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
"You seem very obviously not evil. The only people I have known it to burn have all been mass murderers."
"I am also very sure it wouldn't count things someone was forced to do."
"I took the Oath voluntarily. If someone decided to be a vassal of Thorn, and gave him their name because they wanted to work for him - maybe he offered them something - then they would be responsible for things he ordered them to do, even if they regretted working for him, because they made the initial choice."
imeanforever
"I don't actually know if he has anybody like that. Blossom maybe, I don't know."
"But not you. Being forced to hurt people is very awful but it does not make you evil."
"I am not at all clear on what you want from me, other than 'someone else', which is a reasonable thing I would want in your place."
imeanforever
"I'm curious about the Silmaril and what it was reading. You remember me freaking out about mindreading. I can ask someone else if someone knows more things."
"No one else here would know anything more than that. I vividly remember you freaking out about mindreading. I don't think it works that way - after all, it would still burn someone who believed themselves wholly good - but I can't say."
"I am glad. Were you injured falling?"
imeanforever
"No, I just spent a lot of time injured and was only allowed to heal myself when told. I wasn't unable to fly so I made the flight unhealed."
He nods. "And you can't heal yourself in our world?"
imeanforever
"Sorcery doesn't work here. Tried it once I figured out this wasn't the regular mortal world, but nothing."
"That's too bad. Our magic works here. I wonder if it wouldn't work in fairyland."
"If my family weren't dead, I had a brother who could invent you a magic item that made you deaf whenever you heard an order you hadn't expected, things like that."
"The minute I heard your world existed I'd have rushed to his workshop and pleaded for one, and he'd have grumbled and then heard the story and stopped grumbling and had it done in absurdly little time."
imeanforever
"How would it distinguish an order from an unenforced imperative?"
"I don't understand how our engineering works very well. It might block both, honestly, or if there's a way to filter them he'd discover that, or he'd just have us sit there doing trials for a week to train a piece of metal to recognize the different innately. If you were willing to participate, that is."
imeanforever
"I would want one of those things very badly. You can train metal?"
"I knew people who could. I can't personally."