Well, some of the awful people can shelter some non-awful people.

The Noldorin empire is going to take everyone on military duty and set them to cleaning up all that ugly scorched earth and rebuilding, yeah.

And now they're not besieged and could feed people. And stuff.

Yeah, yeah, the King hates famines as a matter of principle and as soon as there's enough food it'll be distributed wherever in the empire it's needed.

Good.

The reconstruction effort is very efficient and very thoughtful and managed competently and doesn't involve any slave labor or anything. The Noldor take back their Silmarils. They didn't swear not to figure out how to kill the Enemy so they keep working on that. 

She's not going to argue with that.

She thinks she will stay in Doriath with the blood berry bush and nobody she has punched in the face unless someone has an objection or Findekáno wants her as an advisor or something.

Findekáno can write her letters. He does, occasionally. He's trying to get Maitimo to overhaul the system for conscription of Men to be less tidily coercive.

It is pretty tidily that. Outright compulsory military service is not unheard of in Earth human countries but here is what she knows about other ways to orchestrate it.

Eventually a system is implemented that is just as tidy and less coercive. Findekáno does not communicate how he achieved this.

It's probably at least partly the obvious thing, which remains Findekáno's prerogative.

They make it work. The King likes games, and seems to like this one as much as the old one, even if it does mean living in constant terror that Findekáno will get tired and leave. Findekáno is not tired. He does not leave. He fixes things. He will not reward Maitimo with affection but he will reward Maitimo with sex. Maybe someday he will have fixed all the things within reach and leave; maybe someday he will have fixed all the things within reach and Maitimo will turn out to have been one of the things within reach and they will grieve together for the love they once shared and then have a go at rebuilding it.

Elspeth does not know why Melian has so much trouble understanding her. It's not that her magic doesn't work at all, Melian understands her to be honest and can read her mind and stuff. The barrier is actually worse than with Dwarves. She can make sense of things for Dwarves without supernatural assistance, it just doesn't get up to her usual standard. Melian is somehow less able to understand her than that with magical help and it's annoying.

Melian does not even notice that Elspeth is annoyed!

Does Lúthien maybe have any ideas for what it could be?

"I mean, the Maiar think very differently from us? It takes a while to learn, I think. You'll get there eventually."

Differently like how? Elspeth's witchcraft is so desperate for understanding that she can sometimes pull together information she has no other way to know solely by constructing the right analogies to communicate things. Elspeth can talk to rocks. Why this deficiency?

"Their minds are much much bigger and they have much more attention and they care about completely different things and experience the world very differently..."

Vampires have bigger minds too...

...how much bigger are Maiar?

"Probably a hundred times as much conscious attention, compared to an Elf?"

Come to think of it Elspeth's not sure exactly how much an Elf has, but it's less than a vampire and probably less than a half-vampire.

...She's been throttling her magic so she doesn't overwhelm people. Is she just... not explaining fast enough for Melian or something?

"Fast enough?"

Well, even around vampires she can't go at top projection speed all the time; they'll recover but it takes a while and that's if she's just doing full context layering and content nesting, it doesn't even have to be a mnemic blast. Maybe Melian is just missing so much context that she's barely keeping up with what Elspeth's trying to communicate when Elspeth's throttled to Elf-safe levels.

"Huh. That sounds possible."

But if Maiar have such big minds Elspeth could maybe just speed up? If she comes up with anything that urgently needs communicated, anyway, she mostly doesn't urgently need that with Melian in particular.