"....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."

"It also doesn't make a lot of sense to me but I expect I am missing most of the context that would let it! - also he's really, really different. I would be more confused if it were Leareth, I think."

"Most people are substantially changed by being tortured in Angband for years."

"He did say at one point that he hadn't - made a habit of this kind of thing - since a very long time ago when he needed lots of anonymous children."

"How did he get that different, did he wind up in the wrong species somehow, that's never happened before but I can't think of what else would break the streak -?"

"I would've noticed if he was a Quendi? - I think you might be underestimating the Angband piece of this. He - he has a kind of continuity, right, with his past selves, he can be confident in claims that they derived for him - and in Angband they chop you up and shuffle your memories around and rerun interactions hundreds of times until they like how they steer you - lots of perfectly nice people come out ready to murder their whole family - and then he died, and he doesn't take very much with him, just some particularly salient memories, which could easily have been from Angband."

"I know he doesn't keep all his memories, but he never does - if it were dependent on that kind of detail I'd expect this kind of variation to have come up before."

"Do you want me to swear that I'm telling the truth or something."

"I think that would probably be helpful."

"I also have Thoughtsensing? Which I haven't been using and won't if you don't want me to but if it would help."

"I am kind of vaguely traumatized around Thoughtsensing because he uses it constantly to make sure I haven't figured out how to hurt him somehow but this is important, I can probably get over it. Would you be willing to stop if I get overwhelmed -"

"Of course."

"Then you can try."

He is attempting to think loudly in her direction that there's a little more context on what happened which might be helpful but which he doesn't want to share in front of this Quendi who seems dubious about the 'hey in a sense Telumë doesn't have a gender' claim. In particular he and Leareth had dated, briefly. Less than a month. But if that helps put the pieces together - I can show you the memories of that, too, in addition to the memories of the interaction leading up to the marriage - uh, I don't want to show you everything but I could show us talking up until he kissed me?

He has a lot of attention, more than most humans one would try to thoughtread, and he is spending most of the rest of it singing a complicated song in his head to avoid showing other things he doesn't mean to or getting more panicked.

She has negligible Thoughtsensing experience so she doesn't actually know if this is a normal amount of thought, but she nods when he suggests the memory.

So here they are before everything, sitting on a mountain.

"Okay, I don't know what to make of that, I guess 'Angband changes people' might be as good an explanation as any."