She comes inside, thrumming with nervousness.

What if this doesn't work? She can't--if Illia had died, and someone said they could maybe bring her back, and failed--what would she do? She doesn't know.

He seems to mostly be cycling through clammy skin colors. "What else do you need?"

"Let's--let's start with that. I've never done this before. If the first try fails and I think of something that would have helped I'll ask for it."

"Okay. I assume my brothers would have noticed if you were the Enemy, but - what? What can you do? And how?"

"I'm from a completely different world and I came here by accident. I have a kind of magic that hurts to use and risks personality alterations unless you have a personality that's a specific kind of exceptional, which I do."

He nods. "Okay. And you can give people new bodies, like Mandos?"

"I've never tried a whole body. I'm human, and my people don't have anything like Mandos' halls anymore than the Men here do. But I can give people new body parts--I regrew Maedhros's missing hand--so I'm hoping it will generalize."

"Huh." A thin-lipped smile. "Did he call you unrealistic?"

"Not to my face."

"For a while it was his highest compliment. Then he got better at - well."

"Pretending?"

"'Achieving his goals,' I think he'd say."

"He did seem very competent."

"Yeah. I guess you really get a sense of a person once half of them is gone and you have to see what they get done with what's left."

"...That hasn't actually happened to enough people to become a general rule, has it?"

"It's been a long war."

"I wish I had been able to take my feelings out on the giant spiders. Oh well."

"Why didn't you? Always helps my mood."

"...So it turns out they're people. It doesn't surprise me that no one noticed sooner because the only reason I knew was because I got paranoid and checked by my magic and I couldn't get any to respond to osanwe until I took one captive that had been attacking me and straight-up told it I wasn't letting go until I got some answers, but now they're in a glass dome where they can't bother anyone and nobody can bother them."

"...thoughtful. Can we travel through there, if we need to?"

"Yeah, I put walking-paths on top of it."

He nods.

And then Celegorm is back with a deer.

Hokay.

Deep breaths.

"You can put that down--somewhere it won't stain anything if there's blood. There'll probably be blood. Which direction is Valinor from here, precisely?"

They both point.

"Okay."

She'll try just reaching out to Valinor, as a preliminary exercise--she doesn't expect it to work, but it might get her a decent idea of how far she is from succeeding.

...

Well, that sure is an ocean.