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]

"Okay."

[lintamande]

Maedhros sends his boyfriend a look that is very hard to read and then sits down. "By 'science' we usually mean the facts about how our world operates and the techniques to figure them out. The techniques should work everywhere, the facts obviously aren't true in Fairyland. One interesting way to teach you science would be to set ourselves the project of understanding which of our inventions will work in Fairyland."

[imeanforever]

"Nonmagical inventions or magical ones?"

[lintamande]

"Both. In theory I would have said before I met you that nonmagical inventions should work on every world that is similar enough to ours to have thinking people of any kind, because the principles that hold it together are the same ones that hold thinking people together. But you are a different kind of thinking person than I imagined, so perhaps I'm wrong about which rules might hold."

[imeanforever]

"Well, we know Fairyland doesn't obey the thing about no creating new essences, although I guess it could just be technically magic every time something like the sourceless waterfall happens."

[lintamande]

"Yes. But does it obey things about combustion reactions, for example? Do fairies forge metal? Do they burn coal? Do things fall down when you drop them at the same speed regardless of their size?"

[imeanforever]

"There's fire... Metal's not in common use but it exists and some fairies forge it. I don't think there's coal. I have not dropped things and watched them to check."

[lintamande]

And he starts explaining, very engagingly, the history of the Elf sciences and the things they know and have learned about the world, and the things you can do with that knowledge, and how they could predict whether gravity works in Fairyland from whether archery does, and so forth.

[imeanforever]

Bows and arrows are a thing, although blowdarts are more popular for the obvious applications. Fairyland has sky islands. There's a spell you can do to an intact dewdrop but not to any other form of water. Entire regions spend long periods of time stalled on a single season or time of day; her tree is in a place where it is almost always autumn and usually afternoon. But there are things that seem to her recollection to behave pretty much as Elves would expect things to behave: water usually flows downhill and wind affects the shapes of clouds and fire behaves normally.

[lintamande]

"I would really love to see this place someday," he says. "It sounds beautiful."

[imeanforever]

"It is! I didn't travel very much but there's art books, in libraries, paintings of all kinds of amazing places, and there were some nice things within flying distance of my tree too. There's... landscapes, here, but they're kind of drab."

[lintamande]

"You should have seen Aman in the time of the Trees."

[imeanforever]

"Not drab?"

[lintamande]

"Beleriand was beautiful too before the war scarred it. But - no. Maglor should sing you something. It was glorious."

[imeanforever]

Promise sings up an illusion of her tree, huge and just shy of sculpted, heavy with fruit and brilliant green against a backdrop of fall color on a dozen other types of trees and exotic varieties of underbrush, afternoon light cast through the canopy onto leaf litter and a rainbow of circled mushrooms and lichen-laced rocks.

[lintamande]

Maglor smiles. "We'll get you back there." And he sings the Trees, the universe cracked open to channel its light through two astonishing trees, each of them a million years old and sized to suit it, casting golden and silver light out across Aman.

[imeanforever]

"...I don't think Fairyland has anything quite like those."

[lintamande]

"We don't either, not anymore. But we did." And he sings some more of Valinor's geography, of Tirion, of Valimar -"

"I told Eru to give the Teleri the swanships," Maedhros says.

This stops the song. Everyone stares at him.

"Huh," says Maglor. "Good idea."

And he sings of Alqualondë and its swanships.

[imeanforever]

Apparently it caused a time travel problem. It was alarming. But they're very pretty.

[lintamande]

We burned them. It was - not the greatest of our crimes, but up there.

[imeanforever]

Why did you do that?

[lintamande]

My father was angry and afraid. He makes mistakes when he's either of those things and bad mistakes when he's both.

[imeanforever]

...But why this particular mistake?

[lintamande]

We were supposed to send the ships back to get some people who didn't like my father and didn't trust him, and it was mutual, and he wanted a demonstrative way of communicating his lack of intent to send the ships back for them.

[imeanforever]

Oh.