Their departure date draws closer. Most of them are working full-time - past full-time, actually, the standard is now two twenty-two hour shifts and then a five-hour break - making magic weapons and armor.

Kib has to sleep more than that, but no one who listens to him doing it will think this is recreational.

Awake, he works on servants. They're short on books, except the ones that weren't in the library or Fëanáro's workshop; he's the best source of servantmaking knowledge for people doing assembly and programming and etching. He's the only person who can test chassis as puppets to make sure they'll move smoothly as golems or automata. He's the only one who can wake them up.

Eventually they have a pretty effective war servant, based off some of the models from home. And boats for the crossing. They have another go at singing automata and can't get them precise enough to do magic. 

Kib's boyfriends keep giving him minor magic items. Ring to deflect arrows, ring for unnoticeability, ring that warms in warning when a servant of an Enemy is near...he can put them all on a necklace or something if he doesn't like wearing them as such...

Well, he's going to run out of fingers if he keeps accumulating them. Although the one that gets warm will probably work best against skin. He wears them.

And then there's armor, fitted to his size. Lightweight, resistant to a range of temperatures, swords glance off it, they're testing how much force it takes to dent it and the answer seems to be 'more force than we can apply'. It's not quite comfortable enough to just wear around, and the helmet is sort of necessary for it to do anything more than 'make people aim at your head' and is vision-obscuring and annoying, but the Elves are very pleased with themselves. 

The magic swords are satisfyingly lethal but it continues to be a terrible idea for Kib to bother with those.

Well, unless someone wants to get him a humanoid articulated puppet. It'll be really strong, too, if they're that curious about how hard it is to dent things.

Valar have closed the portals. Temporarily, they say, and with a few weeks' notice for everyone to get back on their preferred side. 

The Valar have also communicated their displeasure with the Noldor overreacting like this.

There's no way to usefully communicate displeasure with their simultaneous over- and under-reaction, is there.

Fëanáro does so; he tells them that they're Melkor's kin and imbeciles unworthy of governance of Arda, and that the Noldor will no longer be their thralls. 

This goes over - not at all. The Valar do not send a response. 

Everyone figures it is time to go.

Sounds like a plan.

The boats cross the ocean in about a week. The Elves, who have been working relentlessly, take advantage of this imposed break to sing, mostly, and stargaze. 

The singing's nice. And the stars.

They land. The shore isn't held by orcs who open fire before the boats even come in, or anything like that. They scout a few miles inland, report that there are orcs but in relatively manageable numbers. The host marches inland to explore further. They leave the civilians on the shore, well-defended, and ready to take off again in the boats if something goes wrong.

Kib is not exactly a civilian but he's not a front-line combatant either. He sets up shines where shines need to be to spare people having to tediously program them around with instructions saying to go a foot this way and a foot that way.

And for a few days the orcs seem to just watch them, scatter at their approach. And then a signal comes and they attack. Pouring across the mountain passes and out of caves the Elves hadn't known yet. They'd estimated there were hundreds of thousands of orcs on the continent. There are a million in this fight.

That's too many orcs -

The best place for Kib to be is secreted away, within osanwë range of an Elf with a good vantage point to see the fight whose eyes he can borrow, zooming shines into orcs' faces. The dinosaurs aren't bodyguard-sized yet but he can have a war golem on hand and his best puppet besides in case anything sneaks up on him.

He blinds orcs, turns their heads into unseeing brightly lit targets against the darkness, moves the shines on when the orcs die.

They don't have walls to rest behind yet. They build them out of the bodies of the dead. And they fight.

The orcs' swords and armor were not enchanted.

And when there's an opening Tyelcormo sneaks out a cavalry wing, down south along the coast, to come back and take the pass the orcs are streaming through from the other side. He is only out of osanwe range for about twelve hours of this operation, and when he's back he's cheerful - there are locals! they're alive, behind walls, and grateful to have the sieges on their cities broken - and he circles back around and they wrestle back the pass.

The fighting lasts twelve days. 

When the orcs stop coming the only question is whether to immediately march on Angband.

Do they have any intel, at all, on what's there?

They're just sending scouts out now. They have the stories of how Utumno fell. That's it. 

But - the Enemy is likely to get stronger, and doesn't seem to have the kids animating mountains yet, and his armies lie dead at their feet, are they better off waiting for him to recall others?

They could wait for the dinosaurs to grow - they should at least sleep, it's ridiculous how little sleep Elves operate on -

- the fact that the kids aren't getting any less competent is a good point, though.

They sleep. They wait for the scouts to come back with descriptions of the surrounding mountains. They decide not to wait any longer than that. 

They've got all the golems they can throw together, vicious little automata to send ahead of them to chew through rock and enemies alike, birds to stay high and call or swirl in informative patterns if they see this or that over the walls -

- Kib, again, had best not go near the fighting.

Yeah. His boyfriends tell him they love him. He can tell by now when he's one of ten osanwe conversations they are conducting simultaneously, but still, they tell him they love him.

And they march on Angband. 

The Enemy does not come out to challenge them. So they send the automata at the walls. They chew a hole.

And then the fighting starts.

(Kib attempts to sleep through the worrying.)

He'll have to sleep some; they're not back for three days. They are singing, when they return, the song they sang for Aydanci, and someone makes an announcement - 

The King's dead. About ten thousand dead. Thauron's there, and none of our weapons can touch him. Melkor did not get off his throne, we don't know why. We know roughly the layout of the first level of Angband, though they have illusionists. They have shapeshifters, so we're working out new security protocols for making sure the people you're talking to are who they claim to be. 

We're going to build fortresses, besiege him, figure out what kind of weapons it'll take to win.