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.
Okay, well, you're the one who understands planets, what exactly should I be asking for?
She goes over to Curufinwë. I hear you're the person to talk to about local non-Elves. I don't think they were covered by the dead people thing and I might have to arrange a separate dead people thing.
He has... different aesthetics from me. I don't plan to micromanage him because that would probably do more harm than good but I'd like a better picture of the problem and what solving it might look like before he goes and does stuff.
There are a lot of Men and they breed very fast. Bringing them all back when they die is probably better than not doing that but possibly not ideal, and does present the resource problem. Sending them to another planet might be nice but some Men will probably kill themselves to get to the next planet. An optimal solution would look something like what we have for Elves, which is where there's a known place you get reembodied right away with no fuss, except we'll need far more space to accommodate Men. Given peace and enough food within an Age there'll be a hundred billion of them.
I think the estimate I heard for the other mortal world is five billion but I don't know how long they've been at it and they only have one planet...