lintamande | don't touch me

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lintamande

"I was taking some solace in the thought I hadn't prohibited you from it, and wouldn't. But. We can die. When we attack the refugee camp of Sirion many people will die. I don't know if you consider that a bad thing, but here it's considered one."

From:

imeanforever

"I don't want anybody else to die either if they don't want to."

From:

lintamande

"Right. So. If I am somehow stopped from attacking Sirion, or if the Silmaril is retrieved such that I don't have to, then no one dies."

From:

imeanforever

"And you want to send me in to tell her to hand it over."

From:

lintamande

"That is the most obvious solution."

From:

imeanforever

"I assume you have her name."

From:

lintamande

"I do."

From:

imeanforever

"If you give it to me are you going to use me to make her do anything else?"

From:

lintamande

"Get you out of the city safely, maybe. It's all in vain if you don't actually get the Silmaril back here. Otherwise no."

From:

imeanforever

"Somebody whose name you don't have might interfere with me on my way in or out."

From:

lintamande

"No one knows that names can be used in this manner, I could try to get the names of most of the people who could interfere. But yes. The city has defenses and even with Elwing's agreement I'm not sure you could get in or out of them unimpeded."

From:

imeanforever

"If this were Fairyland I could turn invisible, but it's not."

From:

lintamande

"You could arrive at Sirion as a refugee. They take people in. You could avoid telling anyone that you met me first, or how you work, or that you're anything other than a girl with wings. You could learn the names you needed, order Elwing to give you the Silmaril, and leave."

From:

imeanforever

"Would that take long enough that it would be conspicuous that I wouldn't eat or drink anything?"

From:

lintamande

"Not if you arrived with food you could feed yourself, or does even that not work? Or you could ask to eat and drink in private, citing trauma - people certainly are familiar with that."

From:

imeanforever

"It doesn't work. It might be worth the risk if you happen to personally keep a garden and use seeds you harvest yourself every year."

From:

lintamande

"Haven't had much time for gardening. Are there other things you would expect to go wrong with this plan?"

From:

imeanforever

"Assuming no one force feeds me or incapacitates me - I don't think I'm much harder than a mortal to render unconscious except no amount of drowning will do it - and I have the names of enough people that they can prevent everyone whose name I don't have from shooting a hole through my wing or anything - I don't suppose there's any obvious reason it wouldn't work."

From:

lintamande

"I know a few hundred names," he says, "of people who ought to be there, most of them important people. If I tell you the name will you fit it to the person when you see it, or do I need to send you names and faces?"

From:

imeanforever

"I have to know which person you mean - faces would do it - and entertain the correct hypothesis about their name and then I'll know if it's right or not."

From:

lintamande

"How badly am I hurting you if I order you to do this?"

From:

imeanforever

"Depends on how free a hand I have to order the people intelligently as opposed to on a rigid plan, and whether you continue to intend to leave them alone after you have your thing. I don't - I don't intrinsically object to having names, all that does by itself is make it so they can't hurt me - and I'm assuming they'd rather not die -"

From:

lintamande

"I think they'd rather not die. You can ask them. I will need to talk this over with my brother but I currently intend to order you to do whatever you think retrieves the Silmaril best, not to do anything more specific, and I can promise to leave them alone once the Silmaril is in our hands."

From:

imeanforever

"I don't understand why you're under the oath to get the Silmaril in the first place but as long as you are this is better than massacring them."

From:

lintamande

"We were very young and naive and thought it was only our own lives we were staking. Thank you." He stands. "Do you prefer that I tell you when I'll be back when I leave, or give you some notice when I'm returning, or what?"