With his luck recently this won't even be it, but Telumë gets to work anyway, uses a combination of magic and a large stick broken off a nearby tree to scrape and shove and dig all the mud and silt out of the way. 

There's a sealed door underneath that.

Maybe! If it's his, it'll need magic to open. So he tries opening it with just a good hard shove, instead, in case that lets him rule it out before he's spent too long banging his head on getting the spell. 

Nope.

He can guess at the shape of spell a past-him would use, but not the exact details. He spends a long time experimenting. 

Eventually something works.

He smiles, delightedly, his first real smile in weeks. Casts a mage-light, used a wind-spell to circulate some air down there, and heads into his ancient store of records.

Maitimo is very busy, which is good, because he likes being very busy; there's an irreplaceable satisfaction to pursuing seven lines of thought at once and watching them wind back together as a solution to his problems. And there are a lot of problems. They don't know if Vanyel is dead. They know Leareth isn't, but that it'll take a lot of work to make him once again as vulnerable as he is now; they're checking halfway around the world for missing mage-gifted boys, following every tedious lead, wasting precious time and resources on tracking down runaways and idiots who drowned in the river.

He knows, roughly, the route Leareth will be taking. He'll want to go north; it's where his army is. He won't chance the Pelagirs, even though the Star-Eyed isn't working with Vkandis on this (Maitimo is working on that), he can't chance Valdemar or Iftel or Karse. So wherever he started, by now he's probably east. Mostly moving on foot, since he won't be able to easily Gate places he hasn't seen. It is not straightforward to find a man in the wilderness, not when you've never met him (and as far as Velgarth's magic is concerned, they haven't met). 

But it's not hopeless. Leareth never explained his system of supply caches in any detail, but the fundamental concept is simple: he had to be able to rederive their locations without any specific memories. The locations therefore had to follow from who Leareth was as a person, and Maitimo knows who Leareth is as a person, probably more confidently than Leareth knows it himself right now. He has teams out scouting for the right sorts of locations. The first one will contain instructions to all the other ones, and then they just have to intercept Leareth before he makes it north. And of course that probably just ends in another fireball, another search, but once they have the list of caches they can win that game as often as it's necessary to play it.  

He could do it faster with more help from home - Quendi have better vision, better instincts, can communicate at greater range - but that'd strain the alliance between Sauron and Vkandis very badly, and it is already requiring all Maitimo's finesse to manage. Vkandis doesn't want Quendi here. Maitimo is himself a compromise. Vkandis doesn't want this war conducted across two worlds. Sauron feels that in that case he should've helped more with getting Vanyel killed. If he's dead, there's no one on the Arda side that can mount any kind of response. If he's not -

- then they're leaving a lot of critical pieces out of all their strategic conversations for the sake of appeasing Vkandis, which means he needs to be rerunning all of those, separately, accounting for the Silmarils, accounting for the combinations of both magic systems under various stages of investigation -- accounting, a couple decades down the line, for Arda's own mages - 

- if it were up to Maitimo they'd send Sauron back now with some of Iftel's mages to kidnap or kill all the humans, to assault Vinyamar if Vanyel is indeed dead, but it is not up to Maitimo and so they just have to work on a tight deadline. Win before Arda can rederive how to strike back. And the plan for that, of course, is one which Vkandis would hate, so he also needs a false plan for that, one that's not so stupid Vkandis loses confidence in his allies but which doesn't require too many resources to pretend to proceed with, because he will need those resources to devote to the actual plan. 

He has told the priests of Vkandis that they're studying the Void in order to track down where Leareth's resurrection mechanism is hidden, follow him there, kill him for good. It's a pretty good reason. They seemed to enthusiastically approve.

One of the junior Sunpriests enters the room. He bows, then waits for Maitimo to acknowledge him. 

"Sunpriest Ulrich." He likes the people of Iftel; they are devout and sincere and mostly competent. Sauron wants a priesthood like that; he took it badly when Maitimo argued it should not really be anywhere high on the priority list, even though Maitimo was right.

The man straightens up. "Report, sir. News of the resistance in the west. We believe we know who is leading it." 

"Who would that be."

Sunpriest Ulrich looks very nervous for a moment. "General Lissa Ashkevron. It - is unclear if she was in Haven at the time of our Sunlord's victory there, the records said she ought to be, but - we believe she is in the west now, leading a rebel group from those loyal to Forst Reach." 

"It's regrettable that having Vanyel's family in hand was not adequately prioritized during the early days of this operation," he says mildly. "What sorts of things are they doing, can we draw them out?"

"They are taking advantage of knowing the terrain much better than our people do so far, in order to conduct raids, usually by night, and slip away before we can follow them. It seems that they have some mages and I am not sure how, they must be foreigners. They have focused on cutting our supply lines and sabotaging camps, more than direct attacks. It seems very likely that they have a hidden base, somewhere, but we have not managed to discover it. Also I think they have been communicating with the locals and - convincing them to be aggressively unhelpful to our side while putting on a front of cooperation." 

"Must be foreigners - not ours, of course, not Karsites - Ashkeveron was involved in negotiating the annexation of Lineas, but they wouldn't have had mages - Baires might. Send some people there and see if she's been recruiting. And..." - cracking down, while it's tempting, commits the army to staying long-term; Vkandis might not prefer that and Sauron certainly doesn't - "and when the rebels carry out an act of sabotage, round up all the kids in the area, say it's unsafe for them to remain because of the ongoing rebel activity, take them to Iftel where they can get a better religious education. Promise they can return once the rebels are dealt with."

Sunpriest Ulrich bows. "Yes, sir. And we will try to narrow down the region where their base could be?" 

"Yes. If they're from Baires I'd expect you want to start looking in that area."

Sunpriest Ulrich looks a little embarrassed, possibly because he's aware that his people didn't think of this until now. "Yes, sir. Any other orders?" 

"It seems to me that it might've been productive for me to hear of this sooner, do you agree?"

Shuffling of feet. "I brought this to you as soon as we had - a balance of evidence indicating it was General Ashkevron, rather than merely weak suspicions. There are many weak suspicions that arise, which are often wrong, and–" He stops, looks down. "In future we will bring those to you also." 

"Thank you. That's all."

It's an entire six weeks after waking up in Velvar that Telumë crosses the border from Ruvan, east of Jkatha, into Thurbrigard, east of that. He's been hugging the southern edge of Ruvan, staying well away from the border with Karse, but he'll inevitably have to pass closer than he likes Vkandis-held territory at some point. 

It should be fine. Even if Vkandis and the evil Maia, Sauron, are looking for him, they don't know who he is. Tarek's disappearance shouldn't even be that suspicious, since his mage-gift was a secret; they would have to do a lot of piecing together records to even find out about that Gift existing in potential, and he can't think that they'd have anyone with that kind of competence and cleverness. 

Still, he's on guard. In Velgarth, there may technically be such a thing as too paranoid but he's not sure he's ever hit it. 

He has a supply cache in Thurbrigard, according to his notes; it's in a cave the entrance to which is half a mile from an old mechanical dam that once turned a hundred milling wheels, before a series of floods made it untenable to keep relying on.

Then Telumë will head that-aways, keeping his mage-senses extended; he's been using his Gift as much as is feasible without giving himself actual backlash, this is the best way to get it to full strength faster. This body has Adept potential, but only just barely, and the tricks for wrenching a Gift open wider than that are complicated and risky and not things he can attempt until he's reunited with whatever's left of his organization in the north.

Unfortunately his notes don't have specifics on said organization; he updates the caches regularly, but where 'regularly' is once a century or so. He can infer that in his incarnation as Leareth he started taking initial steps toward the final plan. And that this went very awry, in some way related to the memories of Vanyel and Maitimo and the other world called Arda and the part where it seems like he got captured and tortured by an evil god or something. He has no idea what the status of it is now.

Telumë ended up spending three and a half weeks in the first records cache, re-memorizing notes, which he now knows is longer than usual due to having read said notes. This is partly because his retained memories are less Velgarth-relevant, but moreso because - it seems like he's diverged further than he usually does on reincarnations? He can't fully record the values held in his core memories, it's the sort of thing that's impossible to write down, but some of his notes gesture at it, and also he can see how past versions of himself were thinking. Mostly it's in a way he recognizes, but some...isn't. In particular, it seems very unusual for the last millennium of his existence that a third of his core memories are about a specific person, and that a very solid chunk of the driving force in him, the part of himself he's been trying hardest to preserve intact across all these centuries, is about fixing the world - all of the worlds - alongside Maitimo and Vanyel specifically. 

Telumë isn't sure what to make of this. It seems like he had an eventful previous life, hopefully things will make more sense once he makes the rendezvous with his organization and obtains more recent records, and in the meantime he had better stop thinking about it and focus on his surroundings.