"Anything might help."

"So it routes through other planes, and when Vanyel was trying to trace Leareth's work during the early stages of the war he had to figure out how to hit them each in order..." and he can come up with a serviceable explanation.

He is pessimistic, though. His Leareth is just as motivated to find them and already has interworld transit and as soon as he gets here it's all over. And without osanwë he can't even cry out into the empty countryside around Imladris - Sauron, Sauron, come find me - 

"Is that also my nephew's work?" he says to Elrond, pointing at the magic ring on his hand.

"Yes. From the - doomed collaboration with Sauron, but the Elven rings he managed to get out before Sauron could corrupt them."

"Thank you. I would like that tour of the grounds now, I think -"

"Of course."

Belrun starts trying to figure out how to put to paper an explanation she wants to copy twenty times and Fetch into the void.

"Can you explain to me how compulsions work?" he asks Belrun a few hours later. "The state he's in is very bad for him and it'd be really good if we didn't have to leave him that way until someone from another world comes. But I don't know if they can safely be addressed with our magic."

"I'm not a mage so I don't have a lot of detail. They're - spells where if one is cast on you you do the thing the caster is trying to make you do. Uh, I think Mindhealers might be able to interact with compulsions, and they're not mages, which suggests that it might be safe to come at them from yet a different angle, but I'm seriously only guessing here."

"Do you know if anything goes wrong if people try to break them and fail?"

"I... think based on circumstantial evidence it can't be that bad because Leareth uses them as a condition of employment for sensitive jobs and if this made all his sensitive-job type staff really vulnerable he would probably not do that."

"- huh. Okay. Thank you."

Does Maitimo know anything about this.

"You can give yourself a little bit of a headache snapping a badly placed one. It won't kill you. Dislodging ones that are much more skillfully placed might hurt more, I guess, but - it's worth it to me. If you think you have some way to try I would like it very much if you did."

"I also have no idea how I would target particularly the ones restricting your movements."

"Well, it's not as if I was hoping to keep any of the other ones in place. I don't even know what they all are. Do you have any kind of way to see them, that feels like it might be a necessary element and maybe it'd also give a hint about who was doing what?"

"I cannot see your spirit. I can sense that it is very - pinned, contorted -but not with sight."

"I didn't even know it was possible to do that much."

He glances at his ring. "We have learned some things since you died."

A second's hesitation, figuring that out -

"Of course you would have." Proudly.

"How does magic work in Velgarth?"

"I don't know much about it. Belrun has Fetching, you can see if you can learn anything from watching her."

"I have Healing too. And Thoughtsensing and Mindspeech but I only found out about those recently and can't do anything fancy, though they should be safe enough to experiment with if it's useful. Uh, to clarify, I have enough general Healing training that I don't expect I'd hurt anybody by mistake even in a new species, but my actual specialty is microbiology so I can't promise I'll be able to do anything useful in other domains - not that this is applicable to Russandol's issue but in general."

"Does Thoughtsensing allow for reading more than what osanwë permits -"

"It does."

"Some people take Gifts like that and unconsciously use them for shielding instead of having uncontrolled active use, and I'm one of those, I didn't know I had either Mindspeech or Thoughtsensing till Leareth checked me and the extent of my actual historical use of Thoughtsensing is what I looked at when Russandol offered, and also accidentally catching a stray thought off my father when he let me check to see if I could Mindspeak him even though he isn't Gifted."

" - okay. And your - lifebonded, if he shows up -"