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.
And then she hits the tear and she cannot go where she was told and she does not have general permission to fly. She can twitch her wings, which is enough to barely steer her fall. She can't even yell for help - this has to be the mortal world, she won't even be able to fix her last batch of injuries - when she hits the ground it twists her bad knee, jars her wrist when she pitches forward, but she manages with her little freedom of movement not to roll and aggravate any of the cuts and scrapes.
She is crouched still on the ground, breathing, moving her eyes but forbidden to lift her head.
"Go out," he says, because others will be hearing that also, "and find who's left us a present." And ask her to keep the blind horror and anguish quiet - kill her if she wants to die -"never mind that," he says, "I'll go." It is almost certainly a trap and he is not inclined to be cautious with his life, but the Oath disagrees so he goes armored, and cautiously.
Her mind does not stop crying out. As he gets closer he can piece together some things about it.
She's going to be stuck here till Thorn forgets her name, if nobody finds her, or if somebody finds her and she can't convince them to feed her and let her go. And then she supposes she gets to wander the mortal world until she chances upon another tear or an actual gate, and at least finding her continent again will be straightforward unless she takes so long to get back to Fairyland that the Queen's up and moved somewhere in that time. She weighs probabilities. Maybe she shouldn't go back - to the continent, anyway, she doesn't really want to spend the rest of eternity without sorcery. But oh she misses her tree. Thorn did not break her thoroughly enough to feel confident in making her use her tree for his purposes. It is probably still there, he probably didn't burn it down. She will just have to remember where it is and go back to it whenever she can, whenever that is.
unless she takes so long to get back to Fairyland
till Thorn forgets her name
Her head is not a pleasant place to be but it is also a confusing one and he keeps lingering, wondering what kind of game this is, what reaction it is supposed to provoke from him. "Hello," he says.
Twitch. She's not allowed to talk. She can wiggle a wing, make it clear she's not deaf? Wiggle. This is literally just some random mortal and she has no idea what he'll do with her but she can't exactly evaluate people for suitability as rescue masters from here can she.
...She can make facial expressions. Does he think she's a mortal? With wings? Do mortals ever have those, she thought they didn't. She twitches the wing now designated for negative answers. No, I don't want you to kill me, or swallow the sun, or time travel, I do not require anything literally impossible of you, you just need to feed me literally anything and say you rescind all my orders -
No because she can't TALK! - If he knew about food and asked someone to fetch some before he came out to find her why is he acting like he doesn't know what's going on? Does he know about fairies or not? Or do mortals come in 'super hearing', or has he got a broadear captive back wherever - no, if he had a broadear he'd know how fairies work -
- she cannot actually be permitted to wander around Beleriand, not if the portrait that is coming together is at all accurate. The right thing to do would be to send her to Círdan.
Someone comes running with food.
- what's he going to do with her, he's reading her mind stop stop stop stop -
- she shivers violently, she can do that, it's not volitional, but she opens her mouth. She told Thorn when he asked her that leaving this avenue wide open was a security hole but he kinks on hand feeding so she's allowed to be hand-fed because nothing should ever obstruct Thorn from kinking on things, oh no -
Shiver. "Okay. Now that you've fed me I'm your vassal and you're the only person on hand - unless somebody else had a really strong specific claim to that specific piece of food before you gave it to me, maybe - who can rescind or supplement my orders. A lot of them are really uncomfortable and I would like to stop having them now. Please."
"Not much because I'm severely injured and have nowhere in particular to be. I don't have all the exact wordings memorized but they include things like not currently being allowed to go anywhere or move significantly because I can't make meaningful progress towards where I was being sent, and if I think of an actual loophole in the orders I have to bite my tongue off and brute force cube roots until further notice by an authorized court member. My immobility pretty thoroughly prevents me from marauding the local mortals but I am not specifically ordered against it but I have no reason to want to."
"I order you not to attack anyone, or otherwise arrange for harm to come to them. I order you not to communicate with the Enemy. I rescind all orders I didn't give you. I can eventually remove those as well but I strongly expect your arrival here is some sort of trap for me and I would need to be satisfied I wasn't putting people in danger."
Shiver. "I don't know what else is important to you. I don't want to hurt anyone and nobody but you can make me. - Unless someone else feeds me. There's no fairy food here, if I eat anything that isn't straight out of your hand it'll vassalize me to whoever can claim the food."
"Specific enough that there's no chance I look away for a second at some point and you're far away finding someone else to get to rescind your orders, general enough that I'm not constraining you from thinking about escape - if I give my word not to escape, that only constrains my actions, but if I give my word not to consider escape, I change my mind itself. Are you the same?"
"Orders can make me think about something but cannot make me not think about something, or want something, or believe something. Why does your word do that?" Fucked up alternate universe gracewings? "I can't fly all that fast, I couldn't be out of earshot that quickly."
The fortress is not glorious, but it is imposing, and it has thick walls and is very very safe. There are people milling anxiously around the ramparts. He explains as they approach. I don't know what she is. I do not think she is of Arda. Don't read her mind or at least don't indicate you've done so.
"The temperature's fine. I don't know if you have anything that would fit me," she is after all five feet tall and winged, "but this dress should hold up for a while longer. I could use more food. Plants are better, I think mort- I think some people eat non-plants."
"I have some questions. Answer truthfully and completely. If I say something like 'would you do this?' does that count? Or does it need to be more direct? If I ask you 'is there information you're withholding from me that I'd care about', do you have to use your best model of what I'd care about, can you rationalize? or change what I care about by suddenly doing something I care about significantly more?"
Twitch. "If you say 'would you do this' and don't specify under what conditions it leaves me partly free to imagine conditions on my own but you couldn't accidentally let me to say I'd do something I'd never do. With that phrasing I could use my current model of what you care about, I wouldn't have to think hard about making sure it was good, but I couldn't deliberately worsen my model by anything other than carelessness; I could do anything I wasn't otherwise forbidden to do in the hopes of adjusting my model but I wouldn't have a very long window to do it in before I had to answer."
Are you trying to figure out a way to trick me into some kind of mistake that makes me vulnerable to you? If so, what have you thought of? If having a warning before I ask your thoughts reduces your distress, you can always delay answering questions like that for a few minutes."
She takes a breath. She thinks for a moment. "Mutual vassalization is possible and if it were in place I'd be less afraid of you because vassals can't hurt their masters, although not by very much because plenty of things don't count as 'hurting'. If anybody mentioned your name I'd listen and remember it but I don't know yet what a good opportunity to learn it would look like. I'm currently free to speak and enforce orders if I obtain any vassals, of whom I presently have none at all, and I can also put my ears out if I get my hands on tools, which would make it prohibitively difficult to control me with orders, although my existing orders would stand and it wouldn't make me any more physically imposing. If you're under an oath like you described that means I have to think about this entire situation in terms of it being your master and thus mine at one remove and that affects how decent a master I can expect you to be on the general spectrum of people who keep slaves. It seems unlikely that you're a good source of unbiased information on someone who you've nicknamed 'the Enemy'."
"You may not give anyone any orders. Do orders have to be spoken? Giving them telepathically doesn't count? If you can't give orders, what changes if you learn someone's name, do you have other forms of power over them?" He isn't willing to stop her from putting her ears out. "Mutual vassalization is not acceptable to me but I am more than willing to give my word not to 'hurt' you if by that you mean physical violence. Are there other commitments that would make this situation less harmful to you without putting my people at risk?"
"Orders can be written if the vassal watches the master write it out but not at any degree of temporal remove. I don't know if telepathy counts but it probably does. If I can't enforce orders then the only thing someone being my vassal changes is whether they can hurt me or not and whether we can feed each other without adding new claims on the fed party. I - I don't want to be touched. Or ordered to hurt myself or anyone else. Or deprived of sleep. Or addressed by name even if you make me give my name which doesn't give you anything you don't already have unless you want to turn me over to another fairy, food works fine for nonfairies, are you sure you're not mortals you said the Enemy was going to kill everyone? If you're going to try to use me for any mental work more complicated than answering basic questions like this I will function better if I have time to - draw. If anybody ever finds a gate to Fairyland you probably won't let me go and get a cutting from my tree, will you."
"I will not touch you, or let anyone touch you, or order you to hurt yourself." He does not promise not to order her to hurt other people. There is a Silmaril, there is an Oath, they are moving towards Sirion as slowly as they can but they are headed there. "Or deprive you of sleep, or address you by name. You can draw. We don't have much paper but you can certainly use it. I cannot think why I wouldn't let you go and get a cutting from your tree, is there a reason I ought to hesitate to do that?"
He stands. A bit unsteadily.
He does. "How are you? There's an important constraint I didn't mention yesterday. Delaying action on an Oath numbs all the things you care about that aren't the Oath, after a while you can't want anything else or remember exactly why you did. We are not going to delay action on the Oath that far, but the next action it demands of us is terrible so we have been delaying. That means it may be wise for me to find a solution with you that's safe for all parties, in the next few weeks, and then commit myself to it before I lose sight of it. Otherwise I would be inclined to leave you alone for much longer. I still can."
"I'm rested, my injuries are going to take a long time to heal without sorcery but they're not so bad I can't think around them, this is still probably a lot better than having arrived where I was going when I went through the tear. I do need to eat, just avoiding me isn't a great idea," she points out. "I can get by without much but not comfortably. ...what are you thinking in terms of a, a solution with me...?"
"I have food. I want to make sure you don't end up in Enemy hands and don't go flitting around making slaves of everyone who gives you their name, those are the only really important features of a solution but they need to be airtight." He puts his head in his hands. "If you could help us that would also be good but I think we are beyond helping."
"You said you knew the Enemy's name," she says. "I don't know how to best keep me out of his hands if I don't know if that would even work or not. I don't want to keep slaves. I had a vassal once because a mortal was stuck in Fairyland and she was starving and Thorn caught us both before I could gate her home. That's the only one. You can phrase it as a question if you want to be surer of my honesty."
"Okay. Strategic information relevant to you not ending up in the hands of the Enemy. This world was created by the Valar. They are very powerful and have very powerful magic and one of them enjoys torturing people and has expanded from doing so recreationally to doing so millions-at-a-time while he does some kind of obscure long-term magic that will probably make this continent a power base for his eventual war with the others. They can read minds, like us, only moreso, and if you were in the Enemy's hands he would figure out how to use you and it would be a disaster. You being in my hands is also a disaster for all innocent people, but less of one, I don't torture them."
"Do not give anyone orders. Do not give any other fairies names so they can give orders; Tell me if there are other fairies trying to do that, and stop them if they do it to me." Intent might not be audible but he says it rather forcefully anyway. "Yesterday we were trying to make progress on the questions of which variants on a general demand for information I could make without harming you."
"You'd have five hundred years of situational information to catch up on to be useful as a strategist. If you find it more objectionable to be asked to think about problems for me I can -" he flinches - "just use you as a fairy. You do not have to tell me anything personal. If you want to ask compensation for telling me things or doing things for me, I can do that."
"The thing I am sworn to retrieve is held by a young mortal woman who is the ruler of a settlement to the south of here. It's not even really a settlement, more of a refugee camp, filled with the survivors of the collapse of the last kingdoms on this continent. And their children. The Enemy hasn't attacked it yet, perhaps because it's not worth his time, perhaps because he expects me to do it. I have asked her to give back the thing I am sworn to retrieve. She has told me to come and get it. We have an army. We are going to do that."
"Before she held it, her father did. We made the same request of him, for the same reason, and he refused. He thought that its blessings would protect his kingdom from the Enemy. They might have done so, for a little while. We attacked her father's kingdom. Her father, her mother, and her brothers, who were young children, were killed in the fighting. As were many tens of thousands of other innocent people. So now she hates us and is eager for us to ride to war so she can avenge them."
"Killing children is considered very wrong because they are very small, and defenseless, and cannot hold weapons or harm anyone. In this world 'mortal' is used to mean people who will die after a certain span of years - we are immortal in that we will never age and can live all the lifetime of the world, but if you drive a sword through us in the right place our body still can be damaged beyond the capacity to sustain us. Does that not happen for you?"
"Assuming no one force feeds me or incapacitates me - I don't think I'm much harder than a mortal to render unconscious except no amount of drowning will do it - and I have the names of enough people that they can prevent everyone whose name I don't have from shooting a hole through my wing or anything - I don't suppose there's any obvious reason it wouldn't work."
"Depends on how free a hand I have to order the people intelligently as opposed to on a rigid plan, and whether you continue to intend to leave them alone after you have your thing. I don't - I don't intrinsically object to having names, all that does by itself is make it so they can't hurt me - and I'm assuming they'd rather not die -"
"If you ever ever figure out a way to use it to take me prisoner, or a way to help someone else do that, I order you not to do it and to warn me immediately. If you ever figure out a way to communicate it to someone else I order you to stop them from getting it by any means necessary. If someone else has it, stop them from taking me prisoner. If you cannot stop them from taking me prisoner, kill me."
"And what I want doesn't enter into it, so if there is literally anyone available who can kill you and you can't do it yourself I will, of course, unless I'm entirely out from under you, tell some let's say small child to do it if by any means I can gain the ability to order them to do things -"
He buries his face in his hand. He's quiet for a long moment. "No. Your wellbeing interests me; pointing out when orders will have a very high cost to you is important to me, knowing what tradeoffs I am making is important. You shouldn't expect that I am willing to trade some probability of being a fairy prisoner off against any other good except a Silmaril, though."
"We discussed the orders. Do any problems come to mind with this order: 'go to Sirion. Do whatever you believe is likeliest to result in you returning with the Silmaril. Do not give orders to anyone for any reason other than protecting yourself and getting the Silmarils, and use orders that are minimally constraining towards that end.'"
"Yes. Temporary but constraining orders are not 'minimally constraining' but they are often faster to say and safer to rely on. If I go through a lot of convolutions to remove all unnecessary constraint, then anyone who can't remember what I said may be stuck trying to remember my wording and unable to do anything else besides try to remember the order until they're released by a new permission. I wouldn't consider it 'protecting myself' to avoid being revassalized if I met someone who seemed likely to be a pleasanter master than you and they offered an opportunity, and they might or might not be able to convince me not to bring you the Silmaril anyway. If people are alarmed when anyone whose name I know acts on my orders they may attack their allies and this phrasing doesn't let me interfere effectively. I could easily consider it protecting myself to give you orders. You didn't specify I had to give you the Silmaril, just return with it, and I'm pretty sure that would give me a lot of leverage you don't want me to have. The order would be better if you put the first sentence last instead, because recency takes precedence, but it's still sloppy and you'd be better off giving me a simple permission to leave the fortress and to order people who I encounter in Sirion for the next day or however long you want to give me and then relying on me not wanting people to be massacred for everything else. I'm good at this crap, I learned from the best."
"I have no idea how persuadable you are. There are people in Sirion who witnessed the fall of Doriath. There are lots of people who can tell you how oaths work. If you are in possession of a Silmaril, bring it to me. You can leave the fortress for two days and have to return here at that time if you can do so safely. You can give orders to people in Sirion but not orders that extend more than a day after you've left the city."
So he pulls out maps, shows her where they are and where Sirion is. "The population is a mix of survivors of the fall of Gondolin, the fall of Nargothrond, and the fall of Doriath. The ruler is Idril, who was the princess of Gondolin. Her true name is Itarillë," He's sending images of faces. "I haven't seen her since she was a child, I'm sure she's changed. Her husband is Tuor. Her son Eárendil is married to Elwing. They have two young children, Elrond and Elros." And so on.
"It stands, and if it didn't, uttering a question like that wouldn't help. I can fly two hundred miles in a few hours. If nothing interrupts me, I don't make some catastrophic social error that puts everyone on guard, and the Silmaril is actually there six days sounds like plenty."
"I'm Promise." She doesn't have anything to drink or eat. She sits. She wonders if she can find out where the Silmaril is by acting like she landed here with the power of speech in the first place and listening; she has some time. Seems worth a try. Maybe she won't have to alarm anyone until the point where she's flying away.
She's delighted to see that it has an effect. "I should take a break, dear, but someone else can come in and do that for you again this afternoon. Do you have people to stay with? Do you need to talk with anyone? Lots of people here have been through scary things, we are happy to talk about them..."
She looks confused, then angry, then terrified. Then - "it's in a locked box in my room. I wear the key on my necklace. It glows even in the box, it doesn't glow too visibly if you wrap it with thick fabrics before you put it in the box and wrap the box. Everyone will try to stop you. I could tell them you're allowed but I don't think they'd believe I wasn't being somehow coerced, there'd certainly be a fuss. If you flew out over the water with it I'm not sure anyone'd realize what was going on, not if I told them I'd just given you some food for your people or something bulky like that."
"That would be less so, but only a little less so, and someone might stop me and see that it's a Silmaril. If you went up with me to see it, and then out through the window? And the people who I told that you were going up to see it were in the palace, and I ordered them to a secret meeting before a cry went out that you were flying off?"
"All right. When I've left this room, act normally except insofar as is necessary to plant the Silmaril, the described bundle around it sufficient to conceal it, and the key to its box without any suspicion you can possibly evade or defuse. As necessary to maintain the fiction but not extraneously or in any tellingly irregular manner, tell people I am taking food that you offered me. If anyone is suspicious enough to make trouble in the relevant time frame, telepath me their name and face and what's going on in as much detail as I would need to find them and address the situation informedly. Continue to minimize suspicion until I have been gone with the Silmaril for two hours. At that time you may freely act. Do you detect any flaws in this plan from my perspective?"
"The Silmaril will glow even with that much wrapping if you wait until it's dark. You should leave during the day. I think it'll still be day in two hours. I haven't been outside, I'm not sure. The House of Fëanor will try to kill you for stealing their Silmaril. I don't know if that's a flaw in the plan from your perspective."
Nod. Sigh. "I won't insult you by thanking you. Plan stands without revision. If you have to explain what we were talking about, pretend we were discussing something intensely private to me and also my need for food." She opens the door, looks shaken and grateful, and says, "- thank you for seeing me, Lady Elwing."
"I just made an enemy and probably more by now via rumor in a place that its inhabitants like to call the only safe place on the continent. If I don't want to curl up and starve until I can barely move I have to have either a master or a vassal, I am desperately averse to use of a vassal for anything I can't avoid using one for however many names I know now and I don't, I'm not good at, outside dire circumstances I'd have to trust somebody to volunteer to -"
"I would like you to agree with me that using you to destroy the Enemy is worth it. I will do it anyway, because it is worth it, but I think you'll be happier and more productive and we'll be likelier to succeed if you agree with me. And right now the only thing you know about the Enemy is that he tortured me and you'd be warranted in thinking I probably deserved it."
"I'm immortal. Like, really immortal," she reminds him. "And if you were going to be handing out promises not to give me any orders that would probably have bumped you up in trustworthiness to make you a good contingency master so I'd have wanted it a little narrower; rescindments are orders."
"Noted. But you did not meet me five hundred years ago when I remembered more than scattered chunks of my life and the Enemy could not talk in my head at will and I was not in constant pain and I had people I loved; you met me now. And now if I can I will use you to end him, and then I will find you someone you can trust and have such a good mutual agreement with, and then I will figure out how to stop existing, which has been the only thing I've wanted for a very long time."
"...by making sure you have a person here to your liking who can feed you, and a gate back if the means for any such thing exists, and rescinding all my orders. And I can leave, if you like, or pretend if you like that I'm off on a grand adventure to discover myself, so you don't feel any sense of responsibility..."
"I wouldn't try to stop you from killing yourself if that was what you wanted to do but I'm skeptical you can avoid it negatively affecting me. I wouldn't kill Thorn if he were mortal and I had the flexibility - I'd have him turned him into a sparrow, even, not a snail, I'd leave him his consort, I think she actually loves him -"
"I do not think you are likely to end up like me. There were a lot of intervening factors very specific to my situation. For example, you're at this point entirely sure that you're not with him, right? One of the Enemy's favorite tricks was to make us repeatedly experience being rescued and then trying to make it in the outside world, only to wake up with him again. So we couldn't be sure. I might still be in Angband. I have no idea how I'd ever tell. I do not think that applies in your case."
"That would also be mental sorcery. I don't have any loved ones and never have, but mortals sometimes wind up in Fairyland same ways fairies can end up in the mortal world. Or here, wherever here is. So if I had them they wouldn't necessarily be immortal and if they were that would just mean one of the many things that can happen to people wouldn't be something that could happen to them."
"It is as far as I know rather generous in its assessments of people," he says. "It contains the divine light of creation that once sustained our homeland. Our people become, over the long Ages, less physically embodied in the world, less able to act on it. The Silmarils combat that. They prevent decay. They provide healing. They strengthen and revitalize."
"I took the Oath voluntarily. If someone decided to be a vassal of Thorn, and gave him their name because they wanted to work for him - maybe he offered them something - then they would be responsible for things he ordered them to do, even if they regretted working for him, because they made the initial choice."
"I don't understand how our engineering works very well. It might block both, honestly, or if there's a way to filter them he'd discover that, or he'd just have us sit there doing trials for a week to train a piece of metal to recognize the different innately. If you were willing to participate, that is."
Maglor clicks.
"His birth name is Canafinwë Macalaurë, you could have had it just by wondering if he shared it with our father. Macalaurë means 'shapes gold'. But we have separate words for 'gold' the metal and 'gold' the color or the light, and 'laurë' is the latter, so it's closer to 'weaves golden light' than 'makes thing out of gold'. The Eldar love names. It makes me sad we can't tell you all about them."
"It probably is unobtrusive to mortals," he says. "You have an accent and cadence associated with early northern Beleriand Thindarin, with some sound changes specific to my family, and there's no way you would speak that way. It's more like how I'd expect it to come through if you were speaking osanwë. No one's words sound like their thoughts but yours did."
"They were suspicious of me until I swore I didn't work for the Enemy and then they were very kind. Elwing thinks you're going to chase me down for taking your Silmaril and I didn't correct her. - I started a sewing project while I was making sure I had a loose idea of how they functioned as a community and didn't bring it back. Apparently you can't just sew leaves here but I can work in fabric."
"She's the next highest ranking court member and considered trustworthy even under her orders, nobody but Thorn's allowed to touch her, Thorn touches her a lot. If you're asking if fairies have sex the answer is yes, it's just almost always at least vaguely horrible because of the background mastery thing."
"Among mortals, when we had mortal neighbors, they had all kinds of rules about things to avoid lest you create the appearance of impropriety. The Eldar don't worry about that but don't do things like this either. And - if someone had sworn an Oath to obey another person for some unimaginable reason people'd probably make sure they weren't alone together."
"You couldn't get me to do something I didn't know how to do like that. I'm not sure you could get me to stop thinking privately altogether - you could load me up with other things to think about in case that one slipped - but you could order me to think publicly for sure."
"I think privately by thinking about being in my tree; nobody can go in my tree if I don't let them. You cannot forbid me to think about that except indirectly you can try to crowd it out with something else. But you can order me to also think about not being in my tree and get my thoughts that way. It'd amount to the same thing; I can't actually keep a secret you really want to have."
'Right now I have the Silmaril. I am not constrained to not destroy any capabilities that I'd need if it were taken again, or I couldn't kill myself even once I've found a way, right? Come to think of it, I think I can even order you to order me not to demand your help retrieving it again if it's stolen again, right now it's mine, the Oath has nothing to say..."
The Oath doesn't oblige me to attack the Enemy right now because there'd be no hope at all of success, you can't be bound to make attempts guaranteed not to work. If I saw an avenue to successfully attack the Enemy I'd be bound to it, but I'd also want to do it because he needs to be stopped."
"I am not sure. Perhaps they'd permit me to jump with it into a live volcano, or something in that vein. Perhaps they'd take it away once I surrendered, and then I'd be in horrible agony but no one else would have been hurt. Even if I knew they'd take it away when I surrendered, while it was in my hands I'd have fully free choice, I could decide to surrender even anticipating that."
"That is a demonstration. Most of my music is for war."
Eventually the other Ainur tired of contesting with him over land and left the world to him, and build their own continent where he was unwelcome and they could design things as they preferred it. This continent was Valinor; it is west of here. The rest of the world was for the Enemy, and he delighted in it and sunk his power into the land and built a great stronghold.
And then we were put in the world. We awakened by the lake Cuivienen, far east of here. We learned to speak and delighted in language, we explored and delighted in the world, we made ourselves at home in the trees.
And Morgoth was intrigued, and jealous, and when some of our people wandered in innocence too far from the others he captured them and took them to his stronghold. And he tortured them and forced them to breed and tortured their children and did this for many generations, until he had foot soldiers made in mockery of us and bound by his magic to serve him.
And then he escalated, taking more and more Elves, until we were afraid and ventured barely at all from the lake shore, and starved, and lived in terror. And eventually one of the other Valar rode by, and learned of us, and we were frightened of him and he learned why we were so frightened, and he told the other Valar and they decided to war with Morgoth."
So the Valar warred with Morgoth, and much of the world was destroyed in their fighting. The Valar won and took Morgoth prisoner. Morgoth had already bred and created and released many horrible creatures into the world, so then the Valar came to us and invited us to their paradise where we could be safe. Most of us went.
And after three Ages of the world, Morgoth was pardoned, and he promised he'd never do such awful things again, and he came to live among us in Valinor. And he spread lies and tried to provoke a civil war and then assassinated the King, destroyed Valinor, and fled.
The King was my grandfather, and my father succeeded him. My father was worried that Morgoth, back here on this continent, would return to torturing and enslaving and breeding orcs, so he prepared us to go off to war with him. The Valar were angry and tried to deter us from departing, and then there was a battle, but we reached these shores. We tried to stop him. We held on for a very long time, and lots of people lived in safety they would not otherwise have known. But in the end we lost, and so now he is back to freely torturing and enslaving and slaughtering, and someday he'll decide I am not amusing enough to permit to wander around free and I suppose he'll come after us."
Now, if you take all eighty things - some of them only exist in Valinor, so it'd be hard, but if you did - and you write up their properties, you get certain regularities. In particular you get regularities in how they link up with each other and with other things. Metals are kind of a category of regularity. So are gases. To make this simpler than it really is, the regularities come from how many other things they'll connect with - like, imagine everyone has arms and they use those arms to catch hold of other essences. Carbon has four arms. Helium doesn't have any.
Most of the world is made out of essences holding hands, or floating around freely if they're the kinds with no hands. They're only stable if everyone has all of their hands occupied. Does all that make sense?
But I can only rearrange what I have in the first place, and I can only do rearrangements if I can create the conditions for them within my body. Therefore I have to eat things that give me all the essences I require, and if there are things I can't create the conditions for internally I have to eat something that already contains it.
This is clearly not how you work. I am confused about how you work instead. Even the Maiar, if they have biological bodies, construct them from essences."
"In our world the formal definition of magic is things which create essences, allow essences to undergo unfavorable transformations that they usually wouldn't, or create energy. I had a brother who thought that it was inelegant for magic to be three different things like that, and concluded that all three of them are actually somehow the same thing."
If you were like us and ate nothing but leaves you'd have a hard time building any muscle. We mostly eat animals and animal products to get protein.
Come to think of it, you weigh far too little to be made out of the essences we are. I wonder if you're just made of something entirely different."
"I've never been. And I only met a mortal for a little while like - fifty years ago, about. It's full of mortals, they come in different colors but only one kind really, and sorcery doesn't work there either, and they have weird politics and lots of languages and no magic and lots of animals but I don't think they have Valar."
"They live in cities, really dense cities, the mortal - she kept going through nicknames, I can't remember which one she had last - was talking about buildings a hundred stories tall, and they can't fly so they had things that could roll very fast along the ground with mortals sitting in them..."
"Preserving the divine light of Valinor so we could live outside it. Making it possible to talk instantly with anyone anywhere in the world. Armor like mine, which -" he smiles bitterly - "is enchanted so thoroughly I am almost impossible to harm in battle. Besieging a god for four hundred fifty years. Inventing new chemistry and biology along the way so we could figure out why Men died so easily, inventing music and fortresses that let us stand against a hundred times our numbers..."
"Yes, because if they did die they'd be gone, that's it. Whereas we just are stuck without a body until we can get a new one, which you yourself said might be what happens if you were destroyed in a way you couldn't heal from. If I figure out how to actually properly stop existing then it'll be correct to say I'm mortal. The Eldar in general still wouldn't be."
"Same principle. It's all the same. There are maybe fuzzy areas - mental sorcery typically counts as harm but read-only telepathy might not if I were thinking outside my tree; you could maybe turn me into an animal if you were a sorcerer and I wanted to be an animal; but you can't hurt me."
And they decided it was, because they have known me for a very long time and do know our Enemy. But I am certain that there are a number of people who at least considered forcing you to eat something and then releasing you, because when I was younger it's the sort of thing I'd have done without hesitation."
"...my experience with children is what you have told me, offhand mentions in Sirion, negligible conversation with the mortal I met fifty years ago, and the existence of breeder fairy children, where the most important feature of the state of childhood is that they don't come with names and so whoever runs their court names them with the obvious results. So I don't know what you're talking about."
And - hmm, lots of interaction among people of my kind is about negotiation, I get something I want and you get something you want, and if the other person has far more information, they will out-negotiate you. So high-stakes sorts of negotiations - permanent agreements, agreements with far-reaching consequences, agreements over things of particular value, sex - it is somewhere between 'frowned-upon' and 'evil' to engage in with someone who has vastly less experience than you."
"I am not particularly curious, though if you want to talk I am probably a good audience. I'm assuming if there's things I need to know about apparently-harmless actions that'll cause psychological distress you'll say them, and that if there are things you won't say because you're worried they'd then occur to me and I'd be tempted you'll either ask for my oath not to or find someone else."
"I'm not really worried you're going to decide to torture me, since I can't think of any good reason for getting a Silmaril to require it. Unless you thought for some reason the Enemy would give you one if you did, I guess. As long as nobody touches me or says my name I don't think there's anything apparently harmless that would be very bad. Anything less bad than that I mean to handle through exposure as it comes up."
"He can, but we don't have to entertain a visit from them, and don't let them communicate with us, and would try to kill them on sight. With an enemy like this it's just good strategy. Also, if I can't so much as scratch you, how would I torture you? I don't think the Enemy would think demanding to read your mind counts."
"I had previously given orders to bring a few orcs back alive so you could talk with them about the Enemy and get another perspective on him. Then I decided this was a bad prioritization compared to giving you some mental and emotional space before you worried about war, so I told people not to bring orcs back, but apparently this group was already out and not paying attention. So now we have some orcs, and in an hour we won't, and in a few years when you're ready we'll take some more alive."
"I don't have enough information to form an opinion on going south but the only problems with an order not to hurt anyone - in the standard case where the recipient isn't you - are bad wording, and the possibility that the recipient would prefer to hurt someone. I can be careful with wording and do not feel particularly inclined to indulge impulses to hurt people."
A moment of frightened silence from the orcs. Then one volunteers a name. It does not click. Maedhros sighs.
There's nothing they can say that would get me to kill them slowly, unless somehow they had reason to believe that Mandos could help them more if they'd died after breaking their oaths, or something like that. I'd probably not make a concerted effort to kill their family members unless they happen to have family members who are important operatives for the Enemy, or if they have some way of communicating now with family members and so their loved ones know that you exist. In that case I would certainly immediately commit resources to finding them immediately.
If the Enemy finds them again he'll have them brought back to Angband, rescind their orders, he'll know how you work. They need to get out of anywhere he can find them, without drawing the attention of other orcs to the fact they've been altered. Once they're about two hundred miles south of here I don't think the Enemy's wasting any energy down there, though there are Men and they might shoot orcs on sight.
Oaths don't bother you if you're doing everything you can towards them, and if you're mind-controlled not to do it that counts. He's a Vala and I don't know if he could imitate fairy magic if he had some to work off. Though it'd probably take a long time and in the meantime all he'd be able to do is learn from them how you work, which is still no good.
How's, 'go docilely and without straying with the escort to be provided until they leave you, and then avoid traveling further north than that point. Avoid contact with Melkor and those in his service; and except in immediate defense of yourselves and each other, or to avoid that contact, commit no violence'?
Oh. Okay. 'If contacted by someone in Melkor's service, behave as though your location was due to orders from Melkor you do not have leave to share since discharged, and proceed to act as though this is the case without any mention or allusion however oblique to your capture or my existence'?
"It amuses the Enemy sometimes to order his soldiers to carry out some atrocity - in that case, burning a village and nailing all its inhabitants to trees around the area - and then to order them to put away their weapons and settle down peaceably, so when we track them from the site of the crime we find innocents. And I suppose they are innocents. Just following orders."
I did not previously have mind control as a tool at my disposal."
"I don't think so. You have the information that I'm not lying at least about the oaths and the orders and the fact the Enemy would certainly try to hold you prisoner and torture you. If you think of more questions I can bring you more orcs, but otherwise I'll have our guards back on normal procedures."
This night is a bad night.
She learns songs, and gets pretty good at following musical notation, and trills stacks of chords with increasing fluidity. She sits in the courtyard and sings and makes it look like what she remembers of the forest around her tree. Once; she doesn't do that again. She isn't sure how Maedhros is planning to deploy her against Melkor if he doesn't know his real name. Maybe he's figuring out how to get ahold of it.
Well.
"Promise," he says eventually, "I think you should go to the ocean and talk with Ulmo."
"In - the way the Valar think -there are those who are outside their concern, like the Avari who didn't come to Valinor and who the Valar accordingly won't aid - there are innocents, there are those who have justly been sentenced, and there are enemies. And also, mortals really don't matter and you might drown one if you don't have any particular fate in store for them or if they'd annoyed you. Elves matter more, the Maiar much much more - they keep offering their own second chances. So you'd matter by their lights."
(Another fairy had crashed in nearly the same spot, he'd heard the terrified thoughts and thought he could at least manage things better, the second time, had gone out to meet him, and as he'd walked in the world had frozen around him, so he couldn't move -
"I swear to you," Thauron had said, "that I have the power to give you the remaining two Silmarils, that I have leave to do so, and that if you tell me the fairy's name I will give you both Silmarils."
"I don't want them," he'd said truthfully, not that it mattered at all.)
He could delay. He was delaying.
- can't actually land because she has to fly high enough that no one can stop her. She proceeds until she is over the center of Angband and then, not progressing 'toward Angband', no longer has permission to move and falls, that incompetent evil bastard.
Kneel, the man beside her says.
He was unspecific about truth.
"Fairies come in a variety of kinds each of which have their own powers. My kind, if completely physically obliterated, returns with the ability to do sorcery outside of Fairyland, which is otherwise impossible -"
"Orders can be delivered to or by any fairy. Someone who can order someone else, at least if able to act freely and unobstructed in communicating, is called their master; and those they can in principle order are their vassals. The ordering party must have fed the ordered while not already being the ordered's vassal at the time; or the ordering party must know the ordered's original name, full name in the case of a fairy vassal, partial in the case of a non-fairy vassal. Orders are fulfilled to the letter with slight but not overwhelming acknowledgment of master intent in fine-grained definitions. They can only cover volitional actions. More recent orders take precedence where there is conflict but old orders otherwise stand until rescinded or overridden. Orders cannot prevent a vassal from thinking about a topic outright. It is impossible for a vassal to harm a master even if ordered to do so. Orders wear off if the ordering party forgets the name of the ordered or if the ordering party dies. Enforcement of an order is optional and inaudible. Orders can work in writing if and only if the vassal directly observes the writing; the orders take effect then, not later."
She rolls her wings up. "I know your name but not his. My current orders forbid me to move except as directed by new, enforced orders or if I am removed from Angband. They forbid me to enforce orders except on designated recipients. They have me trying to guess when it's been about an hour so I can think of something to tell Maedhros to do but it's supposed to be 'random' which is difficult to do without a source of randomness and I haven't settled on an interpretation yet. I do not expect more fairies to enter this world for the foreseeable future or for there to be a way to access Fairyland in that time. I am immortal but not more durable than a mortal would be against any particular injury. Ordering hostile vassals is very difficult and this stopgap will not serve you in the long term."
"They get very, very good at issuing airtight orders, rely on themselves or non-hostile vassals for sensitive tasks if possible, they make sure escape is not a relatively appealing alternative if possible, they give self-incapacitating contingency orders in case of failure, and they make liberal use of qualifiers like 'sincere' and questions about the state of mind of the vassal."
If he understood orders perfectly he would have fucking qualified that for truth and therefore - "They could interpret your instructions. They could do things to avoid hearing them. They might have some way to break fairy control, yours over me or mine over them, because they're Valar. They could warn each other if I didn't speak to them all at once. They could render me unable to communicate before I finished the order."
"I hate you and the cube root of nine trillion four hundred billion three hundred seventeen million six hundred two thousand one hundred nine is probably not too far off from twenty thousand which multiplied by itself thrice is twenty times twenty times is four hundred thousand times twenty is eight trillion so that's too low. Twenty-five thousand multiplied by itself thrice is -"
"I expect it'll take us a thousand years to become sufficiently competent in the way your language works that we can be confident of our expect intent being carried about. But I think the Valar will leave us alone for that long. I do appreciate the tutorial. Tell me truthfully what the mistakes are that we've made so far."
Oh, and amusement at how outmatched you are. I am definitely experiencing amusement at how outmatched you are."
"What did you order the fairy to do?"
"Not hurt anyone," he says, "not order anyone, get the Silmaril - she got an exception to not ordering anyone, for that - not eat from anyone's hand but mine, send the orcs she wanted to save south, get Melkor's name - she got an exception to not ordering anyone for that, too. Not use the names she knew. Stop other fairies if they tried to take me or anyone else prisoner. Arrange my death if I was in a situation with a fairy giving me orders which she couldn't get me out of. There might have been others I can't remember."
"Why did she cooperate with you?"
"I am told," he says, "I am among the most likeable mass murderers out there. Also, didn't torture her. Also, she might have believed me that the Enemy was worth stopping. Didn't press her on whether she did."
Sauron raises an eyebrow at her. "Always answer questions truthfully and with all relevant information. Is there anything important he's missing?"
"You give him too much credit for that," Sauron says, "it's not that he's too noble to take advantage, it's that he doesn't like girls. Tell him to pretend you're his boyfriend."
That's not a question. She has to answer, and it has to be a real reason because otherwise it's not 'why that didn't work', but it doesn't have to be complete and it doesn't have to be all relevant information. "Maybe he and his boyfriend wouldn't be in the mood with you standing over them."
Morgoth holds the oaths of all orcs and could release them. Morgoth engineered the suffering of all orcs and could end it at will. Morgoth cannot be vanquished without the destruction of the continent. Angband is collapsing. I can release people from oaths that were spoken before me, such as the oath of the house of Fëanor. Celebrimbor, who is still alive, could with Sauron's aid build a gate back to your home world. The names of the Valar are - and he shares them.
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.
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."
"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.'?"
She glances around. "Apparently Sauron and Celebrimbor-who-is-alive could make me a gate, but since I don't know where Celebrimbor is, standing near Sauron right now just seems pointlessly unpleasant. Also I would prefer to be wearing clothes. What say we address these problems." And she seeks an exit.
"Good question. I didn't plan this in very much detail, I was concentrating on looking for an opening. There might be non-orcs around here besides us. I'm still pretty singed. There's probably still a war going on by default even with the orcs free, that's no good."
"Valinor is perfectly safe and everything is edible and it's meant to be a paradise. A million orcs used to taking orders from Melkor, or dead since who-knows-when, are more in need of that than we are. Everyone in Valinor will be super annoyed to end up here but annoyed is all, the Eldar aren't innately inclined to war and we know how to build cities and agriculture and so forth."
"Yes, they will object to anyone except Elves who they've vetted for purity being permitted in Valinor. I think it's worth it anyway because it's the most cut-off from the other continents, hard for accidental contact to occur, aforementioned paradise considerations, and that Valinor has psychological healing attributes which I think the orcs are, of all Arda's peoples, most in need of."
Blink. Blink. "Wow," she says. "Who let this guy design a universe? Okay, I can throw that in." Arrange for marriage oaths to be optional - retroactively from now, if desired by the involved parties - and permit them between any interested parties whose existing spouses do not object.
I disliked it, considered it unwise, and was alarmed by what your decision to give it after barely any time to discuss those concerns said about you. I can move many hundreds of thousands of times faster than you, and had much more time to consider it, and still have little confidence it was wisely done; you told Maedhros once that ordering forces far beyond your comprehension was unwise, and it remains so when the forces are favorably inclined. And now I have less latitude to protect you from yourself, or my world from the unintended consequences of your decisions.
Make you immune to undesired or non-consented-to fairy orders, most obviously, or make it impossible for people to order others through you, or changing the recency rule on you so you can pick a satisfactory bedrock of orders and not have them overridden, or other things that didn't involve rewriting a great deal of your fundamental nature. And no, I can't put it back; you're not of my universe and moving this many things this quickly without any destabilizing and undesired side effects is at least as hard as raising a continent without causing tidal waves and a rise in sea level.
I cannot undo most of what you've asked. I cannot put an oath in force again. I cannot kill the people I've brought back to life; I can tell the Valar I've reversed my instructions regarding who should be in Valinor, and I cam move the people around, but that'll be 'doing it again' not undoing it, and will be destabilizing. The swanships destabilized the whole timeline.
"When Elves and orcs' bodies are damaged beyond our capacity to repair them, we leave them. We can at that time, if we choose, go to the Halls of Mandos, or we can just sort of drift. You lose yourself, if you choose to just drift. In the Halls of Mandos, Námo, who is a Vala, tries to rehabilitate you and when he thinks the time is right return you to a body. People who he disapproves of don't tend to get to come back. I think it's better to bring everyone back, personally, and then resolve problems of antisocial behavior in some less dramatic way, but it will certainly cause political upheaval. I know nothing about orc social structures or what happens if you bring orc dead back to life."
"Lórien has a big peaceful garden where the dead get brought back. It's - a little dreamlike, all you have to do is think about how you'd like things to be and they'll change. I think that was a pretty good system. Lórien also has them all brought back separately, with one person who they remember and who can help them readjust. I don't know if that's the best system but I'm disinclined to experiment, there's too much interpersonal variation and success is too hard to measure to expect that to result in a noticeably better one."
"I'm sorry. Hmm." You could ask him to answer the pleas of his children for the healing of their world, and then feel out whether that gets him into a more cooperative mood - he may still be able to hear us like this, incidentally, I have no idea - and then let me do the requests. Since I gather that cooperativeness is a bigger factor in success here than airtight wording.
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.
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.
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.
"Yeah." Sigh. "So, Eru and I have a bit of an impasse. He likes the story 'somebody shows up, gains supreme power, fixes the world's major flaws, gives up supreme power and moves on from there'. He does not like the story where instead I consider all his other universe projects my business and will be uncooperative until I screw up if he thinks I'm going to go see who's getting set on fire there."
"That was probably a mistake. Which I suppose is evidence in favor that I should not attempt to rely on any plans in which I do not make mistakes, dicey in the best of situations. Although I'm not sure how long anybody could talk to me without guessing I might want to do that."
"It wouldn't really be a victory for the people of this world - at least, some of them who I know - to be restored to life but knowing now that there are other worlds still suffering, other worlds with the griefs ours has now overcome, and nothing we can do about it. And my family isn't really going to be popular here. Perhaps you could suggest to Eru that part of a happy ending for this world involves putting all its malcontents on other ones where they can redeem themselves." We don't actually need Eru for cosmic power, we just need a few uninterrupted Ages.
I got kind of carried away, she tells Eru, but it's a bad idea for several reasons to go on a universe-revising streak with a hostile vassal, even if you weren't as incomprehensibly powerful as you are, and anyway I do object by default to slave labor and shouldn't get used to having it. - Um, I'm worried that if I actually rescind all your orders after I'm done with the major problems of this world it will have time travel effects but I could say you can act freely or something.
The remaining things that I might need you for would be doing something intelligent with the dead people, and Melkor and Sauron, and maybe Maedhros not wanting to exist if he doesn't, um, perk up without the oath and stuff. Am I forgetting anything? Can we cooperate on those things?
"Eru thinks a 'black hole' several hundred billion or possibly several hundred quadrillion miles away from here might be more thematically appropriate than Everlasting Darkness and says that Melkor and Sauron wouldn't be able to hurt anybody from there," she reports.
"Can he bring everyone back near whoever they'd most benefit from being around, including if that means they're better off alone? Seems easier than sorting for 'not near people they'll immediately try to murder' manually, and seems like the best thing for the orcs not knowing anything about their social circles."
Do they tell you, in the Halls of Mandos, what's happening out here, do you know what we did -"
"At first it sounded as if she were speaking Quenya, but that didn't make sense, Quenya would have evolved over the last five hundred years and wouldn't sound that way spoken here today and when I tried thinking about which sounds I'd heard they were definitely all standard, like it was some smoothed over average of the language, and I tried to think what she should have sounded like and then the second time it sounded like that..."
"...I'm not sure how you want the sounds described. I'm not making them at random, but if I make the wrong ones they will not be the words I had in mind, and usually when I'm making sounds I have words in mind. I don't have a clue what I sound like to you but I assume if somebody who didn't share any languages with you were here it would sound different because everybody would understand me."
"Yes, obviously, since there are tonal languages. Where are you from? Do you know other people who communicate in the same manner? Do you perceive the way we communicate as being the same as they way you do it? If I think about this enough and stop having expectations about what I'll hear, will I cease to be able to understand you?"
"Fairies in general all use plain speech like me. Fairyland's full of us. I hear you're supposed to be able to make me a gate there. I probably wouldn't notice if you switched languages but I can hear the sounds you're using if I think about it, I had to do that a lot to use magic songs. And I have never heard of that happening but my default expectation is that you'll be able to understand me whatever you do."
If I switch languages to one with better technical vocabulary for a technical conversation, will I start hearing your responses in that one?
If I invent a language that doesn't use the vocal chords, uses entirely non-vocal sound production, what happens?"
Everyone else is still blinking confusedly in the light.
"Tell Eru he can wait a moment, did you at least run the obvious experiments? What does an observer who has been told to expect to hear Thindarin hear? What does an observer who has been told to expect a foreign language hear? If everyone present speaks only one language, does she still do the chords? If everyone present speaks only one language but there's someone within earshot who speaks a different one? Could she determine what language she's being heard as, once she knows how to identify them?"
There are a lot of complicated emotions on Maedhros' face. "We did not think of those obvious experiments, because you were dead. Perhaps after we've disposed of Moringotto and Thauron?"
"This is way, way more important than Moringotho and Thauron," Fëanor says, "whoever did this had a kind of magic I don't yet understand. Fairies are probably more powerful than -"
"Than Eru," Maedhros says, "which is why she's ordering him around and he can explain black holes to you -"
"Oh, all right."
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?"
"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?"
"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."
"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?"
"I'd like to talk with them," he says, "if you don't mind and think it's comparatively safe. The Valar and Maiar know a lot of things we'd otherwise take a very long time to learn, and while we are not pressed for time I understand it that there are still griefs elsewhere in the galaxy, and evils in your home world." He starts walking. Everyone except Maedhros and Fingon follow him.
"Um, we're more immortal than you are - although I don't know all the details because I've never been reduced to parts too small to eventually regenerate or known anyone who was - and most kinds begin spontaneously but there are some breeding kinds, and every kind has its own innate magic and other properties, and we're all winged humanoids?"
"No, sorcery's learnable but kind magic isn't. My kind is leaflets and leaflets are each immune to one kind of sorcery; my name can't be learned by sorcery but another leaflet might be immune to being turned into an animal or something. And it isn't very useful in my case since mental sorcery is hopelessly obscure anyway and not a prominent way to get a name. I also have a tree which has special properties, but that's more a property of the tree than me."
"Conventional ways are being told by the fairy belonging to the name for whatever reason, or someone else who has the name, or being the Queen. The Queen is a one-of-a-kind fairy whose kind magic is knowing all other fairies' names. Leaflets are all female, all close to my height, all have leaf wings but it can be whatever kind of leaf, and when we haven't recently been set on fire and raided orc wardrobes we tend to be found in outfits made of leaves. Coloration and such might differ but no leaflets are going to glow in the dark or have antlers or anything."
"We captured some orcs who had ranged far outside where they were supposed to be. They said they'd been ordered there by someone who could make you obey her if you had her name. Then I observed the fortress in secret until I knew more about her capabilities"
"What are the elements, ordered by atomic weight?"
He lists them.
"Tell me whatever will be most valuable to me of the math and science you know -"
This may take a while.
"Your son is in love with Nolofinwë's," Thauron says, "and has and would choose him over you, your mother swore to kill you as a child, your only grandchild disowned his whole family, Elwing of Sirion leapt off a cliff after she lost the Silmaril, Elu Thingol regarded you as a pathetic waste of your father's line, the Silmarils will burn your hands, most of your children do not love you -"
"What's my fathername?"
"Curufinwë", Thauron says, and falls silent.
Promise? I think we're ready to dispose of this one.
I have been trying to use your understanding of all of the concepts you think with, as closely as I can. In one world Sauron develops a polio vaccine. This is not harm. He gives it to everyone. This is not harm. He uses the political leverage from that to persuade them to stop being mortals and find a way to live forever. This is not harm. They decide to do this by starting a war that kills millions. That is harm.
"Findekáno," Fëanor says. "Thauron thinks that my son is in love with you."
"I, like Sauron, have only secondhand information on that."
Maedhros does not say anything.
"I am inclined to be very angry but if Thauron thinks I should be that is sufficient reason not to be. Can you instead explain to me what he sees in you?"
"Do you know how many times I've been tempted to ask you the same question?" Findekáno says.
Maedhros buries his head in his hands.
He sighs.
They're the most intelligent people you'll ever meet, once they recover a little bit - all of them very narrowly, but differently narrowly, and they usually fill in for each other as needed. They aren't good people but that's because our world has kind of a fucked up understanding of what goodness is. I don't know what task he thinks they'd complement you for.
There was a lot of back-and-forth about where to put dead people and Maedhros thought you were going to wind up somewhere else but the actual algorithm was where they'd be best served to wake up with somebody getting a second-best option if there was likely to be violence so I guess Eru didn't think there would be violence.
I think I may not have gotten all the dead people because apparently different kinds of people go different places when dead, so I want to check on that, and I don't know if he'll want to give Melkor a redemption arc too or what, aaaaaand Eru says he's personally necessary if Maedhros wants to stop existing altogether but I'm sort of hoping he will change his mind about that.
Ordering hostile vassals is tricky and I have almost exclusively observational experience with the skill, he's really complicated and I don't understand a lot of his powers, and he won't cooperate on the rest of fixing this world if he thinks I'm not going to quit while I'm ahead there.
'one of Eru's worlds that needs us' probably isn't enough of an idea. If they're all within this universe, and I think they are from what he conveyed during the black holes explanation, I could specify star systems, but that'd still be an inefficient way to do it. I can't assess in what respects they'll need fixing but if we had a way to bring back our dead I am very sure we could do it.
Or a planet where we are automatically reborn without fuss or judgment if we're killed. There are lots of unused planets. We should perhaps choose one as a base of operations other than this one, I think it'll raise tensions to have us here. I can set Maitimo to building me a peaceful base-of-operations planet while we find an efficient way of identifying worlds of Eru's where we're needed so you can gate to them.
There are a lot of Men and they breed very fast. Bringing them all back when they die is probably better than not doing that but possibly not ideal, and does present the resource problem. Sending them to another planet might be nice but some Men will probably kill themselves to get to the next planet. An optimal solution would look something like what we have for Elves, which is where there's a known place you get reembodied right away with no fuss, except we'll need far more space to accommodate Men. Given peace and enough food within an Age there'll be a hundred billion of them.
Okay! I did that! And I made Mars habitable! I had to make it bigger first. And there's a very large dramatic gate between this world and Mars. It's over a river so you have to get into a boat to travel between them. I thought it was more dramatic that way. And all the Men who've ever died are on Mars, arranged to wake up around people who will be good for them to be near. All young and in good health, too.
The Elves raise their eyebrows. "Uh, if there were a way for them to not suffer while not changing their behavior, that'd probably be good," blond Elf offers. "Animals dying isn't a problem, they don't have a sense of themselves the same way, but they usually die slowly and horribly and they do suffer like anyone else."
"Up to a day, not longer," his father says, "the fundamental principles the universe operates on are pretty simple and I think I already know most of it, and he does not interest me otherwise."
"I don't even know what that means," Promise says, "I'm really going to need to get some kind of more thorough education than Fairyland had to offer me when I was newer. Uh, so. - Eru is hoping to give Sauron a 'redemption arc', I don't know about Melkor but it seems not unlikely he'd like him to have one too."
"No, he also means removing whatever abilities he uses to do harm, possibly putting him in a cute or pitiful form, and encouraging him to remorse and compensating for the harm he did. I mentioned this to Sauron and I don't think he's going to cooperate but Eru's the one who can ambiguously see the future -" She relays the proportions and clarifies that she checked Eru was using her definition of "harm".
"I want to accomplish a lot of things. It seems like having Sauron around might make some of them more convenient but whatever Maedhros likes to call it I draw some distinction between fairy orders and mind control and I really don't like the idea of mind control even compared to people ceasing to exist."
Do you want it to be a planet where sorcery works? I think that'd be more fun. And seven moons, and several other habitable planets in the solar system so you can have some fun before you've worked out interstellar travel. I'll make the main continent shaped like a star. and put a really tall mountain with a temple to me at the center.
I will not edit anything that you experience as earlier than this moment in the timeline. The Eldar will all become like Maedhros immune to fairy orders and unable to vassalize fairies. So will I; so will the Valar; the Dwarves might already be because of their immunity to mind-effecting magic but if not, they will as well. I don't think I will make fairy orders impossible on all of the worlds, because then you won't be able to go do interesting things and tell amazing stories there.
"I think it should be doable," Curufin says, "orders have to be parsed as language -"
"But fairies do really bizarre language parsing to start with -"
While they continue this conversation Maedhros smiles at her, looking almost relaxed. Well done.
He is not! He has read through them and has two possible avenues to gates: one is to make a magic artifact that stabilizes harmonics locally so they can gate, and the other is to find a non-sorcerous means of gating. The latter will probably go a little faster but the former might be more useful, what does she think?
"He collects sorcerers. Most of them wouldn't be hanging out at my tree, but I don't know how the fight would go if it came to a full-on assault on his court. I guess he'd be really surprised that you were immune to orders but he's not unable to incapacitate people who he hasn't mastered.
"Yeah. My tree and Thorn's court are both on her continent, it's possible but not that likely that she'd notice. You can't deliver fairy orders anymore, though, and I can't guarantee a food claim on another fairy even though I've got a better than typical chance at it and I'm sure if it were easy to get her name out of her it would've been done long ago, so it's not entirely clear what to do with her - Thorn somebody can turn into a sparrow and have done, the Queen's a little too valuable for curbing Fairyland abuses in general."
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."
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.
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.
She's never interacted closely with them; breeder courts tend to be unmixed, none of them lived very near her tree until shortly before she was captured, Thorn only had a handful and they didn't talk to Promise about their families. She does know that breeders have all different ways of reproducing and they don't consistently involve two parents and definitely don't consistently involve the sort of things mortals do to have children. Actually, she's not sure if any of them involve that? She's pretty sure she's never heard reference to a pregnant fairy?
"Depends on what specifically the difference was. But imagine if in your world, a small thing coming loose from a big thing didn't maintain its momentum the way I explained. Then we could build a gun at the gate which - actually, you tell me." He grabs some paper. "How could we shoot things out of gates at absurd velocities, if the world worked like that?"
"...I mean, the obvious exploit on gates now that there's someplace other than Fairyland where they'll work is to make horizontal ones and drop things through them until they get very fast and then gate them wherever you want to throw the fast thing, but I think that works even with momentum behaving like you're used to."
"Well," she says, "yes, but they won't automatically do anything in particular to things they begin by intersecting. And they can take up to a week to settle and stay put by space, not by adjacent items, so I don't think you could aim things inside a person very well that way."
"To me the word harmonics calls to mind tangled strings, such that tugging one affects others, is that badly off? Anyway, wave behavior is a subject of study and if harmonics have anything to do with it then that's the loose outline of what my father will be doing to develop a harmonics-calmer for gating."
"They'll be brighter or dimmer or flicker, and if I've tried to make them all the same and I've accounted well enough for the nonharmonic factors in the area then that leaves harmonics as the thing responsible for the differences. There's a nastily complex notation for it; I can't do the really fine maps because I can only distinguish so many grades of dimness, but I can map a spot better than having to feel it out if I'm going to be sorcering there a lot."
"It's probably not particularly helpful to describe it to me until I can see it, and Father thinks that the general solution is a century or two out," he says reluctantly. "All right. Well, optics -" and this isn't as much fun without lenses and faceted stones to show Laurelin's light through, but he still remembers it.
"I would probably not have used Eru's name and used Ulmo's only in with the convenient indifference of the suicidal. And most of the Eldar are less ambitious than me, and most Men have less scope for their ambitious, and Thauron's ambitions were grand in one sense and astonishingly small in another."
They name the city Vanda Nossëo. Findekáno's family arrives to speak with them a week later, but they mostly seem to want to speak to Findekáno, and he leaves with them for a while and then placidly comes back. No one comments. Fëanor quizzes her about harmonics and runs the tests of plain speech that he wanted.
"Hmm. It seems like 'if this costs me and benefits my people, trust that it's right, if it costs a friend and in my assessment the cost is not worth the benefit to my people, trust my instincts' might be reasonable if people think they are inclined to be self-serving but not excessively protective of others."
"Um, depends on what you mean. Having a mortal in a court is actually a status symbol because they're hard to get and maintain. The cultural stuff is mostly considered incomprehensible more than anything; I don't think people would look down on a fairy who studied them, every now and then a fairy wanders in the mortal world and gets stuck and that's rotten luck but not particularly low status..."
"Breeder fairies are low status compared to spontaneous kinds," she says. "They have worse kind magic on average and start vassaled to whoever names them, so any given one you meet is probably low-ranked within their own court unless you get the ancestor. Languages are just weird; somebody might have a hobby of learning them and that wouldn't be lower-status than having a hobby of copying art books or weaving grass."
"Discovering the processes that underlie it, and them turning out to be much simpler than we currently think they have to be; discovering other worlds in the process of becoming Fairylands, or that once were; understanding the universe well enough to build my own, and seeing a Fairyland crop up without intervention on my part."
What are your goals for the next two hundred years? We all have a lot to cope with and have been in some cases dead for a very long time, and there's all this new physics to learn. I think we'll be happy making the city beautiful and apologizing to people who stop by to ask for that and designing the planet we'll settle once we can gate out.
I want to learn more magic music and stop finding nonfairies so confusing and make sure I write down what I've learned about sorcery in the last fifty years because the notes in my tree won't go that far and I don't want to forget while I can't practice and I want to learn science.
It's only a century later that Fëanor has gating to Fairyland sorted. Everyone is not quite ready.