Bella does not rely on him for systematic magical research assistance. But he now knows all the nondamaging spells she has.

And she has other people to rely on for systemic magical research assistance. Olórin remains delighted to help, and eager for the first accidental explosion; Rúmil is writing a grand history of Arda but is happy to work on magic with her whenever he doesn't have a pair of eyes for that project.

Bella is sometimes his eyes for that. She doesn't read very fast in Quenya yet, so she can get it at almost full speed even focusing on the part of the paper he needs looked at.

She gets a written (well, actually, looks like it's been embossed into the page) invitation to give a talk to Aulë and his Maiar and his students.

She has more than high school curriculum to talk about now! She plans two hours of "how to read scrolls", "derived principles of spellcraft", and "the future of wizarding research and invention", puts together another copy of the lot of the spells extant to pass around, meditates on her nervousness around Valar/public speaking/being Not A Real Wizard (...she kind of is one now), and schedules a day.

Mahtan offers to come into town and walk her there, in case she'd like the company or is nervous because it would be quite understandable. He is very famous and well-regarded and this is only partially attributable to Bella happening to give him the idea of glass first.

She would appreciate that!

He arrives, with Nerdanel who has grown several inches and a younger girl who is even smaller than Nerdanel when they first met. "Bella, my apprentices," he says, beaming. "I have been accused of nepotism but I insist my daughters just happened to be the most talented children in the business. You've met Nerdanel. This is Hyellindë."

"Hello again, Nerdanel; it's lovely to meet you, Hyellindë." Bella can pretty much converse in Quenya now.

"We're looking forward to your talk," he says. "Or should we discuss any subject at all but that?"

"It's okay, I don't think I'm going to really freak out until I see the whole audience."

"Could ask them not to take material form," Nerdanel says, giggling. "The Valar are so excited about your kind of magic, they've never heard anything like it."

"I think I'd rather know where they all are, to be honest."

"And they've been working so hard on their forms," Hyellindë says, like a proud parent. "It's very tricky for them."

"I wonder what's so hard about it?"

"Oooh," Nerdanel says, "Yavanna explained it to me. See, we're all made of really really small pieces, impossibly small, and they're all folded in specific ways into slightly larger pieces called proteins that are the building blocks of people. But the reason proteins fold the way they do is because of the laws of the universe, and around the Valar the laws of the universe just sort of - forget what they're doing, and in a Vala the same pieces won't fold into proteins, so they have to manually shape them into the right way and then keep them like that. They are so so much smarter than us that they can do that, and after a lot of practice it only takes about a hundred times as much attention as we have to start with, but it's still a lot."

"...Wow. Why do they need proteins? If they're so small? They'd look right if they used whatever the smallest visible piece was to build themselves. Visible to Eldar."

"Oh, they can look right pretty easily. Most of the ones that just materialize and reappear and stuff are doing that, just trying to look right. But if they want to try our foods, hear our songs the way we hear them, use our magic, they have to be us, not just look us-like. So lots of them have learned how to do at least one properly incarnate body. Lots of them haven't, you just mostly don't see those ones around."

"Gotcha."

"Why aren't plants interesting?"

"What am I supposed to do with them?"

"Arrange them into bouquets? Eat them? Turn them into woodcarvings? Bonsai them?"

"Yeah, exactly," she says.

"Why are those boring, then?"

"You can make stone and metalwork that does anything, all kinds of magic, and even without magic you can turn it into all kinds of things, and you don't have to do the same thing twice, and you're making things instead of just reducing them interestingly - I don't mean any offense to Yavanna or people who like plants, those just aren't very - they're not going to change Valinor."

"Druids can do cool things with plants, but I'm nowhere near done enough with wizardry to try to go figure out divine magic."

She nods. "You're doing interesting wizardry, though! Ata made us all learn the healing spell before we were allowed to work the forge."

"I'm glad it's there if you need it! I was expecting it to be really hard, arcane healing is weird and niche in my world because clerics do it all."

"That's kind of the hope in having interdisciplinary talks like this one," Mahtan says, "that things which are very hard from one angle, or not approached as a problem because the discipline has different tools, turn out to be tractable in a different approach that wouldn't have occurred to anyone. Of course, we usually don't get to reach so far as another world for inspiration."

"I didn't know my talk was supposed to be interdisciplinary!"

"It's your magic system! We use a different one!"

"Okay, but the talk itself is supposed to be all wizardry, right?"

"Yes, of course. Sorry to scare you."

"It's okay, I'll live."

"You seem to be rather thriving. Lovely house, by the way."

"Thank you!"

It's not really all that long a walk. Aulë's halls are elaborate stone caverns.

Bella makes sure her notes are all in order.

And there are a lot of people. Some of them are Maiar. Some of them are just Elves. Mahtan's daughters are the youngest, but not by a lot.

Oh they have so many questions. They have questions about whether the magic system can be characterized as parallel in certain specific ways to a different magic system she's never heard of but that the questioner hurriedly tries to explain.

...she can make vague guesses based on this hurried explanation? Um, magic items enchanted in the local sense register to detection.

This is a wholly satisfactory answer and he looks delighted.

Yay!

Afterwards there is an elaborate dinner with lots and lots of courses and Nerdanel whispers that they just keep going forever, she thinks, but that one can ask for desserts when one is supposed to go home and sleep and then get desserts and then leave. Nerdanel is on her left and a Maia named Mairon who has a particularly nice face and is almost good at moving it the way humans do is on her right.

"Thanks for telling me," Bella whispers to Nerdanel.

"The first few times I fell asleep in my chair and missed dessert."

"Oh no!

She's smiling slightly. "Luckily when I woke up it was still going on."

"That's a lot of dessert. I hope you had room to try everything you wanted."

Which Bella will happily answer!

Mairon tries after a while to expand on the question someone had asked her after the talk. "All of our power in the world either works by singing to Creation or by ordering everything at the smallest conceivable level. This seems like it's operating on some scale in between those, and one more accessible to incarnate minds, which is appealing."

"I'm not sure if on my plane Creation is even sung to," remarks Bella. "And the universe wouldn't have let us mess with enough stuff to figure out all the very small things, I think, so this is what was left for magic to do?"

"It's excellent to have something controllable and repeatable with effects at an ordinary scale. What is interesting is that of the three methods it's the only one which drains one. I can't think why that would be."

"I'm not sure. I mean, wouldn't singing tire a person out if they did it long enough?"

He looks flummoxed. "Hmm. Maybe. I don't know. Is singing tiring for people?"

"Eldar need less sleep than I do but they do still sleep, if nothing else. And it dries out the throat, too."

"You can get the same results with musical instruments," he says, "though I suppose that doesn't solve sleep. Still. The limits on use of your magic seem to be much firmer."

"I mean, they stretch over time. Mine are growing pretty fast considering it's only been a year, really."

"Eventually do you suppose you'll be more or less able to do your magic at will?"

"Eventually, sure!"

"Do the longer-lived races have much advantage on your world?"

"Not as much as you might think? Some, at the higher tiers, and I think sylphs and a couple others are actually so short-lived that it makes it hard for them to get anywhere on a worldwide scale, but humans are represented in most fields. Maybe just because there's lots of us so there's more prodigious talents? I haven't looked at the per capita share."

"It's said in this world that Eru gave Men free will, and that this gift compensates for the brevity of their lives."

"I mean... free will's nice and everything but lacking it doesn't seem to be inhibiting the Eldar much as long as they don't go around making oaths."

"It inhibits us much more than them," he agrees. "It may have nothing to do with the gifts of Men in so many fields."

"My plane, humans are mostly known for numerousness and adaptability."

"There are much worse things to be known for. You've certainly demonstrated the adaptability."

"There's harder things to adapt to, I'm not that impressed with myself."

"Does everyone in your world have free will? Do you know if there's magic that can grant it, lift a oath of the sort we give?"

"Um, the closest thing that comes to mind is a spell called 'atonement', which I don't remember a lot about and it's divine magic. It wouldn't do free will outright, I think - I'm not sure there's anything on my plane that lacks it to start out - but it might work on an oath." (She has been thinking about this for reasons.) "It's very fuzzy divine stuff but the popular conception is that the caster can discharge somebody's mistake onto themselves and then it's easier to clear, it's more of an energy cost than anything else."

"That would have tremendous implications, were it possible here and if it had any effect on words spoken before Eru."

"I'm not sure if it would. I might try to invent an arcane version if I can get enough of the pieces figured out but it'd be very risky to play with and might not intersect with the right kind of thing at all."

"Are you not trying to reinvent divine magic? Or is that just the next project?"

"I don't know any of it to start out, and the resident divinities are a lot different and don't ultimately run on divine magic," she says. "There's some cross-domain applicability between arcane and divine, so I'll have a better idea of whether I'll ever get to the point of being able to figure it out in a few years. Well, figure it out without resorting to planar shifting the applied theology section of a library from my plane into my house."

"The prince Curufinwë was under the impression fetching books from your world was very dangerous."

"Going and getting them would be. I think staying firmly in Valinor and just sort of summoning books would be okay. Well, in terms of antagonizing the universe; it would be stealing. I'd probably want to do it with a Vala looking over my shoulder just to be really sure but my plane hasn't done a single thing to me or anybody else since I've been here."

"The Valar would be very interested in the things you're describing and I imagine delighted to help. ..is there precedent for your plane interfering in other ones?"

"Um, resurrection spells do that - dead people go to one of several afterlife planes. And an overlapping set of planes produce summonable animals, which have some combat use so of course that's the thing everyone summons. And I think there's a thaumaturgical debate about whether, like, fire spells are just generating fire or if they're summoning it from the Elemental Plane of Fire? 'Summon Library Stack' would be new but not conceptually unprecedented."

"And what landed you here? Do you know?"

"I think it was sort of the opposite of a summoning spell, but it may have been done incorrectly or something and I'm not sure what they would have been trying to send if I hadn't stumbled into it."

"Certainly something we'd have been less advantaged to have dropped on us."

"I wasn't gonna say it."

He laughs, stretches his arms in a motion that's almost humanlike. "I imagine we could have managed it. Melkor had allies in all kinds of forms in the last war. Our fortune in getting you has almost nothing to do with what they could have sent through instead. Though if it'd landed in the palace with the baby prince that might have caused problems."

"I might have heard about it if a reverse summoning spell - as opposed to a planar travel spell - were being used on people in my school. They probably just would have sent you a rabbit or something."

"What's the relevant distinction between reverse summoning and planar travel? And perhaps they sent us many rabbits. We might not have noticed."

"You might've noticed one in the palace! Planar travel is you cast it and now you're on another plane; reverse summoning is you cast it and now something else is on another plane."

"Ah. Both arcane magic, so you can eventually learn them?"

"Presumably. Scrying first though."

"Scrying is one I expect to be in high demand, so people can check on their loved ones who declined the invitation to Valinor."

"Intraplanar scrying should be easier than interplanar."

"Scrying before transport will probably cause a great deal of grief, if people watch others in danger and desire to immediately fly to the rescue."

"...Maybe first I'll get long-distance messaging spells."

"That would be one solution. What are your ambitions here, Bella? I know some people who would delight in reinventing everything but you seem likelier to desire that as a means to some end."

"It's nice here but it could be more convenient, and in the long term there's other places that aren't as nice that could use evacuation or reformation or something. The rest of this plane, and other ones."

"Turn every space that your magic can reach into Valinor, but with improvements?"

"Why not?"

"Some of the Eldar didn't agree to come here. I'm not sure how they'd feel if we went and spruced up their homeland. I know even less about the peoples of distant lands. I am sure there are some who'd want to first ask Eru's counsel, too, though -" he waves a hand - "we might not be interpreting Eru correctly, if I do say so myself."

"Well, Valinor in a general sense, not necessarily in any specific aesthetic or politics or layout or anything. If there's somebody who objects to arbitrary plants being edible or the eventual availability of launderers or not having to keep everybody you know within arm's reach all the time lest something eat them I'd love to hear their arguments."

He laughs again. As Maiar go he's quite good at it. "You'll hear no arguments for that at this table."

"Didn't think so!"

"CanI send you research notes occasionally? I would like to work on figuring out whether your magic has access to some kind of interpreter that allows it to do the same things we're doing with much less precise control, and if the answer is that it does, and we know the fundamental results that we're trying to achieve, your project would be one of understanding the function of the interpreter and possibly how it was created. I do not particularly expect this to work, but I think it's worth examining."

"Um, I'll look at the notes, sure, although based on that description I'm not particularly optimistic..."

"It'd be odd for a magical system to run in this world which we don't know anything about. It really ought to be somehow a derivation of principles we do know, though I'm not sure this is particularly how."

"Would it be less weird if I were the only person who could cast spells?"

"Yes. Then I'd assume you were tapping somehow on the way the rules worked on your home plane."

"...Maybe everybody is. Which would be a heck of an exploit, since in my home plane science isn't allowed and we've been doing a lot of science to magic."

"It seems odd that whatever prohibits science wouldn't still apply, if the magic is somehow drawing from your universe. But I don't think I really understand how science can be disallowed in the first place."

"My universe has a lot of power structures that don't form a sensible hierarchy with each other. 'The universe' is what we call the thing that prohibits science, and it does it by, well, being the universe - it can make science unrewarding at best and counterproductive or lethal at worst. Here, it's not the universe and doesn't have being the universe privileges; but wizardry might run on something else that doesn't answer directly to the universe, at least outside its jurisdiction."

"If we're able to draw on the magic of your world, I wonder what that does to the fated history of ours."

"When we were tasked with making Arda we saw a vision of what it was and would be. A vision of tremendous detail, down to the contents of books that will not be written for many Ages. You didn't feature in the vision, and your world's magic certainly didn't." He smiles. "It's very exciting."

"Oh. Huh. So what was going to happen?"

"We are eventually going to pardon Melkor, in exchange for his aid on a task no other could attempt, and the immediate aftermath of that attempt is unknown to us because mercy and a second chance cannot be granted with full knowledge. Many Years after that new lights will rise above Arda and new races will be born to it, and they will war, but through tragedy and horror some of the Elves will meet them and aid them, as will I, and eventually they will multiply and fill the whole world save Valinor, and have great and terrible kings and build great and terrible things."

"Me too," he says.

"So how long have I got to fix it?"

"Melkor's pardon is inevitable unless you happen to find the means to break oaths; the problem that only he can fix is that there are people sworn to him who have orders right now to do harm, and he can resolve it by telling them they are free to go live their lives, and we must attempt to aid them. Melkor's pardon may be for the good anyway; we can pledge ourselves to better courses. The arrival of Men is not for three hundred Years. That seems enough time for you to be quite a disruptive force."

"Cool."

"How do you want the history of Arda to go?"

"Less war and tragedy and horror and terribleness of things. Also I am not sure we need more light around here, but I can get darker glasses."

"I think Eru finds tragedy and horror beautiful."

"Um," says Bella, "then maybe he should write novels."

"I agree wholeheartedly."

"Maybe I am here to introduce the concept of the novel." She brushes off her hands in a 'well, that's done then' gesture.

"Some people do think Eru called you here. I don't. He liked the plan. Your plan is very different from his."

"I was kind of skeptical of that idea too. I mean, my world has horror and tragedy but it's very stylistically different and I kind of doubt Eru and my universe are even on speaking terms."

"...what kind of stylistic differences in horror and tragedy are there?"

"It's less concentrated - not just one Melkor doing everything unpleasant like it's his calling - and the tools to address it are way different, magic and subtle arts and every third person you meet being really into swords and people going epic; and the variety of afterlives and etiquette sometimes being a matter of life or death in the most arbitrary ways and a hundred kinds of people instead of like three; and there not being hardly any benign authority figures to go to for help."

"Ah. Yes. Eru wanted a terrible desperate war between good and evil, but he wanted good to win and win wholly."

"If my universe is aiming at something arc-y like that it's more like 'I want there to be cool people and not so many lame people, have a bunch of ways to be cool and I'll kill you if you're lame near anything that's cooler than you'."

"How do you turn that into a paradise? Make everyone maximally cool?"

"I'm not sure that works, because coolness is sort of inherently hierarchical there. There's not billions of ways to be cool."

"And yet making it less lethal to be near people cooler than you does not seem sufficient to make that world perfectly happy."

"Yeah, I think my universe needs a little more work than being told novels exist. It ought to have gotten the hint when action movies were invented, but no."

"Action movies?"

She sends the concept as a bundle - movies; the tropes of the action kind in particular; explosions and choreographed swordfights and wizards locked in combat with dragons and stuff like that.

Delight, fascination, glee - "I am not surprised that this failed to deter people from the behaviors it depicts."

"Oh, I'm not surprised that people aren't deterred, it's just like, Eru should write novels, my universe should direct action movies, everybody else should get on with less horror and tragedy."

"That sounds lovely."

"I think so!"

There are in fact a lot of courses of dinner.

Bella eats things, including desserts, and eventually begs off to go to bed.

A number of people congratulate her on her way out, and encourage her to come back when she has more to say.

She will!

Fëanáro turns ten. The whole city has a minor festival for this, which lasts a week. Major festivals last three.

He is utterly delighted with it and has somehow not spent all his magic for the day yet and until the spell expires no one can hold a conversation with him because he is in fact leaping every medium-sized building in sight.

He is! His gift to Fëanáro is a number of elaborate instruments for calligraphy.

"I had to put that spell together really fast," Bella murmurs, when Fëanáro's visible leaping a few blocks away. "The date snuck up on me. Has anybody invented the wall calendar?"

"I don't think they have. You did very well for so little notice. Wall calendar? Just a paper with dates to cross off?"

"Yeah. And sometimes a picture on the opposite side of the page for every month but I don't need that part."

"I am sure if you mention the idea to someone, one will be on your door as soon as the festival's over."

"Have I mentioned lately I like gift economies? Well, this one, I probably wouldn't like all possible gift economies."

"I think it only works among people who like creating things and who have enough of all the things they really need."

"Yeah, those are important ingredients."

"It certainly suits the Noldor very well. That was a very generous present you gave Fëanáro."

"I thought he'd like it and it looks like I was right. I have this vain hope that when he knows enough different spells he'll be paralyzed with just enough indecision not to use them all up before breakfast every time he wakes up."

"I think when he's twenty or so he'll have learned some restraint. I hope. If not, perhaps he'll just be so powerful he can't use them all so quickly."

"We can hope."

"Let's just hope he doesn't ask the rest of us to cast it on him all day."

"It's personal-target."

"You are a wise woman, Bella."

Giggle.

"Did we determine how much longer the years here are than the years on your plane?"

"...You know, I actually got a set of hourglasses once they were available and I never confirmed that days are the same, but my sleep schedule's not slipping weirdly or anything... Uh, year at home is three hundred sixty five days."

"A year here is seventeen hundred twenty-eight days."

"Yes," he says, "you have."

"Well, it has been one."

"But I mean, like - to the extent when I got here I was nineteen I'm like twenty-three, twenty-four now. ...If the days are even the same. I should check if the days are the same, the Trees might be keeping me on a longer cycle -"

"Well, we have hourglasses now! That's easily checked."

The festival is still ongoing outside. It's loud.

The Treelight is golden and placid.

"Oh," he says. "Oh. I'm sorry. Um. You have a lot to show for it, you learned a language and helped raise a child and teach him to read and write, you reinvented the principles of magic and invented new spells -"

"And that would be really impressive for a year and solidly respectable for two and, like, good try, if it were five, and it's been ten, I have had ten years in a science fantasy paradise with all the help I can think of how to use and negligible side demands on my time and I do not yet hold all time and space in the palms of my hands -!"

"I see," he says. "I'm sorry. I don't think you're holding yourself to reasonable standards but I can imagine what it feels like to fall short of them."

"Maybe my standards are unrealistic but this still isn't ten years' worth of anything. That's a third of my entire life, I have now spent a third of my life here and I have not gotten a third of my total absorption of information and production of work done and it should have been more than that because the first third I spent being a small child and the first two thirds I spent in a universe that bites if you try to do things -"

"Not a third of your life. A third of the life you'd have had if you'd kept living there. A tiny tiny fragment of your life, Bella, you have all the Ages of Arda..."

"A third of my life so far!"

"I'm sorry. What do you want to do? Come up with a plan so the next year doesn't slip past you as quickly? Go live as a hermit on Tol Eressea so we don't distract you and make you invent more slowly?"

"I - I don't understand how this could have even happened in the first place," she says slowly. "I can see not noticing the days being long, maybe it turns out I rely a lot on noticing how tired I am for feeling when in the day it is and the Trees are perking me up so it feels like one day per day, I can buy that I'd miss a factor of two, that way. I can lose hours between sleeps and it makes sense. I don't know where my days went - no one was refusing to tell me how many days things were, it just - it didn't seem important - does, does something about the Trees or Valinor mess directly with time sense -?"

"Um. I think so. It makes the long Ages go by swiftly, is how people usually say it -"

"Okay. Who set that up. I need to make a complaint."

"Manwë, probably. You want to go up to Taniquetil and talk with him?"

"That seems like it would be next."

"Okay. Uh. I don't know anyone who's gone to Manwë with a complaint."

"...do people ever go to other Valar with complaints?"

"Yes, but, you know, more suggestions for improvement, and Manwë is the King of the Valar..."

"Of course. Just possibly very rude, I suppose, and very presumptuous. Everything is safe."

"I mean, I think it's a little rude not to have mentioned this more explicitly when Lórien cornered me my first few days here, he had a good opportunity, like, 'by the way, there is a time-slidey effect throughout Valinor, would you like to opt out'."

"Yes, he should have mentioned it."

"So I just - go to Manwë and explain that this is very alarming and I would like my sense of time restored to its original condition." Pause. "I bet Fëanáro would like it too, come to think of it. I guess it might make being a small child more frustrating but he's always worried about not getting enough done."

"Let's just ask for you, first, and then if there are no negative consequences we can discuss it with him. It might make it hard for you to maintain relationships with people, if you experience time very differently from them. And that's not a problem he needs."

"Yeah, okay."

"Do you want to leave now?"

"I had the impulse to suggest that and then thought you'd feel that way. All right. Let's go get horses."

"Should we bring somebody who sees better than either of us?"

"I've heard good things about vision for travelling, yes. Anyone in mind?"

"Nnnot really I don't have ten years' worth of acquaintances either."

"I"ll ask a friend to accompany us, she was torn over whether to leave Tirion when the Vanyar did and will be delighted to go visit them."

"Sounds great. ...If she will be ready to leave promptly."

"I will doggedly follow her around while she packs, at least. Meet you at the gates by the Mingling?"

"Yes. Thank you."

They are there by the Mingling. Rúmil's friend is in fact very bemused that they want to leave now, but okay.

Hello Rúmil's friend it is nice to meet you, Bella is Bella.

And they head out. It's a week's travel to Taniquetil. No time-blurring, it's just five hundred miles and even Valinorean horses need rest sometimes.

Bella spends the trip diligently running out her magic every single day - she holds a bit in reserve until she's going to go to sleep, then spends it - trying to feel out the bits and pieces that eventually free Proper Wizards from having to cast discrete 'spells'. She solicits obscure Quenya vocabulary. She borrows Rúmil's friend's eyes and looks at things with Eldar vision. She notebooks. She practices teekay, which tires her out but doesn't have a hard limit. She seems terrified to slow down.

If you were Fëanáro, this is where I'd reassure you that you don't stop mattering if you haven't solved everything fast enough.

I'm not actually worried about external deadlines. I'm worried that I spent ten years not noticing that a thing was happening to my mind. I am very interested in making sure that I'm capable of staving it off manually. The rock she is levitating spins in the air.

He nods. Hopefully Manwë can straightforwardly fix it.

Hope so. Spin spin spin. Sway sway sway.

Taniquetil towers over Valinor, its location (in the middle of the rolling plains) and its symmetry obviously supernatural. The path winds through picturesque valleys where the Vanyar have settled, up above the treeline, up above the cloudline, high enough to see the stars.

Noticing anything? It may just be that Valinor's social environment, and gracious array of distractions, encourages one to think about time less.

It's very subtle or it wouldn't have gotten past me this long. I don't have anything definitive.

And they reach the Máhanaxar. The mountain splits open, here, sheer and stunning on both sides. The thrones of the Valar are bathed in the light of the Trees. They are close enough to the Trees that the light is blinding; the heat would be unbearable, too, if not for the altitude.

Bella squints even behind her tinted glasses, closes her eyes and borrows the companion's.

By Elven eyesight the impression is 'bathed in glory' rather than 'blinding'. Manwë's throne is in the center. Do you want me to go with you? Rúmil asks her.

...If you want. Um, any advice?

Try being polite, and suggesting an improvement that would make Valinor more of a paradise for you rather than a complaint about how it's governed.

By now it's familiar; her skin prickles like the air is full of static, her hair tries to stand on end, the world goes silent around her except for the distant impression of an angelic choir, and Manwë's chosen form is tall and muscular and powerful, a god of the airs who could toss lightning bolts, with a long beard and the eyes of an old man - or they should be, except they're glowing - and he says "Hello, child."

"Hello. Um." aaaaah "I came because I noticed that something's changed about my time sense since I've been here, and I would like to opt out of it and go back to how I used to be about the passage of time, please."

Minutes feel normal, but I spent an entire local Year not noticing that the days were more than twice as long - which could just be the Trees making me need less sleep - nor caring that there were almost five times as many days in a year, which I don't know how it would have happened. It seems like it might be making it easier than it should be for me to put things off and work slowly and linger over things without defined endpoints of which there are many and to consider things that happened years-as-my-plane-counts-them-ago 'recent'. - Although I do like that I can still pretty clearly remember things from my home plane, if there's a way to get the rest of my time sense back without the fading memory.

The things you are describing are properties of Valinor, not things done to any person within it. The Ages leap by here, but not in a way that we could forestall for a single individual. Events feeling recent and memories of them being vivid is a great deal of how time is sensed. You could live outside Valinor, on Tol Eressea, which is safe from dangers but has less of the magic of the continent itself.

...Okay. If you can't fix if I might go do that until I have a ward or a subtle arts trick for it or something.

I could fix the vividness of memories, but that's the thing you do not prefer fixed, if I understand you rightly.

Right. Will they fade right away when I go to Tol Eressea?

Do you desire that?

No.

Then we can ensure that they do not.

Thank you. Will leaving Valinor have any other effects like making me age again or anything?

It seems inappropriate and unwise to have you as the first Man in Arda an Age before they were supposed to arrive. We've been speaking with Eru about changing your fate to that of the immortal Elves, as the simplest approach. It is a grave thing and not done lightly, but if you desire it, you would then not age within Valinor or outside it.

I can't think of any good reason to want to age. Is there some advantage to it I'm unaware of that applies here?

I think it is related to time sense; when there are visible and physical markers of the passage of years it is easier to sense them. It is also said that Men, when they die, leave Arda behind, while the Eldar are as a consequence of their immortality bound to it.

Um, where do Men - go?

Eru's plans are not revealed to me. They go on. I do not think it is as in your world, where those who did wrong in this life find the next one unpleasant.

I'm not sure that's exactly how it works in my world either - um, in the short term I prefer not aging but as far as the rest of forever is concerned I would like to have more information or expect to be able to change my mind at some point if more information comes to light.

We would not rush you to a decision on a consideration of this gravity, but immortality cannot be turned on and off.

Is there anything else you can tell me about the choice that might matter?

It is fated that eventually the choice of the fates of Elves or Men will be permitted to some. Of those, about half choose each, and for the most part they choose without regrets. I could greatly slow your aging, so you have a thousand years before you reach old age, if that would assist you.

That would be great. Uh, Valian Years?

Years as they pass in the Outer Lands, which is ten times as swiftly. To extend the lives of Men beyond that would be complicated and could fail if I attempted it.

Thousand regular years will probably still at least give me long enough to find some non-fate-altering magical solution if I decide I want that instead, she says, just asking.

I am glad there is a solution that brings you happiness.

Thank you. What other features of Valinor relevantly don't extend to Tol Eressëa, any?

The light does not reach there.

...okay, so I might sleep twice as much and need to use magic light, still gets me a factor of five. Is everything still edible? How does one get to and fro?

Everything is not edible but some of the Teleri live there by preference and would probably be happy both to sail you there and back and to get you food.

Okay. Can you think of anything I should be asking and haven't?

I would make you informed of anything I thought critical to your capacity for good choices.

Thank you.

May you find joy here, child.

Thank you, she repeats, and she heads away from the throne.

And the world comes back. Rúmil is smiling encouragingly in her general direction.

They can't fix it, but Tol Eressëa is outside the effect. It's also outside the Treelight, so I probably only gain a factor of five, not ten, sleeping more, but that still means I'll work faster than I have been, probably have something to ward myself inside a Year.

Okay. Is that where you want to go now? He raises an eyebrow. Immediately?

I'll need to pack. And I should tell Fëanáro where I'm going. Other than that yes.

All right. And they bow and turn around and depart.

"Oh," he says. "The fish is supposed to be delicious. The Teleri are all kind of gloomy but I guess you're not going for the company. You are going to come back?"

"Sure, as soon as I can ward off the time-slidey thing. I might come to visit, even, if I need a vacation in there somewhere, a while spent not-time-slidey can lead to needing a vacation and timeslideyness isn't awful for the purpose as long as I manage to leave on a schedule. But I really don't expect to be gone longer than half a Year, probably less. I literally accomplished in the time I've been here what I'd have optimistically expected in a tenth of the time without this effect. I'll come back with all kinds of cool stuff to show you."

"And a ward against the effect, which I can have?"

"I actually suggested bringing you along to talk to Manwë, but Rúmil pointed out that it might make it hard to socialize or something, being in Valinor without the time-slidey. So I'll test it out for like a few weeks and see if it makes me antisocial but yeah, I should be able to cast it on you just fine."

"I care more about accomplishing things than socializing anyway."

"Yes, but you're very good at accomplishing things already and you might lose more than you gain if there's an intense effect."

"I'm not good enough."

"I am not going to promise to make a tradeoff I don't know the magnitude of for you."

"I'm older than you. If one year in our world is ten in yours I am seventy years older than you and what have I accomplished? Nothing!"

"You have accomplished several things but believe me I understand the frustration and if the spell doesn't make everything horrible for some reason I will totally cast it on you."

"Okay. Come back soon."

He likes the idea and wants her to finish her work quickly, but shouldn't leave Lórien on so little notice and rather enjoys the light of Valinor.

The Teleri boats are beautiful and elegant and large enough even for her enormous amounts of luggage and there's a great commotion across the dock when another boat is somehow set loose but then everyone gets back on hers and is delighted to row her to Tol Eressea.

It is a lovely boat. She compliments the boat in proper local fashion.

The light of the Trees fades as they row out. Tol Eressea is about fifty miles offshore.

Off come the glasses. She starts poking at the principles of light; the spell spell she has doesn't last but if she can wrench off some of it the way enchanters do with things like "heat" and whatnot she might be able to make enough to see by. She makes a little progress on this during the boat ride.

And they arrive. Tol Eressea has wide sandy beaches, and people who are surprised but pleased to get visitors, and there's a loud splash in the water as her boat pulls into the harbor.

Maybe somebody dropped an oar. She thanks everybody and disembarks; one of her necklaces is now faintly glowing, although she's not sure how long it'll keep up with that.

Tol Eressea is dark and hushed and forested, inland from the beaches, and big enough she can't guess its perimeter just from standing on a beach. There are crickets chirping.

Some people live here, right? She didn't get around to actually learning to build a house. It will probably take her at least a week to get a magic house arranged even if that's her top priority. Maybe she can crash with somebody. In she hikes, dragging wheeled luggage. (Wheels: they caught on.)

There are people who live here. Sadly they either sleep under the stars or in flets in the trees. Though they're happy to build her a flet or share theirs.

Bella is kind of a house person. She will prioritize a magic house, and in the meanwhile under the stars is fine. She already feels a little clearer-headed out here. She can probably get it done real fast. She glows her necklace a little harder and starts work.

Fëanáro waits until the boat rows away to come pounce on her and demand to know what she's doing, but it takes all his restraint and the minute the boat is out he pounces. "I decided to come along," he says, "so I won't waste more time."

"Yeah. It's like I said. I'm older than you are. In the Outer Lands I'd be grown up. And there's so many things I want to do."

"Does anyone know where you are?"

"You do!"

"Besides me. For example, is your father currently tearing apart Tirion trying to figure out where you are."

"He probably asked a Maia and they probably told him."

"So the Maiar know?"

"They know most things, I expect they can find me."

Bella sighs. "What are you going to do if he comes right out to get you back again?"

"We think faster than them, now, because we're out here! So I'll have invented invisibility."

"It's a factor of ten. For you. Five for me because it's not treelit here and I'm going to sleep more."

"That's a lot, though."

"I'm not sure it gets you invisibility. Especially if you use up all your magic every time you wake up, right away. I am going to start work on putting up a house by magic."

"I'm not going to use all my magic as soon as I wake up, that's something I did when I was nine. Now that I'm ten I know better."

"Oh, I see, I should have guessed."

"It's okay, I've never been ten before so you didn't have much to guess from."

"Well. Do you want to help me figure out how to do a house, as long as you're here?"

"Yes, definitely. I might have kind of already used all my spells today; I was still in the habit of being nine."

He actually is a help, once he gets engrossed enough to stop wiggling.

It's a week and a half.

By then she's got a cute little bungalow and she's working on flight. (She doesn't have any pivot points on mind-affecting magic; she's considering doing that entirely by subtle arts.)

Fëanáro's parents have both come. He has a screaming fight with them down by the shore.

Oh dear. (Bella avoids Miriel.)

Fëanáro comes to find her in several giant building-hops. "They said we can stay for a few weeks, but they're worried Mum will try to bother you. I hate her! I wish she wouldn't do that! You're much better than her and I said so and now she's sad and now I don't know what to do."

"Ohhhhh dear."

"I don't want to go back. We're so fast here! I feel so much more alive!"

"I know, I know. But it probably really hurt her feelings that you said that."

"But she doesn't love me, she just pretends, and she's awful to you."

"I can't explain the details of her treatment but I can tell you that I don't want you to resent her on my behalf."

"I always thought if I was good enough at everything she'd come back and she did come back and it didn't make everything better and I didn't start feeling like I was good enough."

Bella picks him up and hugs him. "You've read through all my textbooks by now, right?"

"Yeah of course."

"I am pretty sure there is a part in one of them about how people often think they'll feel better if some thing outside them happens, and sometimes they're right, but usually not if the thing they don't feel good about is themselves. That's not going to just fix itself when something happens to you."

"Right but your textbooks are for people who can't fix their problems by inventing things and becoming beloved by everyone. Obviously that's a better way to fix problems if you can do it, it's just they mostly can't."

"That is not why the textbooks think it doesn't work."

"The textbooks wouldn't know. People who can invent things and become beloved by everyone are really rare."

"Okay: the background assumption is that this entire class of things doesn't work. What makes you think that it's different for you just because you can invent more things?"

"Because I can invent things that no one else could possibly do, things that fix all the things wrong with the world, and lots of why people are sad is because things wrong with the world. Like your world. Probably has more sad people in it, right?"

"Yes, it does, but the paragraph I'm talking about is about self-esteem, not situational depression like 'oh no my family was eaten by a dragon' or 'oh no I live in poverty'."

"I think I had situational depression about my parents not loving me which I thought was situational depression about my mother dying and my father grieving."

"You don't think your ata loves you either?"

"I think he tries."

Sigh. Hug.

"What do I do now, though? I don't want to go home."

"Well, they said you could stay a few weeks, right?"

"That was before I yelled things and hurt their feelings."

"...Yeah, that probably didn't help, did they say that since that happened you can't stay a few weeks after all?"

"They just looked super sad and my mother said 'I love you' but she's not good at lying and I ran away."

Khersis Dei on a stick. Squeeze the kid; this is the prescribed response: squeeze. "She doesn't have as much practice as she should by now because she was gone for so long."

"I know. But I don't want her to be better at lying, I want her to love me."

"I didn't mean practice at lying."

"I want to require less practice to love."

"You don't require practice for everybody to love."

"Parents are supposed to have an unusually easy time loving you."

"It doesn't always work that way and mental illnesses can make it much more complicated."

"Can we do invisibility? Please?"

"So you can be invisible and run away from your parents until they haul a Maia out here to find you? Or just ask me where your mind is?"

"You can tell where I am even if I'm invisible?"

"Yes."

"Do they know you can do that?"

"...I don't think it's come up specifically."

"Then they will not be able to find you and they will be very concerned."

"No they won't, they'll know I'm okay because everything is safe. They just won't be able to make me leave."

"They are capable of being concerned about things other than your physical safety."

"They'll be more concerned if they drag me home and I spend the next year in a blinding panic about how much time I'm wasting."

"...Um, I was able to avoid most of the effect on my trips to and from seeing Manwë by keeping a schedule without achieving 'blinding panic'," she says. "Also people usually don't weigh decisions by what will make them more concerned; if they're concerned about you their reaction is likely to be to keep a closer eye on you so that they only have to be concerned about known things."

"If that's true," he says, "then being concerned about someone doesn't really have much to do with caring about their wellbeing."

"They have to do with each other, but sometimes a little upstream from deciding what to do about either," Bella says.

"When I have kids I'm going to do whatever is best for them, not whatever makes me not worry. And I'm going to love them."

"That is a good plan."