leave of absence | Glowfic Constellation

"The Valar eventually decided to do something about Morgoth. There was a terrible war that raged for a thousand years and shook all the land of the earth and killed almost everything, but they won, in the end, and bound Morgoth and took him prisoner for three Ages of the world. After that some of them walked Middle-earth to heal it."

purposeful_glory

"What happened after three Ages of the world...?"

"Well," she says, "seeing as he is back and in business, one assumes that they released him."

purposeful_glory

"But you don't know why?"

"The Valar don't talk to us. Not even to Mother. She pleaded with them, with no answer, from when Morgoth arrived to when the newcomers did, and received no response until right before when the newcomers arrived, when they communicated they would not be sending aid."

purposeful_glory

"How do they communicate such things?"

She shrugs. "Mother just knows. Perhaps it's a kind of osanwë, possible over that outrageous range only for Powers."

purposeful_glory

Nod.

"Speaking of which, now that we know each other, we can probably keep in touch while you're birding around most of Beleriand. In case you think of other questions for my father, or want me to let you know when Mother's well."

purposeful_glory

"Oh, really? I didn't know how much familiarity it took to gain that kind of range."

"I don't actually know anyone who I am more than acquainted with but who I haven't known for centuries, and I don't know anyone who leaves Doriath. But we could try it."

purposeful_glory

"All right. Although you shouldn't assume that if it doesn't work with me it wouldn't work with, say, your cousins, once you've gotten to know them; I don't actually have osanwë of my own and I'm just organizing my thoughts in a way that you can use yours with me."

"Huh. I don't know what that would change. You were perfectly good at the palace game."

purposeful_glory

"Well, one thing it changed is that I was very surprised and alarmed to discover osanwë existed in the first place. But perhaps it has no practical effect on subjects like range; maybe one person's will cover the full distance that both of them together could."

She shrugs. "I'm not sure. I'll try saying hello every once in a while. Come on, there's a bridge across the river - there's also a tightrope, but no one uses that unless they're showing off..."

purposeful_glory

"I've never picked up the particular skill of tightrope-walking," says Loki. Bridge it is.

"The magic balance doesn't cover it?" She dances across the bridge. "One thing I miss about when we lived aboveground is swimming. You can't swim here, because if you get pulled under no one'll ever find you."

purposeful_glory

"My magic grace means that I will go where I intend to put myself. I'd need a little practice on a tightrope, ideally not above a river, before I'd know where to intend to put myself. You can't divert some of the water into a pool?"

"If Mother weren't using - imagine that she has, like, the capability to keep about a hundred times as many things in her mind at a time as an ordinary person. But there are lots of things we have built in, and don't have to keep in our minds, like having our sensory experiences align with the position of our eyes and ears, or having our heart beat, so it takes her maybe ten to be in an embodied physical form, and ten to keep Menegroth beautiful and twenty to keep the crops growing and ten to make it hard to approach the borders and a few for other things I don't quite understand.

And in peacetime we can go "how much attention would it take, to make sure insects don't grow in a pool and it is clean and safe to drink and beautiful and you'd notice if a child fell in?" and add that to the list, or go "we want deer to enter the borders freely, can you make the protections not exclude deer?" and some of her attention could be spent on that, but now? It takes about eighty times everything I could concentrate on to keep Morgoth from working his magic to oppose our borders, so she's letting everything else lapse as much as she can afford."

purposeful_glory

"People who don't live in Maiar-run forests often find it worth it to have pools and keep them beautiful and clean and safe on their own. I suppose you may not have the substances they use to keep the water clean available, and might have too-high standards of safety to rely on a Quendi lifeguard instead of a Maia one..."

She frowns. "Maybe. We do most of the upkeep on most of the kingdom, but her awareness is still so much of what Menegroth is, it'd be odd to have something she just had a policy of not looking at."

purposeful_glory

"Surely there's room between a policy of not looking at it, and a policy of assuming she will? I'm not saying a pool is the best test case, maybe overall people would rather have deer and it would be a better use of their time to go out and catch some and bring them in behind the protections..."

"Ill ask them," says Lúthien brightly. "It'll be something to do."

purposeful_glory

"I don't remember the exact formula or concentration of thing that we use in pools - although it's not uncommon that we just go ahead and swim in ponds in the wilderness that no one's maintaining, and may get algae in our hair but it's not prohibitively dangerous - but I do remember what it smells like, in case that helps." Osanwë!