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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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"I would really love to see this place someday," he says. "It sounds beautiful."
imeanforever
"It is! I didn't travel very much but there's art books, in libraries, paintings of all kinds of amazing places, and there were some nice things within flying distance of my tree too. There's... landscapes, here, but they're kind of drab."
"You should have seen Aman in the time of the Trees."
"Beleriand was beautiful too before the war scarred it. But - no. Maglor should sing you something. It was glorious."
imeanforever
Promise sings up an illusion of her tree, huge and just shy of sculpted, heavy with fruit and brilliant green against a backdrop of fall color on a dozen other types of trees and exotic varieties of underbrush, afternoon light cast through the canopy onto leaf litter and a rainbow of circled mushrooms and lichen-laced rocks.
Maglor smiles. "We'll get you back there." And he sings the Trees, the universe cracked open to channel its light through two astonishing trees, each of them a million years old and sized to suit it, casting golden and silver light out across Aman.
"We don't either, not anymore. But we did." And he sings some more of Valinor's geography, of Tirion, of Valimar -"
"I told Eru to give the Teleri the swanships," Maedhros says.
This stops the song. Everyone stares at him.
"Huh," says Maglor. "Good idea."
And he sings of Alqualondë and its swanships.
"I told Eru to give the Teleri the swanships," Maedhros says.
This stops the song. Everyone stares at him.
"Huh," says Maglor. "Good idea."
And he sings of Alqualondë and its swanships.
imeanforever
Apparently it caused a time travel problem. It was alarming. But they're very pretty.
We burned them. It was - not the greatest of our crimes, but up there.
My father was angry and afraid. He makes mistakes when he's either of those things and bad mistakes when he's both.
We were supposed to send the ships back to get some people who didn't like my father and didn't trust him, and it was mutual, and he wanted a demonstrative way of communicating his lack of intent to send the ships back for them.
It wasn't one I thought I'd ever have even a partial chance to set right.
Haven't even noticed them. Or - wouldn't I? Would I think everything had always been this way even if it was different?
imeanforever
Eru said that they were originally a thing that could only be made once, so to put them back he had to make it so they were not such a thing. I still remember being told that, I don't know what you remember.
I remember thinking they were a thing that could only be made once. So perhaps he changed that fact without changing the fact people believed it and acted on it.
Certainly less creepy than changing all our memories. Anyway, the dead are back, the boats are back - I feel better about being a mass murderer whose victims are all living.
I am trying to think how best to apologize to them.