Nod. :I can raise a Gate for one person much more easily than for a thousand. Though I am concerned that we know little about the conditions there. I can also scry from a distance – that is lower-powered and should be much harder to detect: He thinks. :I could work on paired artifacts designed to imitate a certain spell in my world, which two mages can use to communicate – then I would only need to find a group of people you trust and open a Gate long enough to drop it through to them. This will take weeks to develop, likely, and carries the risk that if it is captured, the enemy may be able to intercept our communications: 

He'll have to think about how risky it is that Melkor could intercept it anyway, if he can detect Velgarth magic, but - not likely yet, probably. 

If things are bad there, we'll want to get everyone out. I don't like the idea of delaying several weeks to develop a communications method only to use it to learn that the situation is dire and people need to be evacuated immediately.

:Fair enough. I will start with scrying then, to see if we can either learn enough to judge we have time for the artifact, or find a safe place to make contact via Gate – preferably not sending one of you, I know it is not really more fair to send someone else, but you are both very loadbearing to the war effort and Melkor knows that and will accordingly go to great lengths to kill you if he can: 

To kill Nelyafinwë? he says skeptically. I don't think we are planning to do a lot of politics. 

Melkor seems to have gone to considerable effort to make sure you wouldn't trust me, Maitimo says mildly.

:Nearly all endeavours involve politics to some degree: Leareth adds with equal mildness. :Politics is just 'what people do when put in large groups'. Also Nelyafinwë has been handling a great deal of the other logistics, rather competently, which presumably others could do, but I have been responsible for wartime logistics before and losing a key player here would cause massive disruption in the short run: 

Well, you should try to arrange things so that it wouldn't, he says to Maitimo. But it makes sense to send someone else.

:Given that I expect to spend significant time on scrying: Leareth says, :I think it is worthwhile to put several hours upfront into an artifact that will make it much easier to maintain. Assuming there is some kind of crystal raw material that I can use, somewhere in these caves: Unsurprisingly, his unused blank focus-stones did not make it across with them. 

We can certainly look for it. Any kind of crystal works?

:Quartz or something else clear is preferable, but just about anything ought to be workable: 

All right. He'd usually ask Nelyafinwë to find people to fetch a thing but he asks Curufinwë instead this time since apparently Nelyafinwë is a bottleneck on lots of logistics.

:Is there anything else you wish to ask about, regarding what my magic can do, or request that I work on?: 

What do you need in order to be able to do magic for longer without being tired? Is it just that you need sleep as if a lot of time had passed? Is it exertion like lifting something heavy?

:It is not quite like either of those things, but - closer to the latter, I think. There is a kind of resource that it uses up. Eating easy-to-digest food, particularly sugar, helps with endurance and also makes the period of recovery less unpleasant. It also causes a kind of mental fatigue, like intense study does, but in a much shorter time period; stimulants can help with concentration and make this easier. Also, I have much better endurance if something is within my tolerance; I can scry all day and recover in a normal amount of sleep, but a Gate of the scale we needed to come here tires me in minutes and needs days of rest – just as you might wear a heavy pack all day, but could only lift a house briefly and would likely injure yourself. What determines that tolerance is partly my training, how efficiently I can work, but mostly the strength of my mage-gift; this is the sense in which Vanyel is ten times as powerful as I am: 

Huh. All right. I want to design you something that helps with concentration and endurance. Can you send me the feeling of doing magic and being tired by it -

:All right: Leareth has no idea whether this is going to work, but he does – a few different ways, he can show Fëanáro the feeling of doing magic at all, when drained, when pushing through backlash; the feeling of of casting something like the cross-ocean Gate that would wear him out in minutes, and what the reaction-headache was like when he woke up afterward. 

He nods. Frowns. All right. I'll work on that for you and your friend if he comes, and get you a crystal; and unless you and your friend are fairly confident you can take Melkor yourselves, your priority should probably be figuring out the status of all the Noldor and anyone else who wants our help, finding a safe place somewhere to Gate them to, and keeping everyone there safe until we're ready to fight him.

:Thank you:

Leareth heads back to his pile of furs. He should make some effort to learn the new language here as well, soon, but for now he's going to stretch out and think for a while until someone brings him a crystal he can use to build a basic scrying-artifact on. Which won't take long; he's done it a thousand times before and it's a very simple spell. 

They can get him a crystal.

He turns the crystal into a scrying-focus in a couple of hours, and then goes hunting for something to eat, tells Maitimo via osanwë that he's going to start poking around Tirion - or he can start with Velmar if that's better - and can share what he's seeing through the spell if Maitimo wants and has time to spare for that. 

Yes, please. 

Then Leareth will anchor on the Palace, a magical 'eye' hovering a hundred feet above the city. :...I am going to need the Silmarils to do this for any significant time, since Huan is not here: he clarifies quickly, feeling the power-drain. It's a long way. 

You should do it from my father's workshop, then; he doesn't want to remove them from his person.

:Understandable: Leareth heads that way, still holding the spell and showing Maitimo what he's seeing as he swoops in closer to the city. What does it look like now? 

Dark.