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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.
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Fëanor goes suddenly still. This allows everyone else to get a word in edgewise.
Everyone else is, apparently a red-haired man who looks exactly like one of Maedhros' surviving brothers, lurches into his arms, and goes very still; a blond man who says to Maedhros. 'Well. Don't know how you pulled that one out, but well done.' and then looks around like this is not in fact the place where he would have wanted to wake up, and several more men who are glaring at each other.
"That's Eru's fault," Maedhros says to the latter group, "Findekáno, I told him to put you with your family and I have no idea why he insisted -"
"Probably because no one else," Findekáno says, "would yell at you enough for whatever the fuck you were thinking in Doriath, you should have dismissed everyone under your command after the Nirnaeth, how could you-"
This has the other people even tenser. Maedhros raises a hand, as if to hold them in place. It's shaking.
"I know," he says, "but Eru was supposed to put the dead where's best for them, not where they're needed by the living -"
"It is definitely best for me to be here, Maitimo, why do you think I keep on chasing you down, no matter what you've done since we last met, no matter how hard you try to kill me -"
Maedhros flinches.
"I meant that in the sense 'you can't actually avoid me for my own good', not 'the Nirnaeth was an instance of you trying to kill me', obviously we both made the same error of optimism there..."
"How on earth is it good for you to be here with me?"
"Well," he says, "what are they doing with you now?"
"I don't know. They were talking about a war crimes trial, or another exile -"
"Then I don't have much time, do I? And we wasted so much of it-"
Fëanor blinks. "I'd insist on more than a few hundred quadrillion miles," he says to Promise, "the universe is apparently very big and that's actually pretty close, light travels that distance in only a few years. A black hole is a satisfactory means of disposing of our Enemy. Findekáno, why are you here?"
Everyone else is, apparently a red-haired man who looks exactly like one of Maedhros' surviving brothers, lurches into his arms, and goes very still; a blond man who says to Maedhros. 'Well. Don't know how you pulled that one out, but well done.' and then looks around like this is not in fact the place where he would have wanted to wake up, and several more men who are glaring at each other.
"That's Eru's fault," Maedhros says to the latter group, "Findekáno, I told him to put you with your family and I have no idea why he insisted -"
"Probably because no one else," Findekáno says, "would yell at you enough for whatever the fuck you were thinking in Doriath, you should have dismissed everyone under your command after the Nirnaeth, how could you-"
This has the other people even tenser. Maedhros raises a hand, as if to hold them in place. It's shaking.
"I know," he says, "but Eru was supposed to put the dead where's best for them, not where they're needed by the living -"
"It is definitely best for me to be here, Maitimo, why do you think I keep on chasing you down, no matter what you've done since we last met, no matter how hard you try to kill me -"
Maedhros flinches.
"I meant that in the sense 'you can't actually avoid me for my own good', not 'the Nirnaeth was an instance of you trying to kill me', obviously we both made the same error of optimism there..."
"How on earth is it good for you to be here with me?"
"Well," he says, "what are they doing with you now?"
"I don't know. They were talking about a war crimes trial, or another exile -"
"Then I don't have much time, do I? And we wasted so much of it-"
Fëanor blinks. "I'd insist on more than a few hundred quadrillion miles," he says to Promise, "the universe is apparently very big and that's actually pretty close, light travels that distance in only a few years. A black hole is a satisfactory means of disposing of our Enemy. Findekáno, why are you here?"
imeanforever
Um, you heard the guy who understands black holes now, says Promise, unequipped to comment on the family drama or the boyfriend.
Are you sure you don't want anything else with them first?
imeanforever
"Are we sure we don't want anything else with Melkor and Sauron before flinging them into a black hole?"
"Why did 'Sauron' come across that way when I'd expect you to have said it correctly?" Fëanor says.
imeanforever
"Uh, I know his real name but fairies have a thing about abiding by chosen nicknames."
"So did you specifically choose to make the sounds of the phonemes in 'Sauron'? Because it's a name? Is it even his chosen name?"
imeanforever
"Well, I don't know, he didn't exactly clarify, but it seemed likely from context."
"So names you process normally: you learn a collection of sounds, and then you produce specifically those sounds and your listeners hear them as specifically those sounds. I speak the name of a flower, or a concept, or a movement, the way you speak the name of a person. But to you, flowers and concepts and movements have no names?"
"But not the kind of word that 'Sauron' is to you. 'Sauron' is a word that every hearer will hear the same way. Is that because it's a name?"
imeanforever
"Probably? Names are different. But it's not his real name, so I'm not sure."
"Do you consciously do something different when you say 'Sauron did that' compared to if you say 'a bad person did that'? Is it all proper nouns? What's the name of the fortress behind us?"
imeanforever
"I think it was called Angband? And of course it's different, one of them is a specific bad person and one of them is an indefinite one, there are more bad people than just him - do you mean with my voice? I'm not paying conscious attention to how I say stuff, not like that."
He hears 'Angamaite' when she says 'Angband'. "So it's really just names of people. The magic that powers your translation ability distinguishes that specifically. Weird. How about names of animals?"
"So if I say to you that my son once had a pet velociraptor named Ambalë, and you say it back to me while I'm expecting to hear you speak Thindarin-"
"Animal names retain the original language too. What about people who have names in multiple languages - my sons, what are their names?"
imeanforever
Blink. "I haven't been introduced to most of them. Uh, I told Maedhros once it was safe to introduce himself to fairies that way because it didn't overlap his real name which is Maitimo?" It clicked when Sauron said it.
"Maedhros is you?" Fëanor says to his eldest son. "That's not a responsible translation. ...so names you parse normally, and they're heard exactly as you said them, and you say them exactly as you initially heard them, just like everyone else does for all words. Everything else, the superposition of sounds. Which we'll run tests on later once you've deposited our foes in a black hole and - hmm, there's a lot else to do. If we go to Eru's other projects via travel through the stars it'll take us a very long time...how do I build you a gate back to Fairyland? How are gates generally built?"
imeanforever
"Gates are generally built with sorcery. It doesn't work outside Fairyland. So I have no idea how you're going to do it. Are we sure we don't want Melkor and Sauron for anything? I think the black hole is a one way trip."
"Moringotho and Thauron are very powerful and under your control and it is tempting to exploit that but we don't need to, if you've had them release everyone sworn to them and tell you everything you might want to know already. Are the Silmarils still in Angamaite?"
imeanforever
"I didn't actually shake them down for information. I don't know where the Silmarils are right now but probably in there somewhere."
"Might want to do that, then," he says. "If Angamaite's unoccupied we can head in there right now -"
"We'll stay out here," Maedhros says.
"If you like," says his father. "Well done, by the way."
"It was all Promise."
"We'll stay out here," Maedhros says.
"If you like," says his father. "Well done, by the way."
"It was all Promise."