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]

"Men. Is that one of the kinds of mortal around here?"

[lintamande]

"Men are the mortals around here. We're immortal, just not physically indestructible. They die so easily because diseases can kill them really quickly and their first cities had no sanitation. Among other reasons."

[imeanforever]

"You can die and therefore you are a mortal. If I had sorcery I could de-age somebody every fifty years but they could still die and they'd still be mortal."

[lintamande]

"Yes, because if they did die they'd be gone, that's it. Whereas we just are stuck without a body until we can get a new one, which you yourself said might be what happens if you were destroyed in a way you couldn't heal from. If I figure out how to actually properly stop existing then it'll be correct to say I'm mortal. The Eldar in general still wouldn't be."

[imeanforever]

"I don't know what would happen if there wasn't enough of me left to heal but I definitely would remember if I heard of bodiless fairies being a thing."

[lintamande]

"What else might happen? You get a new body elsewhere? That's what happens for us if the Valar aren't annoyed with us. You - stop existing? In that case you're mortal and just really hard to kill."

[imeanforever]

"I'm also quite sure I can't stop existing. New body elsewhere might be it." She smiles a little. "Maybe I'd wake up in my tree."

[lintamande]

"If you were more confident of that I'd be happy to do it for you."

[imeanforever]

"You'd have to get someone else to do it. And I'm not confident at all, I just made that up. But I started with common knowledge and some of it is that I will never, ever die."

[lintamande]

He nods. "You having my name prevents me from harming you? What are the constraints on that? Imagine you were a prisoner of the Enemy, and I could only get you free by cutting off your hand..."

[imeanforever]

"You still couldn't do it." ...She glances at his hand.

[lintamande]

"Inconvenient. If you were about to be crushed, and I could only get you out of the way by shoving you, painfully hard?"

[imeanforever]

"Similar situation, yeah."

[lintamande]

"If there's a medical procedure that requires an incision?"

[imeanforever]

"Same principle. It's all the same. There are maybe fuzzy areas - mental sorcery typically counts as harm but read-only telepathy might not if I were thinking outside my tree; you could maybe turn me into an animal if you were a sorcerer and I wanted to be an animal; but you can't hurt me."

[lintamande]

"That's a stupid place to draw a line. ...would I not be able to osanwë you, if I hadn't taught you how to defend yourself and you experienced it as harm?"

[imeanforever]

"It's not about what's 'experienced as' harm. There are plenty of things whoever's got the upper hand in a mutual vassalization can still do to their vassal. I don't know what use of osanwë you have in mind but communication probably doesn't cross the line."

[lintamande]

He shudders. "And anyone, ever, who captures you, could ask you for my name."

[imeanforever]

"Yeah. I'm not really sure why you let me have it."

[lintamande]

"I have no desire to hurt you and did not realize that I'd be proscribed from any form of protecting you that caused you even the mildest injury. And the Enemy could give it to you and I'd rather it happen on my terms than on terms like those."

[imeanforever]

"I can hurt myself, so if you had to cut my hand off and there was some way for me to close the gap..."

[lintamande]

"You can attack my sword with your hand? Good to know. We're just going to avoid letting you fall into the hands of the Enemy, that's the easiest way to resolve that problem."

[imeanforever]

"Sounds good. Or just send someone whose name I don't know."

[lintamande]

"I have told most of my people not to let you learn theirs. I am ...very much trying them, with this. They have done well with it."

[imeanforever]

"It's easier if people have nicknames. Especially words that mean things so I don't pay attention to the sounds, in case there's a match."