don't touch me

[lintamande]

Confirmation reaches them in the spring that Elwing of Sirion has the Silmaril.

It takes as long as the spring only because they weren't looking. They can stretch the oath that far, they can be disinterested in knowing - but now they know, and so there it is. Elwing of Sirion is twenty-three. Half-man, so fully grown. Sirion is a city of refugees. Elves and Men and, since there are Men, children. Elwing herself has infant children.

They debate whether to send messengers. Debating is allowed, even protracted debating. The Oath, these days, is loud in their minds, and louder when they're pushing it like this, but they drag out the debate for a few months. Messengers will probably be shot on sight. The last time Elwing of Sirion received news of the House of Fëanor it would have been the news that her brothers, twins, aged seven, had not survived the sack of Menegroth.

They send messengers anyway. The messengers are shot on sight. They have good armor, Fëanorian armor, and return home injured but not lethally. Maglor's songs no longer stitch them together. War makes you worse at healing. Maglor's songs are more powerful than ever - he can knock back a wave of approaching enemies, he can make a blade's next touch deadly, he can make them faster and more impervious to danger, but he can no longer do healing.

Maedhros, when he thinks about this, thinks that perhaps there needs to be part of you that is not broken for healing spells to draw on. Or perhaps the Enemy is amused to strip that away first. Perhaps the Enemy finds it suited to the theme as the Oath tugs and yanks and twists them into violence against the lands they once defended and the peoples they once sheltered.

They send messengers to Sirion again. The messengers deliver a plea for the Silmaril, an offer of anything at all in exchange. The messengers do not return at all.

The Enemy is many many hundreds of miles from here but at night Maedhros can hear him in his head. Is it so implausible that I really let you go? the Enemy likes saying. You serve me better free than you ever would have willingly.

The Oath allows them to work slowly. They begin planning the sack of the refugee camp even more slowly than the Oath allows, so slowly that its currents are constantly tugging at them. Any slower and the currents would erode all the things they care about which are not the Oath, and it would be a disaster to go to Sirion once they've been stripped of their capacity to care about anything that is not the Silmaril. So they do not hold out forever. But they work as slowly as they can.

Comments

[imeanforever]

"...Huh?"

[lintamande]

"Food. Does it need to have specific nutritional content for you, or is that like the idea that meaning attaches to sounds when people speak?"

[imeanforever]

"...There's foods with medicinal properties? I'd get bored if I ate nothing but one thing, maybe unless it was haws from my tree? What's protein?"

[lintamande]

"...do you know any chemistry or physics?"

[imeanforever]

"Not really? Just commonsense stuff I picked up from learning transmutation, and, like, 'if you drop things they fall'."

[lintamande]

"We can't do transmutation, so I don't know what you'd consider common sense."

[imeanforever]

"Metals are more like each other than they are like other things, so it's easy to transmute a metal into another metal, that sort of thing. Mercury's harder because it's liquid."

[lintamande]

"Oh. All right. In this world there are about eighty fundamental kinds of things. Metals are many of them. We call them fundamental because you can isolate a single tiny essence of them - the smallest aluminum, the smallest gold, the smallest oxygen - and then so far we can't break those tiny essences, and we think that if we did we wouldn't get an even smaller aluminum, we'd get something else entirely.

Now, if you take all eighty things - some of them only exist in Valinor, so it'd be hard, but if you did - and you write up their properties, you get certain regularities. In particular you get regularities in how they link up with each other and with other things. Metals are kind of a category of regularity. So are gases. To make this simpler than it really is, the regularities come from how many other things they'll connect with - like, imagine everyone has arms and they use those arms to catch hold of other essences. Carbon has four arms. Helium doesn't have any.

Most of the world is made out of essences holding hands, or floating around freely if they're the kinds with no hands. They're only stable if everyone has all of their hands occupied. Does all that make sense?

[imeanforever]

"Sort of, I guess."

[lintamande]

"Essences can be rearranged from one stable form to another one. There are rules about which they'll prefer if there are two stable forms possible for a given bunch of them. When I eat food, my body takes the essences and rearranges them to move my muscles and breathe and things like that. Down to the smallest level this is under my conscious control if I desire; I can tell a muscle to stop doing it, though then I might hurt myself, or to do it faster or differently.

But I can only rearrange what I have in the first place, and I can only do rearrangements if I can create the conditions for them within my body. Therefore I have to eat things that give me all the essences I require, and if there are things I can't create the conditions for internally I have to eat something that already contains it.

This is clearly not how you work. I am confused about how you work instead. Even the Maiar, if they have biological bodies, construct them from essences."

[imeanforever]

"Well, if I had to do that, then I could run out of essences and then I wouldn't be thoroughly immortal, so I guess that's not how I work, but I don't know much about what I'd do instead."

[lintamande]

"Yes, if we run out of essences our bodies can stop running and then we have to go ask the Valar for a new body. If your body can heal from anything it definitely does not work like ours. I'm glad you don't require more variety of food, anyway. It'll take some time before anything grows."

[imeanforever]

"When I have sorcery I can make plants grow very fast. ...Which I guess also doesn't make sense with the essences thing."

[lintamande]

"In our world the formal definition of magic is things which create essences, allow essences to undergo unfavorable transformations that they usually wouldn't, or create energy. I had a brother who thought that it was inelegant for magic to be three different things like that, and concluded that all three of them are actually somehow the same thing."

[imeanforever]

"Fairyland has a lot of things that behave in ways that sound like by that definition they'd be magic even though no one ensorceled them. Sourceless waterfalls and stuff."

[lintamande]

"Yes, we'd consider those to be magic."

[imeanforever]

"Anyway, what's protein in particular and why would I need it?"

[lintamande]

"They're a particular category of essence-clump. They tend to have very complicated structures, but they're all built off the same building blocks. I can't create the internal conditions to produce them - I can create about half the building blocks, but there's no way I know to get the rest of the building blocks - so I have to eat them to keep this body going. If I didn't, I would lose muscle mass first, and then eventually I would be scraping what I have off other parts of my body so my heart didn't stop beating and my blood was still carrying oxygen and it'd be increasingly distracting to sustain my body and eventually it would give out.

If you were like us and ate nothing but leaves you'd have a hard time building any muscle. We mostly eat animals and animal products to get protein.

Come to think of it, you weigh far too little to be made out of the essences we are. I wonder if you're just made of something entirely different."

[imeanforever]

"If I needed to eat animals I'd be in trouble, Fairyland doesn't have any."

[lintamande]

"...none? Do you have insects? Do you have flowers? What pollinates the plants?"

[imeanforever]

"No insects either. Lots of flowers! Plants mostly pollinate themselves, although some kinds fairies pollinate them to help them along."

[lintamande]

"Well. I'd take you out to see lots of cute animals but it's not safe, regrettably. It sounds like Fairyland's creator had a much more specific vision and less design by committee than the creators of our world."

[imeanforever]

"I'm not sure anybody made Fairyland. I guess somebody might have."

[lintamande]

"It sounds very definitely like someone made it to me." He's almost relaxed.

[imeanforever]

"Maybe. They didn't tell anybody they did it, though. And there's the regular mortal world, too."