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

...she'll repeat the word a few times under various conditions. No, group names like that do not constitute names in the clicky sense, only a person's first, real name.

From:

lintamande

It's not the clicky sense he's interested in, its what things her language parser chooses to parse as actual words in a specific language rather than as concepts for later sound-spread translation.

From:

imeanforever

She's pretty sure names for groups do not tend to count unless they are also names for the members of the group in the clicky sense. She could probably call him and his sons Finwëans and have that preserved as a name.

From:

lintamande

But - Feanorians is just the subset of Finweans that includes all the real ones - why would one be a word when the other isn't-?

From:

imeanforever

Because their real names all have 'Finwë' in them.

From:

lintamande

Fëanor instructs his children to produce him some grandchildren and name them 'feanorsomething'. No one is entirely sure whether he's joking.

From:

imeanforever

...she is probably missing something as a member of a nonreproductive species but that seems a little bizarre to her.

From:

lintamande

"You can't order people to marry or bear children," Maedhros explains later. "It'd be very evil. I don't know enough about your world to think of an analogy, a line even bad fairies won't cross..."

From:

imeanforever

"...There's not really anything I can think of. Many very bad fairies still abide by chosen nicknames but I don't think it's universal."

From:

lintamande

"Well, the Enemy crossed this line too, a million times over. But no person who is only our flavor of mass murderer would ever ever order someone to marry or bear children. Everyone would stop them. No matter the circumstances. If the world were at stake."

Edited Date: 2016-05-29 04:19 pm (UTC)

From:

imeanforever

"You don't even have enforced orders."

From:

lintamande

"But our people obey us. So there are things it'd be wrong to order them to do."

From:

imeanforever

"The people who'd be ordered are not the same people who'd stop the order?"

From:

lintamande

"I can definitely think of some people who, if a friend was ordered to marry someone, would physically intercede, but who if they were ordered to marry someone would go along."

From:

imeanforever

"That's weird."

From:

lintamande

"I think it's actually quite normal."

From:

imeanforever

"It's weird that it's normal, then."

From:

lintamande

"What does that even mean?"

From:

imeanforever

"I'm not judging weirdness against commonality, I'm judging it against - consistency with reasonable principles."

From:

lintamande

"Hmm. It seems like 'if this costs me and benefits my people, trust that it's right, if it costs a friend and in my assessment the cost is not worth the benefit to my people, trust my instincts' might be reasonable if people think they are inclined to be self-serving but not excessively protective of others."

From:

imeanforever

"If you're not supposed to do it even if the world's at stake I wouldn't think underestimating the benefit would be a serious problem."

From:

lintamande

"No, but people don't have instincts about defiance that are narrowly tailored to ridiculous requests like that, their instincts are formed more generally."

From:

imeanforever

"Maybe I don't get it because I don't relevantly have a people."

From:

lintamande

"That might be part of it. Fairies also might not have much sense of fealty that doesn't come with orders or coercive exercises of power that aren't about envasselization."