Everything my father values is keyed to the Silmarils, Maitimo thinks in Leareth's direction. He's followed the research team there, though he wasn't participating in any of the technical discussions earlier. They're entirely irreproducible, so it's actually a brilliant security system, if one assumes that none of the Silmarils will ever fall into another's possession. That's a mistake that my father—well, probably will make twice.

I'm Nelyafinwë Maitimo, by the way—Fëanáro's eldest son, he adds, in what's meant to sound like an afterthought.

:I am pleased to meet you, Nelyafinwë Maitimo. ...I confess, I do not think I followed how the Silmarils left his possession originally, or what happened in your world in the interim, just the part where Strange collected them and resurrected your father. It does seem the system has that downside - is he considering replacing it, since presumably your world now has far more advanced tech for that?: 

That...is a long story. Although I don't expect either of us will have anything to do for a few hours at least. (Fëanor, Tony, and Bruce have gathered around the exposed part of the particle collider at the far end of the lab—this is where the actual collisions happen, although the acceleration ring extends for several miles underground. Calanáro is monitoring the simulation progress on his phone.)

The world, so we were told, was created by Eru, the One, who created the gods to help him design it. Together they made a great Music into which the whole history of the world and all who dwell within was written, save the fates of Men, who are free of its chains. Obviously this is—somewhat metaphorical, although our culture has tended to take it quite literally. Anyway, one of the gods, whose name we do not speak—we call him only the Enemy—sought to change the music to his own liking rather than Eru's design. Thus was discord introduced into the Song, and the world marred.

I don't know if any of this is true in any meaningful sense. My father had little patience for it. What we do know is that the Enemy had already been fighting the other gods for millions of years before we came to exist, and although the other gods were...on our side, this was...not a high standard. When we first appeared, in the darkness of Endórë—what you call Earth—the Enemy captured some of us, and did...something horrific...to those he captured. Created his own race of twisted slaves, from the ruins of our bodies, sworn to hate us and all that is good in the world. The other gods intervened, captured him in a war that destroyed several continents. Imprisoned him and invited us to come live in Valinor. Some of us, including my grandparents, accepted. My grandfather became King of our tribe. We advanced rapidly under the gods' tutelage—from making stone tools to—this—in a few hundred years, and my father was responsible for a great deal of it.

About this time things started to go wrong. My grandmother died due to complications from birthing my father—this was not supposed to happen to us, least of all here, and worst of all was that my grandmother refused to return to life, when the chance was offered her. My grandfather wanted to remarry. This was also not supposed to happen—when we marry, it's for the lifetime of the world, and there's a...magical soul-bonding aspect to it as well, no one even knew what would happen if one man had two wives. But the gods convened and permitted him to remarry, if my grandmother truly refused to return to life.

My father hated this decision, and he hated his father's second wife, and he hated the children that were born of that marriage, the older of his two half-brothers—Nolofinwë—especially. The name my father gave me actually means 'Third Finwë'; a more to-the-point translation would be 'He-whose-uncle-is-a-bastard'. And into this mess, the gods released the Enemy, paroled after a sentence of three hundred years' imprisonment. He, of course, did everything he could to fan the flames of this discord. It came to the point that Nolofinwë accused my father of treason in the middle of a council meeting, and my father threatened him with a sword in response. The gods exiled my father from our capital city for it. My grandfather, furious at them interfering in his own government, left with him, which did not improve the situation.

A few years before this my father had created the Silmarils. Valinor at this time was illuminated by two magical Trees, which produced the various effects of Valinor that you're probably familiar with by now—but stronger, then, what you feel now are only lingering effects. We actually can't live very well without them—immortality becomes unpleasant, eventually. My father...deeply mistrusted the gods, and resented that we were effectively being kept prisoner by our dependence on the Trees. He decided to capture the effects somehow. He spent two years on it, almost continuously, barely eating or sleeping, and by the end of it he had produced the Silmarils.

On the day that his exile was due to end, the Enemy destroyed the Trees, murdered my grandfather, stole the Silmarils, and fled for Endórë.

My father went nearly catatonic with grief for a month. When he returned there was little left of him but rage. He swore...a magically binding, unbreakable oath, to recover the Silmarils at all cost, and pursue with hatred to the ends of the earth anyone, elf, man, or god, who kept them from him. We—swore with him. Nolofinwë was furious. Declared that my father had forfeited his right to the kingship by doing something so idiotic. We narrowly avoided a civil war by just leaving Valinor and going after the Enemy. Well, trying to leave. The only ships at the time were owned by the Teleri, whose king told my father, when he asked to borrow them, that he was being hot-headed and should go home and think about this for a while.

Obviously he did not take this well. He decided to steal the ships. We don't—we don't know who shot first, but soon there was a battle going on, the first violence that any elf had ever done to another in the history of the world, and then Nolofinwë's people joined in in the middle, not really knowing what was going on, and at the end twenty thousand people were dead, mostly Teleri. They were—'civilians' is too mild a word—their culture didn't even have the concept of war—

We left anyway. The gods forbade us to come back, or to be re-embodied if we were killed, and cursed us to fail in everything that we did, and be betrayed by our own mistrust. That's—more or less exactly what happened.

Leareth listens through all of this. Mostly with an impassive expression, though his reactions aren't entirely concealed from his body language. 

He's disturbed and - confused - about the earlier war with this 'Enemy', and increasingly frustrated and - sympathetic, though not surprised, with each step of escalation. 

At the description of the King's death and Fëanor's reaction, Leareth is very briefly not tracking the story anymore, as he wrestles his own disproportionate, pointless grief back out of the way. It's not even Vanyel he's thinking of, this time; it's Urtho. 

The part about the Teleri and the death of twenty thousand people, especially "'civilians' is too mild a word", gets a visible flinch from him. 

At the end, he's quiet for a long time. 

:- A complicated and messy story. I...am sorry to hear that this was your history. - You died and were reembodied recently as well?: 

Yes. That was only the beginning of the story. My death comes at the very end.

My father, hearing this curse, did not want to inflict it on his brother, whom he did reluctantly care for, by this time. Instead of going back to get him and his people, he burned the ships, hoping to spur them into the repentance that he could not himself muster. It didn't work, just as I had warned him; they were just as furious about the King's death as we were. They took...the long way out of Valinor. It took them twenty-five Earth years. Twenty percent of their population died during the trip.

Meanwhile, we retook most of the continent where the Enemy had embedded himself, but my father was killed early on in the fighting. I took up leadership. The Enemy offered us a parley, which I accepted, hoping to ambush him. He ambushed us back. I was captured.

I could tell you, in great detail, about the inside of his fortress. Had you asked during my first life I would probably have had an uncontrollable panic attack on attempting to, but death did something to my head so that...it's like it happened to someone else. It extended eighty miles beneath the Earth's surface, down to where the rock melts and his fire-demons bathed in the magma. It had a population of ten million, a complete self-contained industrial civilization existing solely to serve the purposes of its god. We had less than a hundred thousand, at the beginning, and our numbers did not replenish, and we were knocked down to a tech level of sword and bow by our crash-landing. It's a wonder he didn't just nuke us, although he didn't need to—his armies were always inferior in quality but vastly superior in numbers, so that we would have to kill as many as possible before finally being overwhelmed.

I could tell you more, but I don't think you would want to hear it. He has a penchant for inducing hallucinations, apparently—I don't actually remember any of those, but apparently he can produce hallucinations so realistic that one can inhabit them for years without realizing it—accordingly, when I was rescued, it was years before I really believed that I was out.

I spent fifty-something years in Angband. The last twenty-eight of those chained to a cliff face by one wrist to taunt my people, my body sustained by magic. Eventually my cousin and...dearest friend (there are a lot of implications around that word) rescued me. He nursed me back to health—physical, if not mental—and when I was well enough to pretend to function I surrendered my crown to Nolofinwë and moved with my brothers several hundred miles to the east.

We besieged the Enemy for hundreds of years. Eventually he broke the siege. That's...somehow not important, anymore, though it was terribly important at the time. Regarding the Silmarils, though—at one point there was a mortal who had fallen in love with the daughter of the local Elvish king, one of those who had stayed behind when we had come to Valinor. He named as her bride-price 'a Silmaril from the Enemy's iron crown'—which was to say, of course, 'fuck off and die', but the lucky bastards (she helped a lot) managed to actually do it. Of course, we were still bound to make war on anyone who kept one from us—we asked nicely first, but my brothers had insulted them quite badly during this whole affair, and they refused. Eventually we were forced to attack. Their kingdom, which was once the only safe place on the continent against the Enemy, was destroyed, several of my brothers and a lot of their people were killed, and we didn't even get the Silmaril back. We asked nicely again, were refused again, attacked again. The granddaughter of the original elf-mortal couple jumped into the sea with it rather than give it to us. Ulmo, god of waters, turned her into a bird and allowed her and her husband to reach Valinor to plead for aid.

Aid was granted. Between the Valar and the more technologically advanced elves, the Enemy's forces were completely destroyed, although the continent was rendered uninhabitable and eventually sank under the sea, and the world, which was just managing to come out of an ice age, was thrown back into a 1200-year nuclear winter. Mortal civilization only survived on an island the gods had raised for them far to the south. The Enemy himself was captured, the Silmarils were taken back, and he was tossed into a black hole. Most of our followers were reembodied or permitted to go back to Valinor. We, ourselves, were not.

We were still bound to take back the Silmarils, which were now in the custody of the triumphant army of Valinor. They let us take them. Because—the Silmarils were enchanted to burn anything evil. After all we had done, my last surviving brother and I discovered that we qualified. He threw his into the sea and stayed to wander and mourn on the shores of Endórë. I threw mine into a volcano and jumped in after it.

Fifteen thousand years passed, as they were counted in Endórë. Eventually the Avengers recovered the Silmarils and gave them to my father, and with all three in his possession, he was able to render the oath harmless. Mandos decided that we had repented enough, and with the oath nullified were no longer dangerous, so he reembodied us.

For pretty much everything after 'I was captured', Leareth is...not really absorbing the story on an emotional level. It's too much pointless stupid tragedy, and he has no anger or indignance to spare for it. 

:Why did the Valar wait for centuries to do anything: he says at the end, tonelessly. :- I am tempted to ask also why Eru bothered to create an evil god at all, but...I have not found it productive, in general, to ask those questions of the gods: 

Maitimo has, of course, been telling Leareth his entire life story on a thin pretext mostly because he expects his reactions to tell him if Leareth is someone they can work with.

His reaction to Finwë's death is noticeable, and Maitimo can guess that he suffered some deep grief in his past—long before the Snap, he would guess.

He flinches at the Kinslaying less than most Elves would, but more than some Men he's met. That's good. Maitimo regrets Doriath and Sirion deeply, but he can't, rationally, bring himself to regret Alqualondë—on balance, compared with what Morgoth would have done had they not arrived to stop him, the First Kinslaying probably saved lives.

He sees Leareth start to dissociate, at roughly the same point, interestingly, that his own memories seem to do the same. Something has been redacted from every memory he has from after Angband—something that feels extremely important, but also as though he would really rather not know what it was.

Our philosophers have been debating that since before the invention of writing, on the assumption that Eru is benevolent, he says. I find it simpler to—dispense with that assumption. I doubt that we are...real enough, to him, for benevolence to have any meaning; he is certainly not optimizing the universe for our happiness. I think he is telling a story, one that we all happen to be caught up in, and a story without an Enemy is very hard to make interesting. My family has tried to—be interesting in ways that involve less violence—but in the end our lives didn't turn out to involve much less than the Enemy's.

Perhaps, by some people's measures, this makes Eru evil. I—don't consider that a meaningful concept. He is what he is. He is responsible for the world's existence, and I think that...most people, at least, would rather exist in this world than not exist at all.

Leareth nods along. He approves of this analysis, and feels even deeper appreciation for Nelyafinwë Maitimo; it feels like he's very rarely met people who - were trying to reason through this sort of complicated ethical-philosophical question from a framework that made sense to him and didn't seem completely stupid? 

He's...impressed, that the Elves had philosophers interested in such abstract questions before they had writing. He's pretty sure the humans of Velgarth didn't. Maybe it would have been easier, for them, living in a place like Valinor, where scarcity and the accompanying constant pressure to focus on survival wasn't a meaningful constraint... 

:- Honestly, I feel that even applied to humans and equivalent sentient species, 'evil' is...less useful as a concept than many believe. ...I am not sure what your gods are like, but ours are very, very alien. They perceive the world in ways that we cannot even make sense of, and so of course Their concepts are different, and to the extent that values are built out of ontology and concepts...: 

....

If Nelyafinwë Maitimo were a Velgarth Mindhealer, there would be quite a lot of information here for him to perceive directly, both about Leareth's general underlying traits and his current emotional state. 

Leareth is almost two thousand years old, and for approximately that entire time, has mostly thought of himself as, in some key sense, alone in the world - more accurately, alone in the mission of achieving the goals and values he cares about. His mind is set up accordingly, and would look incredibly bizarre to any Mindhealer used to examining standard human minds. The intense grief and loss, that Maitimo saw echoes of as Leareth reacted to Finwë's death, is deeply and inextricably tied into this. 

After the Snap, for weeks, Leareth was holding onto his sanity by a thread. There were certain assumptions that were built into the self-stabilizing mental architecture that he pieced together over his long, lonely life. One of those pieces was...a fundamental assumption that he could, and would, investigate - and with sufficient effort come to understand - anything that happened in Velgarth. And then fix it, if it needed fixing. But he didn't see the Snap coming and neither did the literal gods of his world. Some of whom were, Themselves, subject to the random coin-flip deaths of the Snap... 

Leareth didn't give up. He made a vow on the stars, a long time ago, that he would never give up. But after weeks of throwing everything he could at understanding the disaster and preventing any future recurrence, he still had nothing. He did his best to go on taking the right actions, to save as many people as he still could – even when every assumption behind his core sense-of-self, behind his vow that held him together for millennia, had just been invalidated. 

By the time Captain Marvel arrived, Leareth wasn't, really, capable of immediately making and propagating all of the updates that her existence and the news she conveyed demanded. He tried to take all the right actions anyway, despite feeling helpless and overwhelmed and despairing and a dozen other emotions that he isn't used to feeling EVER and thus has relatively few functional coping mechanisms for.

This is still, mostly, the mode that he's operating in. He's had some time and space to start wrapping his mind around the new-resources side of the update as well as the scale-of-tragedy, and the driving sense of purpose underlying everything else is stronger and more coherent than it was during those early days in Velgarth. It's not especially fragile or in danger of breaking under strain. 

Leareth is nonetheless in significant emotional pain and mostly dissociating from this because he has no idea what to do with it and there's work in front of him. He's trying very hard to take all the right actions here, which include mental actions such as 'curiosity' and 'strategic planning', and he's starting to get some traction on this, but to a Mindhealer it would be clear how much this is costing him. 

...

Nelyafinwë Maitimo, of course, is not a Velgarth Mindhealer, and Leareth has millennia of practice at controlling his facial expressions and body language and minimizing those leaks. He's well outside of his comfort zone, though, and Maitimo is also immortal with all the life experience that allows, and from the perspective of someone skillfully paying attention and trying hard, Leareth's nonverbal signals and Mindspeech overtones give away quite a lot. 

Maitimo has begun to suspect, already, that Leareth is much older than any of the Secondborn ought to be; he might be even older than Maitimo himself, although he has, actually, no idea how to calculate his own age at this point, between time spent in Valinor, Endórë, and Mandos, the last of which has a particularly ill-defined relationship to time, and in which he spent the first several—probably millennia of Endórë time—trying very hard not to exist at all.

He understands, in some measure, Leareth's particular pain, for he once spent centuries continuing to take actions against the will of every fiber of his being—but he did it for his family, and his people, and this is the only framework in which he can characterize such motivations. He inevitably wonders who Leareth is loyal to in this way. He will not guess that it is all people, on all worlds.

He notes Leareth's deepening respect for him and guesses that it's partly because he sees the world in a way few others have even dared to. However, the fact that Elves were doing philosophy before they invented writing doesn't mean much. They are all immortal, telepathic, and have perfectly eidetic memories. Writing was actually, in many ways, a significant step backward in the quality of their communication. His father, who invented their current writing system, regarded it mostly as an aid in the study of spoken language. The Vanyar, from whom most of the philosophers hail, borrowed the invention from the Noldor and probably never would have invented it on their own.

The orthodox definition of evil is the absence of good. The orthodox proof of Eru's benevolence is that there's no suitably abstract definition of good other than 'what Eru is'—most of the dubious arguments are made trying to reconcile this definition with the innate sense of goodness that was designed into them for participation in a society of other people. Maitimo's innate conscience was a casualty of Angband, and he wasn't particularly good at being a normal person before that, and he has little use for either definition.

He doesn't know what Velgarth's gods are like, but the Valar are, he suspects, much more alien than they pretend to be. They exist half in the universe and half out of it, Eru's puppet-strings by which he pulls on his creation, and the illusion that they have desires and motivations comparable to those of the Children is just that, although they themselves may not even realize it.

Maitimo is not even bothering to distinguish public from private thoughts at this point. Leareth can hear all of this, albeit not in a way that's particularly directed-at-him.

Calanáro approaches Leareth cautiously, seeing that he's probably in the middle of a conversation, though he isn't saying anything aloud.

"Uh—the computers came up with a solution to the spacetime geometry problem."

Leareth has his Thoughtsensing open again, more out of an abstract sense of 'all information is worth having' than because he wants to or can muster any curiosity about Maitimo's thoughts. This also makes it a lot harder to even parse what Maitimo is thinking, though he notes what he can and files it away to think about later. Someday. Maybe.

(Lately it's been feeling a lot less clear that there will be a later.) 

Despite Calanáro's careful approach, Leareth is startled by the interruption, though he tries to hide it. 

:- Oh. Good. I can come look, if you wish - is there any update on the particle accelerator experiment -?: 

"You'll have to ask Fëanáro about that, and I don't think you ought to go over there at the moment," he answers. Fëanor and Tony (the latter of whom is in full armor) are both somewhere inside the particle collider assembly where they probably shouldn't be, messing with something that's emitting a lot of light, and probably a lot of harder radiation, even behind a solid foot of darkened, lead-infused glass. Bruce is keeping a safe distance.

(Elves aren't harmed by high-energy radiation and in fact need to absorb it to power difficult magic, is the concept that Calo throws wordlessly at Leareth, preempting his concern.)

"Unfortunately this lab was built before anyone appreciated the concept of a thoroughly non-magical holo-display. You'll need to touch the palantír, and it will osanwë the visualization to you." He points to a round, black—stone?—sitting on a base to which Calo's—small computer terminal?—is attached by a cable that looks hand-made.

:Yes, of course: 

Leareth reaches for the black stone, with an apologetic glance back at Maitimo for the interruption. 

(He can tell that Maitimo isn't finished learning - whatever it is he wants to learn - about Leareth as a person. He's not sure how to approach that. Usually he would have more actual plans, that would affect how he wanted to be perceived by potential allies, and thus what was strategic to reveal. He...doesn't really have plans, right now. Which is an uncomfortable realization in itself.) 

He touches the black stone, waits for the visualization to reach him. 

The visualization of the solution is projected into his mind. It's an inverted Möbius strip a shockingly elegant eleven-dimensional cellular automaton that expands to produce the breathtaking complexity he saw earlier.

...It's beautiful. 

For a glorious ninety seconds or so, it captures Leareth's full attention, as he tries to wrap his mind around it or at least around a few fragments of it, enough to sanity-check the general shape against the intuitions he's formed over a couple of days of intensely studying the relevant math. For those ninety seconds, his mind is too full to leave any space for emotional pain. 

- eventually he drags himself back to his physical surroundings. :To the extent I can understand it, the solution seems adequate to me: 

"Okay."

He sets to programming the little navigational devices that Tony had made back on Earth, in anticipation of when they found the solution.

A little while later, Fëanor emerges from his work, and makes an announcement.

"My theory on the nature of the Pym particle was correct, and I have been able to create some and trap them in silma." He holds up a small crystal glowing with red light (which is an entirely unrelated magical effect used solely to distinguish finished jewels from raw silma). "I have enough silma remaining to create a total of ten infinitely reusable jewels. I could, at need, create more, but the crystals take the better part of a Valian Year to grow, and while it's possible they would grow faster on Earth, I think it more likely that they would not grow at all.

"Calanáro, if you are done programming the navigation beacons, we can begin the test now."

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.