone's used to Companions being cagey sometimes, and - I guess you get into a habit of just not bringing the topic up and shielding your surface thoughts, that's what Van did for years leading up to the incident. I'm surprised general anti-deity sentiment puts enough, hmm, pressure on the thing to snap it."

She narrows her eyes at Belrun. "Though given that you're lifebonded to Leareth, I'm not surprised your mind has plenty of content that would hit that limit. And I guess once you knew it was possible, the obvious thing was to try it with 'Fandes too?" 

"Yeah, they were already having issues and I didn't think they could avoid confronting it so getting Yfandes through like Amshalan seemed the best idea. Amshalan knew what I was like going in and had experience from a past life trying to work around some of the Companion mind control so it took her like fifteen minutes but the trick seems to be finding a way to pit the two bits of mind control against each other, the bit that says to be there for the human no matter what and the bit that says that of course this has to be done in a god-approved fashion."

Nod. "I'm glad to hear it went more smoothly for Van in your world. I suppose we could try asking our Rolan about talking to gods, but I think it's possible his ability to talk to Them, if that's something he had - I don't know, seems plausible to me but it never came up - was via the Web, which was destroyed. Er, Van can talk to the Star-Eyed by Mindtouching a Heartstone, but it's kind of bad for him." 

"Bad for him how? And why him specifically?"

"Hmm. It might not just be him? Actually, I bet any Tayledras could if they wanted to, it just seems unlikely they'd do it to yell at Her. Van helped move the Heartstone in k'Treva once, as part of getting the background he needed to create one in Haven that'd power the Web, and then had - a weird experience - so he stormed off to try to yell at Her, and She gave him a lot of baffling memories of alternate timelines of his life, I assume they were Foresight somehow but I don't know actually. Then he mostly couldn't remember it but was having quite disruptive flashbacks with memories that weren't real, so I made him go back and ask Her to undo the thought-block She'd put so he couldn't be curious about it. All of that should have happened in your world, actually? The second occasion was in late 801, right before we won the war with Karse." 

"Maybe it did, I didn't even meet Van till the war was won."

"Makes sense. Anyway, where were we before that digression?" 

"Differences between your recounting of your timeline and what Russandol, or Maitimo, told us. I assume most of it was intended to make my other self look worse." 

"And to make the war in general sound messier and less sympathetic, maybe?"

"Yes, that seems right – it sounds like he was trying to spin having voluntarily split with Fëanáro and the Noldor. And, oh, right, I was going through the actual events after his capture. So Van was in k'Treva, out of contact - I was actually in Rethwellan at the time, I managed to get out of Valdemar after the invasion. Stef and Jisa were both in Arda, along with Treven, who was Randi's heir at the time and had been doing a state visit while Jisa took over from me as the local Mindhealer. But none of them were mages, so they were out of contact. Meanwhile, Leareth came back in a new incarnation, he was in Jkatha, and started trying to make his way north. But Maitimo was fully working with Sauron by then, and - he knew Leareth really well, he guessed Leareth would need to make his records caches findable from first principles even when he didn't remember the locations, and he cracked his system and staked them out to try to catch Telumë. Fortunately Telumë had already made it to one and gotten access to some records, or I don't think he'd have made it at all. He had a couple of really close calls before he made it back to his organization." 

"Eesh."

Leareth squeezes her hand. (He's a lot less alarmed about this part, actually, people trying to murder him is hardly a new thing.) 

"Anyway. I guess the next relevant part is– oh, right, some background context is Jisa. Do you have a Jisa in your Velgarth?"