"Fair enough. I should go talk to my family. Idaia, do you want to come see the Silmarils - you haven't yet, right -"

"I have not! Lead the way."

He actually needs to wait for his father to finish his work; Fëanáro has gotten touchier about interruptions and wears one of the keys to the vault around his neck. They sit there and eat lunch and wait for him.

I hope your dad comes out of this okay.

I'm really glad the King agreed to leave with us. My dad needed that.

I just hope it doesn't have repercussions later.

I mean, it will, but those will be politics and this is my dad's happiness and wellbeing.

I'm not saying it's not worth it it's just that there's an evil god on the loose who started all this shit in the first place so.

And he wanted to divide our family and the King proved it couldn't be done.

I know. It's just--you know I have reasons to be paranoid. I know in my head this isn't gonna be my hometown all over again, but...

Everyone here? Is on our side. Would be on our side if my father'd stabbed Nolofinwe outright. They're our people and they won't turn on us. If we leave Valinor it'll be because we found somewhere nicer.

Or to save the people elsewhere. She remembers his father's urgency at the plight of Men--what do we need, what do they need--

That too. But if we go we'll go together.

Yeah. How was she ever this lucky, that she stumbled through a magic snake into a group of people with priorities that make sense.

Fëanáro takes a break a few hours later and is happy to show Idaia the Silmarils. Well, happy might be putting it too strongly. 

The vault is underneath the King’s home here, locked with a key Fëanáro wears around his neck and a gear mechanism that can only be released by entering the correct series of tengwar. The tengwar do not spell out anything of significance to Fëanáro – that would be folly. They are seemingly random, but the graph that they paint in his mind is the largest connected graph that can be extracted from the mathematical representation of a supply problem that’s been trifling him. “The Trees are getting dimmer,” he says to the two of them while he types it in.

"Huh. Thought I was imagining things."

The door swings open. "No," Fëanáro says. "We measured it. The question is why."

The door at the bottom of the stairs is not locked, and swings open at the brush of his hands. And it's starlingly warm; the Silmarils fill the room like a roaring fire and like Laurelin at her peak and like the embrace of a lover, all at once, dancing in joy at the arrival of visitors. Fëanáro leans against the wall and drinks in the warmth and the light and the joy. All three, perhaps, have been scarce lately. “The Silmarils are no dimmer,” he says, though he’d never had reasonable grounds to fear that, and the Silmarils are glimmering flirtatiously, the way they only do when all three are together, sliding rainbows off each other and catching the angles just right to paint sparkles on the walls.

"Beautiful," she breathes. "...Okay I understand that the important thing about them is that they'll let us leave Valinor but I am suddenly way more sympathetic to the people whose reaction to them is to coo over how pretty they are."

"That is also an important thing about them," he says, eyes shining. "People cannot live lives with no hope and joy and beauty in them, just the expectation of some in a distant future."

"Yeah," she says, staring at them as though if she just thinks about them hard enough she'll be guaranteed to dream of them clearly enough to have all that beauty at her fingertips for the rest of forever.

He squeezes her hand. Hey, maybe she can.

Maybe. Worth a shot, anyway.

Fëanáro has already gone off back to work. They stare at them for a while longer.

Your dad's amazing.

I know. He's - this is so hard on him and I'd do anything to make it easier...