Someone spontaneously appears in the middle of a path. Someone might trip on her. Or slip in all this blood. The sources of the blood at least seem to be self-repairing? Oddly quickly, even with the Silmaril present?

She's a human. She's dressed in outlandish clothes that seem intended for much colder weather than this. She's still alive and whimpering.

They are startled! By the blood, by the oddly quick self-repairing, by the sudden appearance. People crowd around and murmur anxiously. Someone should go - fetch a healer - they're all wearing white, in the probably-vain hope that the Feanorians will spare them accordingly - a hope made more vain by the fact some other people have worn white hoping to get close enough for a shot at the foe -

 - someone goes off to do that -

- there are trumpets in the distance -

She flinches when the trumpets go off, starts screaming hoarsely. Since she is substantially less injured than she was thirty seconds ago this is a weird time to start getting louder about it.

Well, perhaps she is quite reasonably afraid that the Fëanorians are going to come and kill everyobdy, because they are definitely going to come and try to do that. People ask her - can you walk, you should get out of the street, they're coming - 

Confused pained whimpering noises.

Can we carry you -

She mumbles something in a foreign language.

She doesn't look like a Dwarf but they try speaking aloud. "They're coming, they'll kill you if you're here, we've got to get you to the healers, they might not kill people in the healers, or you could just hide..."

"- I, I don't know what you're talking about -" She's got enough of her bones knitted back together that she can sit up now.

"The Fëanorians are coming. They're going to sack the city and kill everyone because we have -" gestures, she can't possibly have missed it - "and we can take you to the healers or you can hide but it doesn't look like you can fight them -"

"I really really don't know what you're talking about but healers okay where -"

The army arrives before they've gotten her to the healers. It's out of human eyesight but not out of human hearing - the clashing of metal on metal, the screaming - "here's the healers keep your head down -" 

It's on one of the cliffsides, so they have a view of the city and can go where they're needed. Through the window it's possible to see the fighting. 

She doesn't need the window. And can't see.

She curls up in a corner, almost completely healed now. Shrugs off her coat and shakes.

The fighting moves further into the city. The attackers are stabbing everything in their path. They are astonishingly good at it, like they've practiced almost nothing else for five hundred years. Blows bounce off their armor. People are screaming. The attackers are pushing towards the tower of the King.

By now Annie can actually pick out their leader.

Okay so that's five or six things wrong with her at least.

They would be delighted to spare the healers but after the third person to stab them after pretending to be a healer they stop doing that. Some part of her shrieks in agony but most parts of her have been shrieking in agony for five hundred years anyway - this isn't real this isn't real she's going to wake up and Thauron will be laughing at her and say 'see how easy it was to reduce you to our level' and she's going to fucking kiss her because that will at least mean it isn't real - 

- they force the entrance to the tower, the King's guards are incompetent, what was he thinking - 

- he jumps -

- the Silmaril plummets with him into the sea and the oath has no opinions about what the House of Fëanor needs to be doing here and she numbly, wearily, despairingly, tries to open her eyes back in Angband, and fails, and then goes to tell the healers they will not be interfered with.

The bloodstained completely uninjured human in the weird clothes in the corner, eyes unfocused, twitches when Rirosseth speaks.

Oh, a new hallucination-character she's supposed to pay attention to. She does, because she is clinging to reminders that this isn't real. She puts her hand on the hilt of her sword again - "name?"

"- Annie."

"Where are you from."

"...N-noregr? I don't know where I am."

"Where's that, how did you get here -" everyone's leaving her such a wide berth that they can't use their healing halls for healing, except a couple people who are trying to assess whether they stand a shot at killing her, she grabs the new hallucination character and pulls her out into the street -

Annie stumbles but doesn't resist. "It's next to Sviar? I got hit by a van and at least five artifacts hit me and one of them put me here -"

"What's a van, what are artifacts, are these locations coastal or inland, temperate or tropical or mountainous -"

"Like a car but bigger, coastal, far north and cold and mountainous."

"I've never heard of a car either."

"...it's a vehicle."

"...okay. Have they heard of the Enemy in Noregr?"

"...no?"

"Valar, Eru, Beleriand, Valinor - have you met any Elves or any Dwarves -"

"I don't recognize any of those names and no everybody where I'm from is a human. ...Everybody on the whole planet."

"You've mapped it enough to be sure? Okay. Entertaining the premise here, we've got to evacuate this world, is yours a good place to evacuate it to? We've also got to move - can you ride -"

"I have never been on a horse in my life. I have never been near a horse in my life. Um, I guess it might be an okay place? Depending how many people this is and where they went - I don't know how you'd get there -"

"How did you get here?" Lírnith is coordinating their retreat. It is not too complicated to coordinate because there is no one left here in any state to resist them. Lírnith is sending her the names of the dead. Once upon a time she would have appreciated that, and for a long time even after she stopped being able to care about things like that she would have appreciated that her sister kept doing it. She is past appreciating either of those things. It isn't really Lírnith anyway. Amras isn't really dead. 

She stops dead still in the street, shaking, unable to maintain her train of thought. There's so much blood everywhere -

"I think one of the artifacts sent me - do you have those here -"

"No, no we don't. What's the hook, if there's no way to save anyone -" distractedly, not really looking at Annie -

"...huh?"

She is no longer paying attention to her. She is still dragging her along. 

Annie trips along after her.

And after a minute - "...Nelya - what - I need you to get yourself together, everyone in the palace is dead except the princesses, they're six, they're a mess, entertaining the premise for me what do you want me to do -"

"Kill me -"

"...entertaining the premise far enough to make strategic decisions but not far enough to form preferences based on it, then -"

"Someone would probably find the kids before they starved -"

"Nelya."

"Sure, let's take them. Let's take Annie too. May as well round out the ticket with some hostage infants -"

"Half-mortal, they're six and this high -"

"I don't care, Laurië, everybody's dead -"

"And I actually have to fucking come to grips with it, so stop it with -" with the coping mechanism that is the reason you are still alive - "...would you like me to coordinate our retreat, commander."

"Yes."

She starts singing.

Annie's knees buckle and she shrieks.

...she does not immediately make the connection, just shoots her a confused glance and keeps singing.

Annie doesn't stop shrieking until she's out of breath and then she gasps for it and sobs, dangling from Rirosseth's grip, unable to stand.

"What's wrong now -"

Can't answer too busy being in debilitating agony!

Probably should kill her. No, most people don't want to die even though they'd be better off. ...render her unconscious? Is that even safe to do with humans -

- the person clinging to her in debilitating agony is causing a cascade of flashbacks, she's trembling violently, she'd better - she puts a hand around Annie's neck -

- if Annie were an Elf she'd now be an unconscious Elf, she has no idea what it'll do to a mortal, she collapses on the ground and begs Melkor to make it end -

Annie passes out.

Briefly.

Bruises bloom on her neck and fade again almost at once and she wakes up and lapses at once into anguished sobbing.

Well that probably means it's not dangerous to do, she can just hold her like that -

- yup, she can keep pace with the healing.

She has everybody coordinated. She raises an eyebrow at her sister and then wearily helps her sister drag her hostage onto a horse. There are a lot of dead to sing for. They ride. They sing. 

Annie does not scream while unconscious.

It's a long ride back to Amon Ereb. They don't take it in one go, because of the children. The children are terrified and silent and wary and probably imagining that they, too, will be strangled and kept unconscious if they are difficult. She has no idea how to correct that. She sings them to sleep when it's night. They do not sleep themselves. 

Annie, quite passed out, has no comment on this.

They return home. They get the children a room. They get the children a meal. People stare at her, but only a little bit. It's been a week since she's slept. There are black spots swimming in front of her eyes. Lírnith declines to take over for keeping the hostage human unconscious, so she sits against a wall and holds her and tries to stay awake a little longer. Eventually she fails.

When Annie wakes up she is cradled in a sleeping, bloodied, fully armored mass murderer's arms and there is at least momentarily no singing within human earshot.

Annie touches her throat, catches her breath.

Assesses her surroundings.

...leans her head on the armored mass murderer's shoulder and sighs and tries to organize her thoughts.

She won't be helpful; she's sleeping. The fortress they are in has thick stone walls and this corridor is empty.

Uninterrupted downtime is actually really helpful. Annie doesn't have very many clues but she has some and she can pick through them and also her fucked-up emotional state without being in mysterious artifact torment or trying to answer the bewildering questions of Sword Lady.

Sword lady: has no bewildering questions. Occasionally whimpers in her sleep.

Poor Sword Lady.

Annie will lie here quietly for four hours or until somebody starts singing, whichever comes first.

There are people singing, but out of human earshot from here. 

Then neither she nor her mysterious artifactual torment can detect them!

She gets hungry. She starts carefully trying to extract herself from Sword Lady.

She doesn't wake.

Annie investigates the layout of the place and tries to see if any of the things she can sense are clearly recognizable even through the sense as food.

There are kitchens downstairs and recognizably-food things.

...she ventures cautiously down the stairs.

She is sitting with the children! She is trying to coax them to have some soup. She looks up at Annie and looks weary and vaguely relieved. "Oh, good, you're not-  Nelya was scared to let you wake up because you kept screaming and couldn't tell us what was wrong -"

"I - don't really know what it was. It hit once before but didn't last as long then. Sometimes an artifact drawback is a random thing hurting."

(The children look at her curiously but don't move or speak.)

"Artifact drawback?"

"I was hit by at least five and possibly more artifacts which are a thing my world has where if you touch them they permanently grant you one benefit and one drawback. I think one of them sent me here. Can I have some soup?"

"Of course. ...is that why Nelya wanted you. I was trying to think how the Halls to -"

Annie takes some soup. "How to what?"

"If she were sane she would want me to stop her from staggering off with an unconscious girl she abducted from the site of a city we sacked, because - well, no one else is going to stop her and if she were sane she'd be horrified -"

"- is she not?"

"Not sane? No, she isn't, but I wasn't expecting her to be that particular kind of insane and I wasn't looking forward to confronting her about it. 'you accidentally travelled between worlds' is a much better reason -"

"...compared to what?"

"...you're pretty and we're already thoroughly damned? It would be profoundly out of character but I didn't have abundant alternate theories so I needed to at least make sure except she would have absolutely fallen apart -"

...Annie makes a valiant attempt not to indulge mental images. "Oh. Well. I'm from another world and I don't think I can get anyone there like she was saying but I don't know what all my effects do yet. At least they don't seem to be mutually fatal."

"Can we help you, um, I don't know, catalogue them? Mutually fatal, is that a thing that happens?"

"It's not impossible in principle. If one, say, makes you need to sleep for twenty hours a day and another one makes you insomniac? I don't think anything I've noticed should interact like that. I could be missing things though, I don't know how many artifacts there were, just how many drawbacks I've counted."

"How do artifact drawbacks work?"

"Depends on the artifact. I'm blind, and deaf except for words - I think maybe I don't have a sense of smell either, which means that's probably one thing and not two or three, I wasn't sure before I tasted the soup and noticed the smell thing. Something I haven't identified yet makes me collapse screaming but at least it's not water, there's one where it's water. I'm really really uncomfortably warm. I've heard of other ones - there's a popular one that makes it so you can't keep secrets from whoever your favorite person is, the twenty hours of sleep a day one is real, there's one that makes you go around cursing at the top of your lungs all the time, there's one that makes you terrified of shoelaces..."

"Okay. And the teleporting between worlds, is that a drawback or a - benefit -"

"I'm assuming drawback. If it were a benefit I'd expect to be able to control it or something."

Nod. Sigh. "Uh...you must want to know what's going on, yes?"

"...it'd be nice."

"...does your home world have Valar?"

"No."

"So the Valar are - the beings that created the world, and they are very powerful and incomprehensible. There are fifteen. Fourteen live on their own sealed-up paradise continent where no one is allowed to go or leave but which is otherwise quite nice, and the fifteenth one is nearing completion of a six-hundred year campaign to take over the world and torture and enslave everyone and fill the world with her mind-controlled servants, called orcs. We fought her. We lost. Pretty much everyone's dead and now we're just waiting around for her to pick us off when she's so inclined."

"...what did the place I landed in have to do with that?"

"So there are three powerful - magic things - they're called the Silmarils - which my mother made, and which could have stopped the Enemy and won the war. And more than six hundred years ago when the Enemy stole them and the other Valar were positioning themselves to make a claim that the Valar were the rightful owners, my whole family swore an oath - a magically binding oath, humans don't have those, Elves do, if I swear something I literally cannot break my word - to kill the people who withheld the Silmarils. 

And for five hundred years that was just the Enemy and that was fine because she needed killing, but then some idiot stole a Silmaril, and we told them that the oath bound us to go after them and they wouldn't give it back, and - you can resist an oath. You stop caring about anything, you stop feeling anything except intensifying psychological agony, but you can...for a time...until you've stopped caring about peoples' lives, and then you have no further reason to resist, and then you act."

"Yes, it was astonishingly unforgivably stupid and evil, I know, I've known six hundred years, doesn't help us any now."

"That must have been what they were gesturing at when they explained why they were under attack - did they think they were going to win, what do the Silmarils even do that they wanted them so badly -"

"Healing and light, by default, we could have killed the evil god with them but no one else knows how to use them for that - and we'd teach them, obviously, but it's not 'oh, you enter the secret password' it's 'oh, you decipher from what remains of my mother's notes the magic that she used to do it and then you adjust it and it'd take ten years of research to get anywhere'."

"Oh."

"I don't know if they thought they were going to win or if they just didn't care because everyone in the world is dead anyway -"

"...they showed me to the healers because they said I might not get killed if I was there."

"Then probably thought they'd win." She shakes her head. "The King was really young, he was only three the last time this happened, he must have had advisors who could have told him that we've spent six hundred years at war and are really good at it but I guess he could still just have miscalculated..."

Annie gets some more soup.

"Anyway. Don't know if you saw that part but the King jumped off a cliff into the ocean with the Silmaril, which means as far as the oath is concerned no one's holding it and so the oath - stopped. It'll come back if someone acquires it again somehow. We did check, couldn't find it on the shore."

"I can't see and my weird magic replacement sense has a range limit and he wasn't in it."

"...okay. Well. That's what happened. ...these are the King's daughters. They haven't told me their names, maybe they'll want to talk to you on account of you not being a mass murderer."

"Hi," says Annie to the girls. "I'm Annie."

They watch her cautiously. One takes the other one's hand. They do not offer their names.

...oh well.

"Um, I probably can't evacuate the world. If it turns out I can't evacuate the world what do I... do."

"Uh, pick how you want to die, I guess. I'm sorry."

"We probably have some time left. Ten years, maybe even fifty."

"...mm."

"...yes, we're mass murderers not capable of expressing anything resembling the correct affect or emotions surrounding having just been magically coerced into a massacre, yes I just told you Nelya's not sane, no we're not wrong about any of this, no it's not really safe to verify but no one will stop you from trying."

"It's not particularly that I don't believe you. I just don't... know what to do." Pause. "Can I have some paper, the language thing cuts through the deafness thing and I - would like to see if I can read."

"Yes, sure." She doesn't move. After a few minutes someone comes in with paper.

"...how'd you know to bring paper?" Annie asks the paper-bearer.

"Uh, the princess asked?"

"...maybe you just have much better hearing than humans?"

"We have osanwë. We can communicate mind-to-mind over great distances."

"...oh, that explains what they were doing before they tried talking."

"Yeah, osanwe doesn't have a language barrier - if you didn't have time in Sirion to learn the language, is that another artifact thing?"

"Yeah. I didn't know what language to speak here until I heard it but then I knew how - I can do it with languages from my world I've heard of too - I didn't notice it until I could understand someone who spoke this to me." She apprehensively tries writing a word out on the paper - sags in relief. "I can read too. That's lucky, it could've been spoken only or just not beaten the blindness..."

"Does this sort of thing happen to people often?"

"No. Usually even if you touch an artifact by accident there's only one of it, and you only do it on purpose if you know what it does."

"And they universally have a benefit and a drawback?"

"Yeah. Although some of them it's sort of arguable if the benefit is really good or the drawback is really that bad."

"Nelya sent people back to where she found you to look for things that could be - the relevant artifacts, I guess. Didn't find anything."

"I don't think they came with. And it could've been bad if they had and someone had touched them."

"Yes, I'm starting to gather. The horrible pain one especially - unless we could weaponize it -"

"I don't have any qualms about causing the Enemy horrible agony if we could figure out how. She tortured my sister for fifty years and we never really got her back."

"...I don't know what it comes with, I don't know what the trigger is - there's one where it's water and at least I don't have that - and you'd have to get the Enemy to touch it."

"Yes, I'm not saying we could do it, just that if there's anything at all that'd justify it this would be it."

Annie is done with soup now. She sighs. "What's your name? And your sister is - Nelya? -"

"I'm Lírnith in the language we're speaking, my native tongue and our native names were illegal for five hundred years before the kingdom enforcing that law fell. My sister's Rirosseth, but Nelya's what we called her when we were kids and sometimes it - cues her better? It's complicated."

"...complicated how?"

"In between torturing people the Enemy gives them hallucinations of being rescued or escaping. She can do them very convincingly, edit your memories if you're not convinced and try it again, she can make subjective centuries go by in a year... Nelya said once there's been ten? Eleven? Rescues that turned out to be a game. She thinks she's still a prisoner. She thinks she's going to wake up. At this point she hopes it's all a lie, because if it is then she didn't lead people who trusted her into horrifying war crimes. She - tries to act in ways she'd endorse if things were real but lately that's been getting harder and harder.   She keeps telling me that if it were real she'd just want to die."

"Oh."

"Yep. It's - she can pretend most of the time, for a long time no one except me even knew."

"- if she just wants to die then -"

"Elves can't. Not in the sense she wants to."

"Can't?"

"You can destroy our bodies enough we can't sustain them, but as far as anyone's ever heard of there's nothing you can do to stop us from having conscious experiences - and if you're dead you're either all alone or in the Halls which are reputed to be terrible. At least this way sometimes she's asleep."

"The Halls?"

"One of the Valar collects the dead. And brings them back if they are worthy. Mass murder obviously disqualifies you, so it's just - waiting, alone, forever."

"- but -"

"No one deserves that?" Shrug. "No one deserves to have been born to an Arda but here Eru put us all. Except you, I suppose. Welcome to the sculpted horror show of our idiot gods."

"Who's Eru?"

"The god who scripted everything in the first place. She directly intervenes sometimes but don't think we haven't tried prayer."

"Oh."

"Sorry."

"So why are the children here -?"

"The king of Sirion? Had two sisters. They were seven, I think, when we sacked Doriath - that being the last city where this whole nightmare played out - and somebody in the middle of the fighting took the kids outside and we guess they ran away into the forest and starved and I figured this time I would make a different horrible mistake. They're safe here. The enemy doesn't bother us - why would she, we practically work for her -"

"...oh."

"It is likely the Enemy will follow up in Sirion  now they're defenseless. Or has already."

"If you'll find it cathartic to yell at me or something you can, I understand..."

"I don't really want to yell at you, it doesn't seem like it would help anything."

"It wouldn't. I don't do a lot of self-flagellation for the same reason, but lots of people still find it - emotionally reassuring on some level -"

"What was the oath exactly -?"

She closes her eyes. "If I speak the original language will you still understand me?"

"I think so."

"Be she foe or friend, be she foul or clean,

brood of Morgoth or bright Vala,
Elda or Maia or Aftercomer,
Man yet unborn upon Middle-earth,
neither law, nor love, nor league of swords,
dread nor danger, not Doom itself,
shall defend her from Fëanáre, and Fëanáre's kin,
whoso hideth or hoardeth, or in hand taketh,
finding keepeth or afar casteth
a Silmaril. This swear we all:
death we will deal her ere Day's ending,
woe unto world's end! Our word hear thou,
Eru Allmother! To the everlasting
Darkness doom us if our deed faileth.
On the holy mountain hear in witness
and our vow remember, Manwë and Varda!

"I suppose that's the generic 'she' and you don't get anywhere if a man has them."

"Yeah, you can't rules-lawyer oaths that much."

"Suppose it would have been unrealistic for me to think of anything you didn't in six hundred years."

"I don't mind if you try. But - yeah, we've tried. The major loophole if you can call it that is that we're only obliged to harass anyone who is currently in that moment holding a Silmaril, so the minute they surrendered it or we got it back it'd be over and we wouldn't have to - but at this point we have a reputation, people don't trust that they'd be okay if they surrendered and they'll surrender and then keep trying to kill us -"

"...how did you get a reputation saying that people wouldn't be okay if they surrendered, if they would?"

"Aforementioned dead kids, and general tendency of people to assume the worst of their enemies, and we don't show orcs quarter but we don't have a choice on that one."

"Those are the mind-controlled servants?"

"Sworn to obey her. She sometimes gives orders like 'carry no weapons, go and make a nice peaceful settlement near some Elves, don't fight back unless they kill you and your children' - but if we don't do anything about them she can, remotely, at any time, give them different orders and they don't get a choice."

"...ah."

"They swear as soon as they can talk."

"...no loopholes in that either?"

"Sometimes we'd find some, try to work with them, then she'd learn and change what the next generation swore."

...nod.

She wakes up.

"- Rirosseth's awake." Pause. "My weird sense goes through things. It's kind of creepy really."

"Well, it's good to know about." 

This is Annie, her world's magic system comes with powers paired with drawbacks and the unspeakable agony is one of the drawbacks, still don't know the trigger, she's also deaf and blind but can read and write and hear words, I gave her the history, the kids haven't introduced themselves yet.

She stands up, takes the armor off. 

"It goes maybe a hundred yards crisply and fades from there."

She comes in to find them. "Hi, Annie! I'm lucky Lírnith was here to explain things, that must have been an absurdly confusing situation to awaken to. Rirosseth. It's good to meet you properly."

"Lírnith's been very helpful."

"As much help as anything is, at least, right?" She looks at the kids. "Hi."

No answer. 

"They didn't talk to me either."

"When Elves are out fighting," she says to them, "and we need to be very sneaky, we can osanwë to tell each other where we are. Dwarves can't, so they use hand signals." She draws her hand to her chest. "That means 'give me some space now'" - different gesture - "and this one means 'be close to me'."

The children look at each other.

One of them copies the give-me-some-space gesture. 

"Annie," she says, "would you like a tour of the fortress?"

Lírnith stands too.

oh help it was complicated enough being in love with you when you weren't being sweet like that with terrified children

"Sure."

So the three of them leave. She falls in beside her sister. "I confess I don't actually have much of a tour planned. There's a courtyard -" gestures - "and lots of empty rooms, now, if you want to pick one..."

"It might make sense to put me a ways away from everyone else because my magic sense thing goes through walls and people might want more expectation of privacy?"

"We can do that."

"...okay. Am I correct in thinking that you're just sort of - keeping me around in case my otherworldly powers turn out to be more useful than just occasionally making me collapse and letting me talk to people -?"

"If you have somewhere else you want to go you're not our prisoner."

"I really don't."

"I don't think the Enemy knows that there are other worlds and I don't want him to find out. And yes, if you turn out to have any magic powers - or if anyone from your world comes looking for you -"

"If anyone comes looking for me it will take a minimum of several days and probably much longer. There's someone who's got an artifact power to analyze other artifacts without having to touch them, but he has to sleep twenty hours a day and they won't know which one to start with. If the one that sent me here turns out to be controllable or consistent or reversible or something it'd have to wait until he found that out."

"You were out for almost a week. I checked a couple times if you were not-in-unimaginable-agony but you always were -"

"It happened one time before that almost right after I landed but it was just a few seconds then..."

"If it happens again is there something you want us to do instead -"

"...did you have to actually stand over me the whole time, that sounds awfully labor-intensive, there has to be some other way to keep me knocked out."

"You heal really fast,  and most ways of continually doing enough damage to keep you unconscious will kill you if we're badly calibrated about the healing or if it runs out of power or anything -"

"But maybe you could just, I don't know, tie something around my neck -? It won't run out of power, that's not a thing artifact effects do, if I have a healing factor I just have it now."

"Then that should be safe enough. I think."

Nod. "It's at least more likely to actually be a trigger thing than a random thing, I think a random thing would probably have similar durations each episode - I was, I was going to study artifact statistics if they would've let me into the department -"

"Let you into the department?"

"The university I went to has an artifact studies department - it's one of the best in the world because of the guy who can analyze the artifacts - but it allows access to some dangerous artifacts so they won't admit people unless you get in range of a mindreader to be checked out for what you might do with that, once a semester - so I was undeclared until I could see if there was a way to get around that. It's otherwise pretty easy to avoid the mindreaders because they yell all the time."

"There's no - not that way of verifying intent?"

"Not that they use that I'd found out about before I got hit by the van. I didn't even want to touch any of the university artifacts, I just wanted to do stats, I would've been fine if they let me major in artifacts and didn't give me a key to the room, but..."

"So you have - disabled ordinary senses, a new special sense, the agony fits, the teleporting to a new universe, the languages..."

"And I'm too hot all the time - if you have anything for me to change into that's less bloody and lighter that would be good, it's - I can't actually tell how cold it is here but there's no snow so probably hotter than I'm dressed for even without the artifact effect and me having left my coat behind - and um - and the healing - and I'm probably missing some stuff with odd triggers."

"We can find you something lighter. I'm counting four bad things and three good ones?"

"I'm not positive that blindness and deafness are together. There's at least one artifact in existence that does blindness all by itself."

"Okay." 

Someone brings lighter clothes.

"Where should I go to change?"

"Hmm - right, sorry, we haven't had humans around in a while. The - I think everyone who was living in the north wing was dead, there's a guest room there..." She sends the location over osanwë.

"- okay."

Annie goes there. She changes clothes and then comes back out.

They are leaning against the wall and speaking silently. 

She's not sure how you interrupt or don't interrupt or - what - a telepathic conversation. She shuffles around awkwardly a ways away. She definitely does not point her face at them because why would she do that what color is Rirosseth's hair she bets it's pretty -

"Do you need anything else? We were thinking we should probably go check on the kids - actually, if you're up for it, you could check on the kids, since you can do it while giving them space..."

"I can check on them. Um, I don't have very good facial expression reading so all I'll really be able to tell is where they are."

"Do you want to borrow our eyes? I'm glad the other sense can compensate but it sounds - I can't imagine not being able to see farther than a few hundred yards, or without enough fidelity for facial expressions..."

"You can do that? - I think I have the fidelity for facial expressions just not the practice."

"Yes, osanwë can share senses - sight better than sound, because most people triangulate off sound and find it fairly disorienting -" she attempts to send her how to see through someone else's eyes -

...are Lírnith's available because Annie wants to look at Rirosseth.

Sure, she'll let Annie look through her eyes.

oh no she's pretty (of course she's pretty) (the scars are heartbreaking but she's so pretty) oh no

"- wow, you have way better vision than I ever did."

"Elves have much more acute senses than humans, yeah. But our environments not being exceptionally pretty bothers us, so it's a mixed blessing."

"That does sound like a hassle."

"I wish you'd arrived in time to see a real Elven city."

"I don't have much aesthetics through the weird sense and don't know if that's practice or just not something it has. I guess I could've looked at it with help."

They both shudder. Here is the room where they left the traumatized girls. They do not go in.

And where are the traumatized girls?

They appear to be searching the kitchen for food things and hiding them.

"...hiding food around."

"Well, I think we should let them, if it makes them feel safer - we're not going to run out of food -"

Nod.

"Do they have their own rooms -"

"Yeah. I've been singing them to sleep - I'll stop if they want, but they haven't given any indication either way - perhaps you can invent a hand signal for that, too..."

"- I know some actual sign languages."

"That would probably be more applicable than Dwarven military communication signalling."

"Yeah. Should I teach you first or them?"

"I don't want to interrupt them right now."

"Okay. Uh, in Norden Sign 'go away' would be -" She gestures. "And 'stay close' would be -" Gesture.

"Is there something for 'sing'?"

"Yeah -" Like so.

"They're half-mortal, I don't know how quickly they'll pick it up, but that'll help a lot."

"Are Elves really fast with languages too?"

"My mother could be conversant in a day and fluent in a week, in anything. I'm about half that fast, mortal adults are really slow usually-"

"...compared to that yep."

"Compared to their own lifespans. We tried to fix mortality - could have done it, if we'd had a little bit more time -"

"- more time to what?"

"For the relevant researchers to stay alive. Our magic system is powerful but very, very slow - complicated things can easily take a mortal lifetime - my mother might have been able to do it in a few decades but she was killed very early in the war, my sister could have done it but not that fast but - she's dead too -"

"Oh."

"Everyone's dead. Two hundred fifty thousand of us crossed the ocean to fight this war and there are - maybe seventy people alive now."

"- in six hundred years nobody's had kids, or -"

"Not in wartime, no."

"Oh."

"That's another Elf thing. We - this is no world to bring a child into."

"I think most humans don't consider the fitness of the world for children before having them," nods Annie.

"Well, they also don't get a choice. Elves can't have children except by the deliberate will of both parents."

"...in my world we have medicine to prevent it if we want but it's not totally perfect."

"...if you'd gotten here a century ago she'd be delightedly asking you how to do it so we could reverse-engineer it, we find it very upsetting how they don't get a choice, but now there's only a handful of mortals who aren't slaves of the Enemy and we have no resources to develop new medicines anyway."

"I don't know how to do it, I'm not a doctor or a pharmacist or anything. I think it involves messing around with hormones somehow..."

"Well, luckily it doesn't matter."

"I guess."

"Kids still looking for food?"

"Yeah."

Sigh. "Thanks. I might go sing for a while."

She reaches out almost as if to touch her, stops three inches short as if hitting a hard wall, smiles faintly. "See you later."

"Yeah. Love you."

"Love you."

Love you. "...is there anything I should be doing, or, I don't know, books -?"

"There are books. I can have someone show you where - you can read any language too?"

"Probably."

"Okay. If not you can ask her to read things to you."

"Thanks."

"I can imagine this is horrible and overwhelming."

"Yeah."

"Let me know if there's anything we can do."

"Under the circumstances you're being really hospitable."

"The circumstances being 'we're mass murdering scourges of the continent who kidnapped you because you have interesting magic'?"

"...I wouldn't have said that."

"Okay. But you can, I don't want you to think you have to appease us to be safe here."

"It sounds like most of the problems around here are because oaths are a thing. I'm not really used to that and haven't totally decided how to think about it."

"They certainly don't help anything. ...wait, no Elves in your home world?"

"No, just humans, the whole planet."

"Most people from worlds without Elves don't have the habit of keeping their thoughts private. It's easy to pick up but has to be taught -"

"...keeping their thoughts private?"

"Osanwë is communicative, not hostile, you can't use it to read anything that the person has mentally demarcated as private. But people who've never met Elves don't usually already know how to do that. But all your thoughts are private, just like if you'd grown up somewhere where osanwë was a thing. And the mind-reading artifacts can't work the same way, from what you said of them..."

"...they don't."

"They wouldn't really work for the purpose they're using them for if they did."

"Yeah. I... guess this could be an artifact benefit? Which has been letting harmless osanwë through but not mindreading?"

"That would be a really good one. Like Dwarves but more convenient."

"Dwarves?"

"Are immune to all mind-affecting magic."

"There's more of it besides osanwë?"

"Enemy can do a lot of things. And there's songs for it, too, and the other Valar can tamper with your head but they don't without permission..."

"Oh. Well. I hope my artifact holds up if it has to."

"We might be able to check, Lírnith does not know anything that'd definitely count as mind-affecting but she can put people to sleep, speed up their perceptions of the world around them, stuff like that, if your artifact protects against those then you'd know it likely protects against mind-affecting ones too." 

"...okay."

"You don't have to check if you'd rather not."

"It's better to know. I just - didn't know that you would've been reading my mind all along without the artifact."

"I'd have told you how to do private thoughts if you weren't doing them already. All my mortal allies knew it. Inconveniently for us, as it turned out, because they betrayed us to the Enemy, but -"

"Oh."

"I - don't think the Enemy can read my mind, it's the only thing she doesn't control absolutely, I wouldn't let you go along not knowing -"

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."  

A person comes to show her to the library.

And Annie goes to the library and looks at books.

And she goes to her rooms and changes and showers and scrubs away at her skin until it's numb and badly scratched, like always, and then sits there and stares at the ceiling, like almost always lately.

And she, within range of mortal earshot of the library, picks up a harp and starts playing.

And now Annie is screaming on the floor again.

The person who brought Annie to the library notices this and runs off to find a Fëanorian and finds Lírnith first. 

She stops and rushes up to see if she can help.

Annie's catching her breath and slowly sitting up by the time Límith gets there.

"Happened again?"

"Yeah." She picks up the book she dropped and smooths out its pages.

"Do you know what triggered it?"

"No idea. I was paying attention to the book, not anything around me - maybe I should go around with more situational awareness till it's figured out -"

Shudder. "Might be a good idea. I'm sorry."

"It's, you know, it's over when it's over."

"And that is really really good, but still."

"Yeah."

"Let me know if you need anything."

"Will do. Thank you."

And she goes back to playing.

Ohshit.

And this time when she'd notified - "do you have a reaction to music?"

"Maybe? Second time it happened you were singing - I didn't hear anything the first time but I wouldn't would I -"

"...suppose not. That's going to be really inconvenient - I wonder what the range is -"

"...I guess we could test that? If there's usually a lot of music around, enough to keep me out for a week -"

"We sing for a week straight when people die, it's the mourning process. We didn't know, or obviously we'd have - do you want to test range, I take it it's very unpleasant -"

"It... is. Do you happen to know how close I've been to music while still okay so we can start from far away closing in instead of the other way around?"

"There are people singing right now, other end of the fortress."

"...so I guess I could just go in their direction really slowly and you could drag me away if I fall over?"

"Sure, that's probably a good way to do it."

So Annie goes in the direction indicated, slowly and gingerly - then flinches back.

"It's not all or nothing, that's something."

"I wonder if it's a distance or a volume thing."

"Well, it's definitely not that I have to hear it, but it could still be how clearly I'd hear it if I could hear."

"That seems almost unfair. ...if you borrow my hearing, by which that singing is perfectly clear -"

"Testing -"

She doesn't flinch!

"Okay, so it's really really not about whether I can perceive the music."

"I can ask them to go quieter, then you can see if that lets you get any closer -"

"Okay."

Can you sing more quietly? We're testing some of Annie's magic.

And when she has the go-ahead Annie picks her way forward a bit, and does get noticeably closer before twitching back (and falling over).

And getting dragged out of range. "Okay. So it's responding to something like 'what a human would hear', though actually hearing it doesn't matter, and if we get you a soundproofed room - it'll be underground, but it sounds like you won't mind if it's chilly? - then we can sing enough to stay sane without torturing you."

"Chilly would be great, I pretty much feel like I'm baking. ...Uh, I think I noticed another thing."

So she tells some people to set up a room that used to be for food storage and is as dungeon-like as any Quendi living space gets and is drafty and insulated by lots of stone from the castle above it. 

"Oh?"

"I guess it's skin-contact touch range? I only noticed it when you grabbed me. I think I could transfer the effects. I don't know if they'd be in their pairs or what the pairings are of course."

"Oh. 

And one of them is the teleporting - unless that's the one that makes you allergic to music I think most people here would take it -"

"...I think I could take them back. And I think I could give them out by drawback, so we could find what goes with feeling too hot and so on, process of elimination..."

"Couldn't take the teleport back, not if the person teleported - can you take them off yourself, or just other people -"

"Well, the teleport won't go with feeling too hot and feeling too hot will go with something useful," Annie explains. "I definitely can't take them off myself."

"...okay. I should get my sister."

Is Annie suddenly apprehensive what why would that be. "Okay."

"Do you not want her around or something -"

"No, no, it's fine."

"I didn't mean to scare you when I said when we met I was glad to have a kidnapping explanation - she used to be a good person -"

"It's really okay."

She comes. "What?"

"I can transfer effects. Skin contact range, I didn't notice it until Lírnith pulled me away from the music. Which is what I'm allergic to. But only to human earshot range. Even though I can't actually hear it unless it has lyrics."

"That is ...a weird way to delimit, but okay - you can transfer them - we can evacuate people -"