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

[lintamande]

Nothing shoots at her.

[imeanforever]

Great. Then she can lug the damn thing all the way back to the fortress.

[lintamande]

A cry goes up as she returns, and he waits for her on the ramparts.

[imeanforever]

She goes and plunks it down. "You didn't tell me it glowed. You didn't tell me that it plus enough stuff to make it not visibly glow weighs half as much as I do!"

[lintamande]

"..how much do you weigh?" He unravels it, opens the box, touches it, immediately removes his hand. Goes very very still.

[imeanforever]

"Thirty pounds."

[lintamande]

He shakes his head wearily. "An Elf your size would weigh a hundred. I apologize for not considering that flying creatures would have to be very light. Are you all right? Are you hungry?" He still isn't looking at her.

[imeanforever]

"I'm hungry. I'm otherwise fine. They sang me almost all healed, I didn't know there was mortal magic. Is something wrong with it? Did they have a decoy or something?"

[lintamande]

"No. It's the real thing. You prevented a war. Someone bring me food for Promise. We are, again, not mortals, but have magic. My family no longer has any healing magic, because we've been fighting for so long."

[imeanforever]

"What does fighting have to do anything?"

[lintamande]

"It makes healing magic stop working, among the Eldar. My brother has very powerful magic but he can't use it for healing anymore."

[imeanforever]

"Oh. Sorcery doesn't have anything like that. No matter what I did I'd still be able to heal. As long as I remembered, anyway, I might be stuck here long enough to forget all the sorcery I know."

[lintamande]

"You're welcome to write it down." He is flexing the fingers of his remaining hand; the fingertips are burned. Behind them, the Silmaril is bathing the whole castle in astonishing, beautiful, sparkling light.

[imeanforever]

"You didn't tell me it was dangerous to touch, either, what if she hadn't had a box for it?"

[lintamande]

"It would not be dangerous for you to touch, or for her. It burns evil things."

[imeanforever]

[lintamande]

He wraps it up carefully and takes it inside. "Do you want to eat now?"

[imeanforever]

"Yes."

[lintamande]

So he feeds her, with burned fingers. The Silmaril sits in the corner of the room. He cannot take his eyes off it.


"Anything you want to talk about?"

[imeanforever]

"What else are you going to do with me?"

[lintamande]

"I am trying to think whether there's any hope of defeating the Enemy with you. If there's none, I will let you go."

[imeanforever]

"I just made an enemy and probably more by now via rumor in a place that its inhabitants like to call the only safe place on the continent. If I don't want to curl up and starve until I can barely move I have to have either a master or a vassal, I am desperately averse to use of a vassal for anything I can't avoid using one for however many names I know now and I don't, I'm not good at, outside dire circumstances I'd have to trust somebody to volunteer to -"

[lintamande]

"By let you go I mean rescind all orders, I'd still feed you if you want me to. Or order one of my people to do it."

[imeanforever]

"Oh."

[lintamande]

"The problem is that I am not comfortable with the fact that fairy vassalhood exists and I am not willing to exist in a world where it does and I can't protect myself. If you find someone else in this fortress who you like and trust you can form an arrangement with them and then I can release you."