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]

There was a lot of back-and-forth about where to put dead people and Maedhros thought you were going to wind up somewhere else but the actual algorithm was where they'd be best served to wake up with somebody getting a second-best option if there was likely to be violence so I guess Eru didn't think there would be violence.

[lintamande]

He shakes his head. All right. How are you doing? You don't have to, like, continuously command Eru to not make the world stop, do you?

[imeanforever]

No. I haven't actually been enforcing any orders recently, I got him to agree to cooperate on the big stuff.

[lintamande]

Nicely done. What's left?

[imeanforever]

I think I may not have gotten all the dead people because apparently different kinds of people go different places when dead, so I want to check on that, and I don't know if he'll want to give Melkor a redemption arc too or what, aaaaaand Eru says he's personally necessary if Maedhros wants to stop existing altogether but I'm sort of hoping he will change his mind about that.

[lintamande]

Please don't do that.

[imeanforever]

Even if he really wants?

[lintamande]

You have Eru on the line, there has got to be a set of other things such that he stops really wanting that.

[imeanforever]

Like what? I don't want to go anywhere near time travel, that sounds horrendously dangerous.

[lintamande]

No. Like - some absolutely irrevocable way for him to get out of any situation he's in and doesn't want to be, probably. Also he should be better now that the oath's gone but I don't think he's given himself a chance to really process the implications of that yet.

[imeanforever]

Well, I'll deal with the other stuff first and when Maedhros is the last thing on the list we can talk about that, but speaking as an obligatorily immortal creature I wouldn't want to force him to exist if he can't be okay with existing.

[lintamande]

He hasn't tried not being a Feanorian, which is how most people manage finding existence enjoyable. I was prepared to kill him, when I rescued him. I'm not - he doesn't belong to me. But there are decisions he shouldn't be making while he's like this.

[imeanforever]

Well, it seems to be taking a while to decide whether Sauron gets a redemption arc and Eru does not seem very impatient about it. No big rush.

[lintamande]

The world is billions of years old. As far as Eru is concerned, this all happened in a blink. Or - I'm not even sure if he has a concept of time. If Maedhros decides in a thousand years he wants to die, he can.

[imeanforever]

He says he exists outside of time. It was sort of alarming.

[lintamande]

Yeah. You have some nerve. I am glad it worked out like this.

[imeanforever]

Me too.

[lintamande]

Anything else?

[imeanforever]

That was all I meant to talk to you in particular about. You can go back to staring contests.

[lintamande]

Thank you for Maitimo.

[imeanforever]

You're welcome, to the extent that I was involved in providing him.

[lintamande]

He does return to the staring contest, with determination.

[imeanforever]

Good luck with that.

To Fëanor: Do you know what Eru meant when he said I complement your family?

[lintamande]

Hmmm.

Why haven't you ordered Eru to give you access to all his pet projects so you can straighten them out, and to stop making new ones?

[imeanforever]

Ordering hostile vassals is tricky and I have almost exclusively observational experience with the skill, he's really complicated and I don't understand a lot of his powers, and he won't cooperate on the rest of fixing this world if he thinks I'm not going to quit while I'm ahead there.