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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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imeanforever
"I'd bet it has never been spoken aloud and that she's done her level best to forget it herself. If her kind magic applies reflexively she won't have been successful but I wouldn't count on that."
He nods. "I don't understand how fairies work well enough to give you an estimate on how long it'll take for some kind of artifact that'd help with that problem."
imeanforever
"Might need one of the kinds of people who can still interact with fairy orders to make a food claim on her. And if her name's forgotten it would be necessary to continue ordering her via same."
"Maedhros," Fëanor says, "do you know any Men we could enlist in an attack on the Queenscourt?"
"Do Men not age anymore?" he says. "It's a bit hard to predict what mood they'll be in in a century when we attempt this, that's a very big change."
"Do Men not age anymore?" he says. "It's a bit hard to predict what mood they'll be in in a century when we attempt this, that's a very big change."
imeanforever
"They age, but when they die they can go on to their afterlife or come back, whichever they like."
"Huh. I do not know any Men we could so enlist but would be happy to spend some time meeting some, if that's what we're doing."
imeanforever
"We could bypass the Queen but she's very useful, potentially very obstructive for any in-Fairyland projects if not addressed, and will have concentrated most of the also-useful power and knowledge to be had in Fairyland."
Maedhros looks at his father.
"I have no desire to rule Fairyland," he says, "so that'll be up to you."
"I have no desire to rule Fairyland," he says, "so that'll be up to you."
imeanforever
"Well, I suppose we have a while to think about it. But it's a reason to keep an eye out for trustworthy-seeming Men."
"Which you'll want to do anyway, Father, they speak six or seven different languages," Maedhros says.
"Is the workshop done?" Fëanor says. "I have so much to catch up on."
The workshop is done. It does not have tools but apparently those can be built.
"We should go back into Angband," says Maedhros who is making no moves in that direction, "and get coal."
The workshop is done. It does not have tools but apparently those can be built.
"We should go back into Angband," says Maedhros who is making no moves in that direction, "and get coal."
"Stone-moving might move it, or might with a little tweaking. Dorthonion actually shouldn't be a bad place to mine for it. You should probably sit down with someone and get a science education, though, that's going to take a long time."
Maedhros looks torn.
"Maitimo, obviously," Findekáno says, "it'd be a waste of time to send him to get coal from Angband and he explains science well and it'll be a few years before you need to know things that require the attention of the family geniuses."
"Maitimo, obviously," Findekáno says, "it'd be a waste of time to send him to get coal from Angband and he explains science well and it'll be a few years before you need to know things that require the attention of the family geniuses."
Maedhros sends his boyfriend a look that is very hard to read and then sits down. "By 'science' we usually mean the facts about how our world operates and the techniques to figure them out. The techniques should work everywhere, the facts obviously aren't true in Fairyland. One interesting way to teach you science would be to set ourselves the project of understanding which of our inventions will work in Fairyland."
"Both. In theory I would have said before I met you that nonmagical inventions should work on every world that is similar enough to ours to have thinking people of any kind, because the principles that hold it together are the same ones that hold thinking people together. But you are a different kind of thinking person than I imagined, so perhaps I'm wrong about which rules might hold."
imeanforever
"Well, we know Fairyland doesn't obey the thing about no creating new essences, although I guess it could just be technically magic every time something like the sourceless waterfall happens."
"Yes. But does it obey things about combustion reactions, for example? Do fairies forge metal? Do they burn coal? Do things fall down when you drop them at the same speed regardless of their size?"
imeanforever
"There's fire... Metal's not in common use but it exists and some fairies forge it. I don't think there's coal. I have not dropped things and watched them to check."
And he starts explaining, very engagingly, the history of the Elf sciences and the things they know and have learned about the world, and the things you can do with that knowledge, and how they could predict whether gravity works in Fairyland from whether archery does, and so forth.
imeanforever
Bows and arrows are a thing, although blowdarts are more popular for the obvious applications. Fairyland has sky islands. There's a spell you can do to an intact dewdrop but not to any other form of water. Entire regions spend long periods of time stalled on a single season or time of day; her tree is in a place where it is almost always autumn and usually afternoon. But there are things that seem to her recollection to behave pretty much as Elves would expect things to behave: water usually flows downhill and wind affects the shapes of clouds and fire behaves normally.