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 have done so.
imeanforever
Tell me: in your sincere estimation am I likely to regret it if I let you act freely?
I dislike fairy orders and will probably revise the world so they don't work here, or on my children should they visit other worlds. You might desire some of the dead returned to life who would not otherwise have been, or returned to life sooner. You might desire to change the fates of some people. If it is Maedhros's sincere desire to stop existing no one short of me can do that.
imeanforever
Don't attempt to get out from under my orders delivered of my own uncommanded will, nor to prevent me from delivering them. "Oh - you may act freely," she adds to Maedhros. "But please don't kill Sauron, I might need him for something. Eru says if you really want to stop existing you'll need him for that specifically."
"Eru's name worked?" He does not kill Sauron. He is pretty sure killing Sauron wouldn't even work. "And yes, I would, though I'd appreciate it if you told my brothers that this worked."
imeanforever
"...Yes. What did you think I did?" she asks. "Can I have you around for general advice and consultation while I try not to make any stupid mistakes wielding this deity or should I ask Maglor?"
"I am available for advice and consultation. Please don't give me orders."
imeanforever
"Don't anticipate having to with your oath gone," she says. "Eru thinks I might want some people alive earlier than planned or some fates changed."
"Normally when we die we go to Mandos, and he judges when we're suitable to be given another body. To the extent your judgment of that differs from his you might, yeah. Fates changed - I assume he means making mortals immortal, or vice versa."
imeanforever
"He didn't specify. I'm unclear on how fate is supposed to work."
"Us too. This, ah, wasn't in it." He looks wonderingly at the sky.
imeanforever
"What do you suppose would happen if I just told him that everyone in Mandos who wants to be alive should be alive?"
"Then a lot of orcs would be alive, and they're not sworn to hate us any more but they have other reasons to, in many cases, and they'd all be in Valinor, and the Valar might just kill them again. 'Alive and somewhere where they have the resources they need to stay that way and no one they have a serious grievance with' would be better but correspondingly less airtight. You could just go with 'alive, and in a way I won't regret.'?"
imeanforever
"Leaves him lots of leeway and it turns out he's not a fan of fairy orders... might have to work more piecemeal. Do you need several decades to say goodbye to your boyfriend before you stop existing, I could start there."
"He won't let me. Bring him back with the rest of his family somewhere safe and far away from me."
"Well, he couldn't stop me but I wouldn't be able to go through with it."
"There are fairy orders in the world, I want to not exist, I am pretending to hold it together for you because it will not help anything if I curl up sobbing on the ground right now, I owe too many people too many things to abandon them but that does not make my existence tolerable to me."
imeanforever
"I can let Eru make them stop working on you, he kind of wants to do that anyway."
"Please do that."
I have done so.
"Yes."