Calanáro is done programming.

"I know you said you'd like to observe the trial with your magical senses," he says to Leareth. "Is there anything you need to do to prepare for that?"

:I do not need any particular preparation, just - warning, so that I am watching: 

Leareth would really prefer to have a couple of hours - or maybe a couple of years - to absorb what he's just learned from Maitimo and get all the emotions out of the way, but he doesn't have that. So it's fine, for the moment he can keep distracting himself from the inevitable reckoning by watching a different fascinating experiment. 

Calanáro dons the shrinking suit they'd made back on Earth, attaches the Pym-particle crystal to it, straps the navigation beacon to his wrist, and taps a few buttons to complete the programming.

"I'm going to go forward five minutes," he says, then presses one last button and vanishes into thin air.

The space around him—breaks—as seen to Leareth's mage-senses, when he does this. Briefly the space where he once was is filled with random noise, then, within a second, it returns to normal.

It's very disorienting to watch! 

Leareth stares as intently as he can manage until everything finishes returning to normal and he's pretty sure the show is over, then glances around at the others, waiting to see if they have observations to make on how they think it went. 

Everyone is staring at the empty space with bated breath.

Five minutes later, the dead body of Calanáro appears and crumples to the floor.

I TOLD YOU THIS WOULD HAPPEN, says a booming mindvoice that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere.

Leareth is pretty sure that no one warned him that this would happen! He flinches, throws up shields around himself, reaches as hard as he can with mage-sight at the source of the mindvoice - 

:Who - what - was that?: 

The mindvoice is coming from several thousand miles to the west, where there's a region where space, time, and matter themselves seem ill-defined. At the center of that region is a god, the lone anchor of moveless reality in a place where so many of the usual rules of the universe seem not to apply.

Fëanor is panicking, but not because of the dead body—that's easy enough to fix; even in the old days Mandos was always pretty lenient about accidental deaths. He's panicking because, in the back of his mind, he half-expected this result, and it confirms all his worst fears about the true nature of his species and their relationship to the fates of the world.

Tony didn't expect this result; he thought there was a good chance that they'd end up aging or de-aging the test subject instead of sending him through time, but that would have been pretty harmless to an elf anyway. He definitely didn't expect to kill him. Luckily, death seems to be cheap for them.

"It's probably the god Strange met while he was dead," he answers Leareth. "He did mention him saying something about time travel being impossible, but he also had a vision of it working just fine, so I didn't put too much stock in it." 

Leareth's head is currently pounding from the mixture of extending his mage-sight past its limits in an attempt to track down that mindvoice plus the sheer blazing quantity of magic involved. 

He shivers. Takes a deep breath. :If Mandos is the god of this world, but not of Strange's world–: 

Wait. 

- no, wait, damn it, he should have made this connection days ago, and he only failed to because he can't, currently, really think about that entire area. 

:- Strange is human. From Earth. If he went to Mandos, then - then...: 

Leareth trails off, and -

- and then reaches directly for the god-mindvoice, because at this point, why not. 

:Do you have the dead of Velgarth - of my world - as well: 

SOME OF THEM, PERHAPS. MY CALL IS MEANT FOR ALL THE CHILDREN OF ILLÚVATAR, BUT YOUR WORLD HAS OTHER GODS WHO ARE—NEARER, AND HEARD MORE LOUDLY BY THE SPIRITS OF ITS DEAD. HOWEVER, IN LIGHT OF RECENT EVENTS, THOSE GODS MAY NO LONGER BE AROUND. IS THERE SOMEONE IN PARTICULAR YOU WOULD LIKE ME TO CHECK FOR?

I AM GOING TO SEND BACK CALANÁRO, he adds, after a moment. NORMALLY I WOULD GIVE HIM A LONG SAFETY LECTURE FIRST, BUT I AM MUCH TOO BUSY.

A large number of Leareth's people are dead and arguably he should be properly making a list, but in fact there's only one name at the top of his mind right now. 

:Herald-Mage Vanyel Ashkevron - also called Demonsbane and Hero of Stony Tor -: 

YES. HE IS HERE. I WILL SEND HIM BACK AS WELL, IF YOU THINK HE WILL BE OF ASSISTANCE IN UNDOING THIS MESS.

There are a thousand things he could say, and none of them would be right and in this moment none of it matters to Leareth anyway. 

:Yes. He would be: 

Four and a half days earlier, in local subjective time -

Vanyel remembers dying. 

He remembers dying, and that it didn't hurt. 

...He died in the Foresight dream.

The final moments etched into his memory are of Leareth. Leareth's shock and - desperation? - reaching for him, and Vanyel doesn't think that anyone, not even the immortal two thousand year old mage he was created by the gods to fight, is that good of an actor - 

- wait. Focus. 

He remembers dying, and - wherever he is now, it feels like the Shadow-Lover's realm. Except not. Something is indefinably different... 

The all-too-obvious difference, is that the Shadow-Lover is not currently talking to him and offering him the usual choice of whether to move on or go back.

It's very quiet, wherever-here-is. Peaceful. He's not in pain. 

Apparently he's...going to be staying dead, then?

Probably he should - care, or ask questions, or find the Shadow-Lover and argue with him, or something, but it's peaceful here and he could, instead, just...not do that.

He drifts. 

It takes a long time - if 'time' is the right concept, wherever-and-whatever this is there's something odd about time passing here - before Vanyel bothers to pay any attention to his surroundings, other than noticing the quiet. But, eventually, he does. 

He doesn't, technically, have surroundings. Not in the physical sense. But—this place is something, in a deeper sense than anything natural sight or even Othersenses can see. It is a fortress, a prison at need, but for him a—port? His mind, used to seeing through eyes, tries to make sense of the raw reality that's now around him, and he imagines that he's standing on a stone floor in a room so vast he cannot see its walls or its ceiling. There are an uncountable number of other spirits surrounding him, though he can't recognize, nor indeed more than barely see, any of them.

In one direction the floor seems to slope down toward the shore of a sea, and an open sky shrouded by white mist. He can go down to the shore and get in a little boat and pass on into the mist. He would find perfect peace beyond it. He would not return.

...It's tempting. But, no. Not yet. 

It reminds him in some distant way of k'Treva, it's not very similar but, for him, k'Treva has always been the place for resting. And for waiting. 

Waiting for what? Vanyel isn't sure. He hadn't been expecting there to be this much existence, now that he's dead for good. 

Eventually, for lack of anything else to do, he starts walking. Not toward the imaginary-shore-and-sea, but in a different direction. 

He walks for a very long time. Days, maybe. It's very hard to keep track of time here.

Eventually he ends up in a place that he probably didn't want to go. Before, he had been in a place that offered freedom; this is a place of imprisonment. Not for him, nor can the inmates harm him, but what he sees in here will still frighten him. Hideous, twisted humanoid creatures; demons of fire and ice; things in shapes too vile to name. Many of them are throwing themselves madly, vainly, repeatedly against the bars of their cells.

But there is one who doesn't quite seem to belong here.

He looks, at first glance, like a beautiful not-quite-human with red-gold hair, but to Vanyel's Othersenses it seems like—that isn't his correct shape? His wrists and ankles are bound by short lengths of golden chain, which also show up on mage-sight; "chains" is, in fact, just a metaphor for what they are. He's sitting, dejected-looking, against the wall of his cell.

"Help me," the prisoner says, in a quiet, pitiful voice.

Vanyel...supposes he's frightened by the the horrific demon-shapes behind the bars, but he doesn't care very much. He's seen - not worse, but bad enough - and besides, he's already dead. Nothing matters anymore. 

When he hears the pleading voice, though, he stops walking. A call for help is always going to be salient to him. He swore an oath to the King, after all, to heal the wrongs and bring aid to those who suffer - 

Not particularly expecting it to work, he reaches out with Thoughtsensing and mage-sight, tries to get a closer look at the prisoner who may not be what he seems. 

The prisoner is not supposed to be here. He was tricked into assuming this form, used as a decoy for another shapeshifter's escape plan.

(Serves him right, for all the tricks he's played on people over the years, but he had put that all behind him, and died honorably—with another trick, but that's what he's good at, and when half the universe was at stake he didn't think much of the rules of honorable combat—)

Aaaaaaaaaah. 

All right. Focus. What is he supposed to do about this. Vanyel was extremely not expecting the Shadow-Lover's realm to have a demon-prison in it, much less a wrongfully imprisoned– well, not innocent person, but clearly he isn't supposed to be here. 

Can he sort of yell with Mindspeech and try to get the Shadow-Lover's attention.