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]

"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."

[imeanforever]

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

[lintamande]

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

[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."

[lintamande]

He nods. "Outer space?"

[imeanforever]

Blink.

[lintamande]

"How high in the sky can you put a gate?"

[imeanforever]

"I can't fly arbitrarily high because the air thins out too much but as high as I like, if I'm there, I think."

[lintamande]

"As soon as we figure out how to gate," he says, "let's go up in the sky, I think we'd both like that. If you go high enough there's no air at all; that's what we call outer space."

[imeanforever]

"...I do not see what there is to like about being somewhere with no air."

[lintamande]

"You take some with you. You can see the whole world, and all the stars, much clearer without air in the way."

[imeanforever]

"Oh. - Well, I don't think I see as well as you but that does sound nice."

[lintamande]

"Another thing to fix once we have the means to grind lenses! Do you want to talk about optics? It might even have applications for harmonics, I'm not sure."

[imeanforever]

"I'm not sure why it would, but sure, why not."

[lintamande]

"To me the word harmonics calls to mind tangled strings, such that tugging one affects others, is that badly off? Anyway, wave behavior is a subject of study and if harmonics have anything to do with it then that's the loose outline of what my father will be doing to develop a harmonics-calmer for gating."

[imeanforever]

"There's a sort of ripple effect around things that affect harmonics but it doesn't go all that far. I don't know that I'd say they behave like waves at all. They move in patterns, a little, but they mostly don't move over short term timescales."

[lintamande]

"Can you describe them? Can non-fairies learn sorcery?"

[imeanforever]

"I can't directly sense them; when I want to map them I grid an area with weak fairylights and see how they're affected over the space. And yes, mortals can learn sorcery."

[lintamande]

"And how are fairy lights affected over a space?"

[imeanforever]

"They'll be brighter or dimmer or flicker, and if I've tried to make them all the same and I've accounted well enough for the nonharmonic factors in the area then that leaves harmonics as the thing responsible for the differences. There's a nastily complex notation for it; I can't do the really fine maps because I can only distinguish so many grades of dimness, but I can map a spot better than having to feel it out if I'm going to be sorcering there a lot."

[lintamande]

"It's probably not particularly helpful to describe it to me until I can see it, and Father thinks that the general solution is a century or two out," he says reluctantly. "All right. Well, optics -" and this isn't as much fun without lenses and faceted stones to show Laurelin's light through, but he still remembers it.

[imeanforever]

Optics! Optics is pretty neat.

[lintamande]

Watching people who are very definitely back alive build a city, while the Silmarils make the work lighter but there is absolutely no obligation to pursue anyone who might be tempted to take them, is pretty neat.

[imeanforever]

Promise is pretty pleased with that. He hasn't even mentioned intending to wander off to find a temple and ask to cease to exist.

[lintamande]

Well, he can't do that now, everyone's back and they need him, none of the rest of them have any people skills. Not that he does, either, but he'll have them by the time there are gates.