He briefly daydreams about being fluent by the time they get back, so he can be better than Curufin at a language for a few hours. Maybe even for a whole day, if the stranger needs to rest. He picks up another rock. "Three stones. One, two, three."

"Three stones. One, two, three," he echoes dutifully, and then translates. Look at them go. There will be so much learning.

He isn't fluent by the time they get back. He is successfully communicating, sort of. Their vocabulary has expanded to include most of the objects in the area, most things you could reasonably do with such objects, and a few things he sent through with thoughts. Orcs are unfamiliar to Miles.  Death is very familiar indeed. The pod is not a creature of its own, but obeys Miles' commands. 

Celegorm turns that over in his head for a few seconds. Baffling. "Then you are a Power." 

"I - no," he says. "I am not a Power."

He considers how to explain, then produces one of his incomprehensible objects. It is a short stick; now it is a short stick which glows at one end. Glow. No glow. Glow. No glow. The difference between these states is accomplished by pushing on the end opposite the glowing end.

"A... thing, made by people," he says of this minor miracle, in his rapidly improving Quenya.

"You cover and uncover the light source?"

"No... almost." Glow. "Now it is a light source." No glow. "Now it is not."

That didn't make sense. Celegorm knew how to make gemstones that didn't merely refract light but created it, bright enough to read by. There were some that stopped working if you broke them, and there were some that crumbled into smaller glowing gemstones, dependng how you'd married the stone and its new purpose. None of them lit on demand.

"How did you make it?"

"I did not make it. Other Men made it."

"How did they make it?"

He frowns in thought, then puts that object away and gets out another one, which also glows but in writing-like patterns on a flat pane. After manipulating this display for a few seconds, clumsily with his armoured fingers, he concludes: "I don't know."

Perhaps Miles isn't a scholar. This makes him instantly jump in Celegorm's esteem.

Though even Celegorm could explain how to make every thing the Eldar have achieved short of the Silmarils or Alqualondë's swanships. Or some of the obscure mathematics, possibly. He wants to take the light pen and see if he can identify the alloys on closer inspection, but it must be valuable beyond measure. Better to let Curufin be the one to demand that. 

"Who was the creator?"

...Miles considers this question for another few seconds, then repeats, "I don't know," in a tone that suggests he is dissatisfied with the completeness of this response but can't do any better under the current linguistic conditions.

"In our people, to create a thing that enhances the world, or the joy of its inhabitants, is a great good. Everyone will know your name, and desire to study under you, and there'll be festivals, and they'll start thinking of you as collective property and crushing you under the weight of their demands for narrative perfection as well as engineering perfection until you're isolated, paranoid, and beloved by all."

That had started off in simple enough language that Miles was supposed to understand it, but he'd lost the thread of his thought somewhere through the sentence. A few of their cautiously circling guard stared at him. 

Miles caught enough of that for his reaction to be deeply sympathetic laughter.

He puts away the glowing-words-object and gets out the light-object again.

"These are made... many. By many people," he tries.

"But who created the first, and taught the practice, and which of his students built on his work?"

"...More people than that," he tries.

"How many are your people?" He realizes they don't have the vocabulary for this. "We number twelve-twelves of twelve-twelves, four times over."

"Uh..."

Okay, numbers. Sure. He gets out the glowing-words-object and fiddles with it.

"...Twelve of twelve-twelves of twelve-twelves of twelve-twelves of twelve-twelves of twelve-twelves, two times over." He reflects on this a moment and then clarifies, "Not all in the same place."

"Not in the same place," he echoes.

That's more Men than there are grains of sand on the beaches. They'd overrun the orcs with sheer numbers. He has to be lying, or confused. But if he somehow isn't - If one in a thousand was literate and one in a thousand of those could write and one in a thousand of those copied books for a living, they'd have enough books to fill the entire palace. They could know things that not everyone knew, they could know so much that it was impossible to keep up with it all -

"Where?"

A tough question to answer, apparently.

"Different... places." He resorts to the English term: "Planets. Barrayar is my planet. This place, Endorë, is... flat. The sky is up. The ground is down. Planets are not flat." He gestures a spherical shape in the air. "Down is in. But planets are big. Standing on it, you don't see the curve. Just ground and sky, like here. My people have twelve twelves of planets."

"Do the Powers know about you?" They did, they had to, they'd been present at the making of the Universe, and yet to have concealed something of that magnitude from the Eldar - 

Shrug. "I don't know about the Powers."

Well. 

It was a good thing they were nearly back, because this was getting bigger than Celegorm felt equipped to handle. And he'd walked into it assuming he was going to die.

"Are the others coming here as well?"

"No."

He has no idea how he ended up here, no expectation that anyone can or will follow, and no idea if he will ever be able to go home.

"We can't go home either," he offers. Though it's a little different - they know exactly why.