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]

It does. Fairyland and lots of other places.

[lintamande]

Father's not even particularly ambitious, usually, he just likes solving problems and if you keep putting good ones in front of him then he's capable of astonishing goodness.

[imeanforever]

"I'm more outright ambitious, I think."

[lintamande]

"You are the most ambitious person I've ever met. It's lovely."

[imeanforever]

Giggle. "Really?"

[lintamande]

"I would probably not have used Eru's name and used Ulmo's only in with the convenient indifference of the suicidal. And most of the Eldar are less ambitious than me, and most Men have less scope for their ambitious, and Thauron's ambitions were grand in one sense and astonishingly small in another."

[imeanforever]

[lintamande]

"I think we are laying the foundations of your house today. Want to help sing them into place?"

[imeanforever]

"Sure."

[lintamande]

They name the city Vanda Nossëo. Findekáno's family arrives to speak with them a week later, but they mostly seem to want to speak to Findekáno, and he leaves with them for a while and then placidly comes back. No one comments. Fëanor quizzes her about harmonics and runs the tests of plain speech that he wanted.

[imeanforever]

She is happy to answer questions about harmonics and indulgent about tests of plain speech.

[lintamande]

Outrageously complicated speech with an exception carved in for people and animals, he disagrees, but can not learn much more about it.

[imeanforever]

She can't even speculate why there'd be an exception for animals, that's weird. They're probably just piggybacking on the special snap-into-place nature of person names somehow.

[lintamande]

He's asked someone to acquire and name a pet rock for the next batch of tests when there's time.

[imeanforever]

...a pet rock. Mortals are weird.

[lintamande]

Now that they reembody immediately if they die can she stop calling them mortals? It was inaccurate before but now it's really stretching it.

[imeanforever]

'Nonfairies' is so clunky. Fine, though.

[lintamande]

Elves. Perfectly good word. If she has something against it, they can suggest others - Eldar, Quendi, Noldor - incidentally, do all those sound the same to her?

[imeanforever]

Not exactly, but she can tell they mean similar things, except the last one, which is specific. She is not at all sure which exactly of these concentric groups is the gradation at which one encounters weirdness about pet rocks.

[lintamande]

"Feanorians," everyone says unanimously.

[imeanforever]

That's even more specific!

[lintamande]

"And doesn't click as a name? Huh, interesting." Fëanor says. "So if you repeated it would people hear Feanorioni, if that's the language-specific suffix, or -"

[imeanforever]

...she'll repeat the word a few times under various conditions. No, group names like that do not constitute names in the clicky sense, only a person's first, real name.

[lintamande]

It's not the clicky sense he's interested in, its what things her language parser chooses to parse as actual words in a specific language rather than as concepts for later sound-spread translation.

[imeanforever]

She's pretty sure names for groups do not tend to count unless they are also names for the members of the group in the clicky sense. She could probably call him and his sons Finwëans and have that preserved as a name.