View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
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.
+ Show First Post
"I want to give you leave to go fly around and talk to orcs and understand why this is worth it, but I'm worried you'll get taken prisoner by the Enemy. I can ask people to bring some orcs back here for you to talk to."
"The foot soldiers of the Enemy."
"I would like you to agree with me that using you to destroy the Enemy is worth it. I will do it anyway, because it is worth it, but I think you'll be happier and more productive and we'll be likelier to succeed if you agree with me. And right now the only thing you know about the Enemy is that he tortured me and you'd be warranted in thinking I probably deserved it."
imeanforever
"Well," she says magnanimously, "I don't know what you were like before that."
"If I'd found you before that I'd have immediately promised never to give you any orders and we'd probably have been good friends until we both got killed because that is what happens to naive people in Beleriand if they are lucky."
imeanforever
"I'm immortal. Like, really immortal," she reminds him. "And if you were going to be handing out promises not to give me any orders that would probably have bumped you up in trustworthiness to make you a good contingency master so I'd have wanted it a little narrower; rescindments are orders."
"Noted. But you did not meet me five hundred years ago when I remembered more than scattered chunks of my life and the Enemy could not talk in my head at will and I was not in constant pain and I had people I loved; you met me now. And now if I can I will use you to end him, and then I will find you someone you can trust and have such a good mutual agreement with, and then I will figure out how to stop existing, which has been the only thing I've wanted for a very long time."
"I don't expect it to make sense to you."
imeanforever
"If there's a gate before you do that I could fix your hand and whatever else is hurting you."
"Most of the things that are hurting me are not the kind healing spells fix. But that is very kind of you."
"I will ensure that you are not negatively affected by any of this."
"...by making sure you have a person here to your liking who can feed you, and a gate back if the means for any such thing exists, and rescinding all my orders. And I can leave, if you like, or pretend if you like that I'm off on a grand adventure to discover myself, so you don't feel any sense of responsibility..."
imeanforever
"I'm not very likely to believe you're on a grand adventure to discover yourself."
"At need I am a pretty good liar."
"In that case I won't lie to you. You cannot sincerely think that it's somehow good or important for me to be alive?"
imeanforever
"I wouldn't try to stop you from killing yourself if that was what you wanted to do but I'm skeptical you can avoid it negatively affecting me. I wouldn't kill Thorn if he were mortal and I had the flexibility - I'd have him turned him into a sparrow, even, not a snail, I'd leave him his consort, I think she actually loves him -"
"I would much much rather die than be turned into a sparrow, and everyone who loves me is dead."
imeanforever
"Well, I'm pretty sure Thorn would rather be a sparrow. Like I said, I wouldn't stop you."
"Probably. Things have to get pretty bad for most people to decide that even the things which cast a shadow like their memories are unbearable, that life could never ever get good enough to be worth it. I doubt anything that bad has happened to Thorn."