Leareth is lying in a stone room, and nothing in particular is happening right now, and he is mostly succeeding at not having any thoughts. It's a fine moment. He is not, literally this second, being tortured. This is not useful at all for predicting what the next moment is going to be like, of course, or for whether 'quiet stone room' has any particular resemblance to reality, but Leareth has gotten pretty good at not being curious.
She drops the connection and waits for a count of forty-two and then reestablishes it.
He is patiently trying to find Bella's senses or Bella's mind or other things that she has left where osanwë can reach them.
She waits a bit to see if he notices her, then says, Looks like you can't spot me if I'm hiding.
Me too! But I'm going to be trying to find out if any of Melkor's Maiar are still around over here so it seemed wise to check.
Maybe when I'm that old it'll seem like the blink of an eye.
See you later.
And she reports that her Olórin can't sense her if she's hiding, and starts trying for Melkor's Maiar.
"Can't raise any of them.
Do you know what they went by in the time of my Arda by any chance?"
That's an excellent question. I don't but Olórin might, and if he doesn't Aulë might.
"I think the Balrogs have always been like that. Thuringwethil has gone through lots of names, I think -" he lists them - "and Sauron used to be Mairon."
"Will the same thing work again? If I grab him here and you're ready and I can just fetch you out of the Void again? - suddenly assassinating one of Aulë's ostensible Maiar will not endear them to me and my warnings from another universe at all. Was he even doing anything bad yet -"
"I do not know him to have been involved in Melkor's work in Utumno but I think there was some suspicion?"
"...ugh. I'm going to - tell Rúmil, and maybe he's making progress on getting them to agree not to parole Melkor..."
Rúmil?
Hey, uh, the good news is that this Melkor and all his Maiar are dead now.
Bad news is one of those Maiar was going by 'Mairon' in our, uh, era.
Oh.
Oh no.
If he hasn't done anything wrong yet it seems very difficult to - but with magic he could do so much harm -
- the Valar say they find it very convincing that they shoudn't parole Melkor, for what that's worth.