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 couldn't have known better, just listened better. But he sounds less grouchy.
imeanforever
I mean, I should have known to listen better. What do you think of Maedhros's idea of spreading out the requests so it's not all going straight through me?
Most people would make even more mistakes than you if granted the power to have all their wishes come true. Maedhros might not but only because all his wishes are for other people.
There are several thousand people who'd wish Maedhros and his brothers dead, and sincerely not be happy in a world in which they walked free. I am not sure their death is the wrong outcome but wishes are certainly the wrong process. There are many people who'd wish for another to love them. I can do that. I shouldn't. There are people who'd wish themselves different, and not always wisely, or wish for power they do not have the knowledge to wield safely. There are people who'd wish things like "Give me every book in the world on this table" and then there'd be a black hole.
That would be even more difficult to explain in terms you could understand than everything else I am saying.
imeanforever
Oh.
There's a thing some people do where instead of enforcing all their orders they enforce one to obey future orders, and more qualifiers can be arranged that way, like, 'if there is a reason I'm not aware of not to do this, instead of carrying out the instruction tell me what that is', but doing that properly requires more finesse with not using imperatives in conversation than I have.
There's a thing some people do where instead of enforcing all their orders they enforce one to obey future orders, and more qualifiers can be arranged that way, like, 'if there is a reason I'm not aware of not to do this, instead of carrying out the instruction tell me what that is', but doing that properly requires more finesse with not using imperatives in conversation than I have.
Fairy orders are not a good system.
A few of your requests could have created a black hole if I'd been at all inclined to do that, or if you'd been slightly more careless, but I do not want any black holes.
A few of your requests could have created a black hole if I'd been at all inclined to do that, or if you'd been slightly more careless, but I do not want any black holes.
imeanforever
I was leaning kind of heavily on 'help' obliging helpful interpretations of any orders that could be carried out helpfully. I was not in very good condition to be trying to do as much in a row as I did.
Black holes can be very helpful. They are for example one solution to Melkor and Sauron being indestructible. And they are very pretty, though probably not to your unaided vision.
I could explain them to you but I estimate it would take about eight hours for you to have an understanding more meaningful than the one that popped instantly to mind on hearing the word 'black hole'.
imeanforever
I can put that off. What did you mean when you said you were without functional limitations, when it then turned out you couldn't undo some things?
I could undo things in the sense of going back to the place in the timeline where I hadn't done them, but then you'd order me to do them again. I could go back to that place in the timeline and not let you order me, or something, but doing that erases all the experiences that anyone has had since that moment. I could undo things in the sense of doing an action that results in things being almost the way they were before - swap all the orcs and Elves' continents again, for example - but doing things that complicated without undesired side effects is really really hard and doing it this frequently makes those side effects likelier to be things that you object to, which I'm currently ordered not to let happen.
And you are not of this world at all and not my jurisdiction so doing things with you is completely different.
And you are not of this world at all and not my jurisdiction so doing things with you is completely different.
It shows everything that happens at every moment in all of Arda's history. I can intervene to change any thing at any moment; I exist outside time. Your orders seem to only prescribe future actions, but perhaps that's because you didn't know I can also change past actions? I told you I was doing that with the swanships. They were the sort of thing that can only be made once, and I needed to remake them, so I changed the aspect of their original making that made them impossible to ever make again.
imeanforever
What would have happened if you'd been under orders not to lie to me when you told me they were the sort of thing that was impossible to make again?
I wasn't lying. They were that sort of thing. I changed them to never have been that sort of thing.
I should probably have version control for this universe.
A way of restoring it to previous states without undoing things. It would make it easier to describe to you exactly what I did when I changed the swanships. Not easy, but easier.
A sigh. It would probably take four hours for me to explain it to you in a way that provided more understanding than the first explanation I gave.