It takes as long as the spring only because they weren't looking. They can stretch the oath that far, they can be disinterested in knowing - but now they know, and so there it is. Elwing of Sirion is twenty-three. Half-man, so fully grown. Sirion is a city of refugees. Elves and Men and, since there are Men, children. Elwing herself has infant children.
They debate whether to send messengers. Debating is allowed, even protracted debating. The Oath, these days, is loud in their minds, and louder when they're pushing it like this, but they drag out the debate for a few months. Messengers will probably be shot on sight. The last time Elwing of Sirion received news of the House of Fëanor it would have been the news that her brothers, twins, aged seven, had not survived the sack of Menegroth.
They send messengers anyway. The messengers are shot on sight. They have good armor, Fëanorian armor, and return home injured but not lethally. Maglor's songs no longer stitch them together. War makes you worse at healing. Maglor's songs are more powerful than ever - he can knock back a wave of approaching enemies, he can make a blade's next touch deadly, he can make them faster and more impervious to danger, but he can no longer do healing.
Maedhros, when he thinks about this, thinks that perhaps there needs to be part of you that is not broken for healing spells to draw on. Or perhaps the Enemy is amused to strip that away first. Perhaps the Enemy finds it suited to the theme as the Oath tugs and yanks and twists them into violence against the lands they once defended and the peoples they once sheltered.
They send messengers to Sirion again. The messengers deliver a plea for the Silmaril, an offer of anything at all in exchange. The messengers do not return at all.
The Enemy is many many hundreds of miles from here but at night Maedhros can hear him in his head. Is it so implausible that I really let you go? the Enemy likes saying. You serve me better free than you ever would have willingly.
The Oath allows them to work slowly. They begin planning the sack of the refugee camp even more slowly than the Oath allows, so slowly that its currents are constantly tugging at them. Any slower and the currents would erode all the things they care about which are not the Oath, and it would be a disaster to go to Sirion once they've been stripped of their capacity to care about anything that is not the Silmaril. So they do not hold out forever. But they work as slowly as they can.
Like what? I don't want to go anywhere near time travel, that sounds horrendously dangerous.
Well, I'll deal with the other stuff first and when Maedhros is the last thing on the list we can talk about that, but speaking as an obligatorily immortal creature I wouldn't want to force him to exist if he can't be okay with existing.
Well, it seems to be taking a while to decide whether Sauron gets a redemption arc and Eru does not seem very impatient about it. No big rush.
That was all I meant to talk to you in particular about. You can go back to staring contests.
To Fëanor: Do you know what Eru meant when he said I complement your family?
Ordering hostile vassals is tricky and I have almost exclusively observational experience with the skill, he's really complicated and I don't understand a lot of his powers, and he won't cooperate on the rest of fixing this world if he thinks I'm not going to quit while I'm ahead there.
If you can get me to Fairyland I can gate anywhere if I have an idea of where I mean to go. Prospects are fuzzy from there.
'one of Eru's worlds that needs us' probably isn't enough of an idea. If they're all within this universe, and I think they are from what he conveyed during the black holes explanation, I could specify star systems, but that'd still be an inefficient way to do it. I can't assess in what respects they'll need fixing but if we had a way to bring back our dead I am very sure we could do it.
Or a planet where we are automatically reborn without fuss or judgment if we're killed. There are lots of unused planets. We should perhaps choose one as a base of operations other than this one, I think it'll raise tensions to have us here. I can set Maitimo to building me a peaceful base-of-operations planet while we find an efficient way of identifying worlds of Eru's where we're needed so you can gate to them.