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:

imeanforever

Huh. It doesn't act like one.

From:

lintamande

Animals come in all different kinds, like he said. Sparrows are not much like snails either.

From:

imeanforever

It's true, they're not. She was vaguely aware it was three representatives from a very broad category, quite as broad as 'plants', but she didn't realize coral counted.

From:

lintamande

Coral counts. Dinosaurs count. He'd love to take her to meet some but they're all in Valinor.

From:

imeanforever

She's never even heard of dinosaurs. Are they more like coral or squirrels or snails or frogs or sparrows or horses?

From:

lintamande

"...horses. Or sparrows. Depending what kind of 'like' you're thinking."

Edited Date: 2016-05-29 08:39 am (UTC)

From:

imeanforever

"Which ways are they like those?"

From:

lintamande

"If you looked at their skeleton it'd be more like a sparrows. But they're very large and if you saw them you wouldn't think of much commonality with sparrows. And the ones I've seen eat grass like horses. And you can ride them if you are very immortal or very reckless."

From:

imeanforever

"...what happens if you try to ride them?"

From:

lintamande

"They might run very fast, or throw you off, or the bigger ones that eat the ones who eat grass might eat you."

From:

imeanforever

"Isn't running very fast the point of riding a thing?"

From:

lintamande

"If you can hold on - oh, Fairyland has normal momentum, right?" This is how momentum should work.

From:

imeanforever

"That sounds about right."

From:

lintamande

"Aww. There'd be some awesome tricks we could pull if it didn't work that way. And we could use gates for ridiculous energy weapons."

From:

imeanforever

"How?"

From:

lintamande

"Depends on what specifically the difference was. But imagine if in your world, a small thing coming loose from a big thing didn't maintain its momentum the way I explained. Then we could build a gun at the gate which - actually, you tell me." He grabs some paper. "How could we shoot things out of gates at absurd velocities, if the world worked like that?"

From:

imeanforever

"...I mean, the obvious exploit on gates now that there's someplace other than Fairyland where they'll work is to make horizontal ones and drop things through them until they get very fast and then gate them wherever you want to throw the fast thing, but I think that works even with momentum behaving like you're used to."

From:

lintamande

"You can do horizontal gates? And gates in the air?" He grins. "Okay, we already have super fast smash weapons, we don't need multiple strategies for getting them."

From:

imeanforever

"Sure, they can point any direction and be wherever you like."

From:

lintamande

"Can you open them in the middle of people? Or deep underground?"

From:

imeanforever

"Well," she says, "yes, but they won't automatically do anything in particular to things they begin by intersecting. And they can take up to a week to settle and stay put by space, not by adjacent items, so I don't think you could aim things inside a person very well that way."