The Bifrost lights up in all its colors and -
- this might be Midgard, but it is not a part of Midgard she ever saw and not the place she was expecting to be dropped, and there is no Sigyn with her.
She holds Lævateinn ready as a glaive. Maybe her mother feared her sorcery and thought she'd best be sent somewhere deadly under the impression she was meant to survive the trip -
They're on a narrow, snow-filled pass between two sheer cliffs and he's numb with grief and cold and hunger and then, not three miles out, there's a woman.
The visibility is pretty poor here, and a gust of wind somewhere clouds the air between them before he catches more than a glimpse, but he's still certain what he saw. There was no one there, and then there was a woman.
"Have we lost anyone?" he says, bounding to his father's side, and he must sound worried because his father immediately turns around and orders a count.
It'll take half an hour. They've suffered heavy losses but they still number nearly a hundred thousand. They do this every day but there's a limit on how efficient you can make it, checking a host of that size.
"Why?" Nolofinwë says, once they've started, and Findekáno describes what he saw.
"You think it's the Enemy?"
"No. Maybe. No. If he can take on any form he pleases, he'd be incomparably stupid to waste a strategic secret like that on pretending to be an Elf lost in the north."
"You think it's something else?"
A minor Power, maybe, defecting from Valinor to their side. That would be interesting. Or -
- but if any among Fëanor's host did feel any remorse, they wouldn't come alone searching, that was suicide.
"Can I go out ahead?" he asks. He regrets it almost immediately. Nolofinwë's eyes immediately light up with the special anguish he only feels when being a King and being a father come into conflict. "Not far," he promises, and his father wearily nods.
It's cold here. It's not cold enough to bother her, but she's always liked winter and she is wearing her full armor - she is not ostensibly properly banished, she was not stripped of her more portable possessions, she is armed and armored and does not have a thermometer to determine that it's anything more than rather nippy. The bird form might have trouble. No nearby sign of animal life, so she's liable to get hungry, which she can patch with healing spells if she has to but not well. If the swift form is too cold to operate here and fly somewhere more habitable - she should check; she will if she can't find anything else to do or investigate in the area in an hour - then she will have something of a problem with getting any very great distance. Maybe there's at least a cave so she can sleep without being snowed on.
He goes out alone. His father likes saddling him with additional people, knowing he'll take chances with his own life that he'd never take with theirs, but this was his vision and his responsibility, and if it is a trick or a trap the fewer people ensnared in it, the better.
The vaunted Elven ability to walk on snow does not aid you in crossing a continent of ice as much as you might expect. The wagons, for one thing, don't walk on snow. Neither does anything you might eat. You end up fighting your way through snowdrifts several times a day anyway, uncomfortably aware that you're burning calories you can't replace, that every extra exertion means that much more knowing hunger.
And - yep, she's real. Another quick glimpse amidst blowing snow. Short, armored, apparently alone. If the Enemy can pull off a trap like this, he reminds himself, this is the best possible situation to discover it. He moves forward.
Not that short after all, but sinking with every step into the snow. So not an Elf. She looks like one, though. He's getting more uneasy the closer he gets. And the constantly-distracting thought of how they'll cope if he doesn't come back is getting louder.
Well, if it came to a fight, he has a significant advantage in mobility. Perhaps he should arrange for their paths to cross in the middle of a snowdrift.
She sees him, at this point, and lifts a weapon. He slips out his sword. All right.
Asgard.
Well, it doesn't seem likely that the folk of the Outer Lands call their homeland "the Outer Lands".
"Findekáno Astaldo," he says, "Of Nolofinwë of the Noldor," Then he lowers the sword slightly in a way that imposes no combat disadvantage at all but suggests a little bit of friendliness.
In reality, hope is already soaring in his chest. If the people of the Outer Lands are alive and well and armored, they won't be too late and perhaps won't lose any more along the way.
The weapon vanishes. Well. For a friendly gesture, that's certainly terrifying. And Asgard isn't in the Outer Lands after all. That implies - lots of things, none of them particularly reassuring, but he's not going to leave a friendly stranger to die in this weather. He honestly probably wouldn't leave an enemy to die in this weather. He's seen enough of that. "We're emigrating to the Outer Lands. My grandfather was born there but few among our host have ever been. It was abandoned when we left, but probably isn't now - I thought you were from one of the peoples there."
He tries to keep the regret out of his voice.
"We grew up with them," he says. "My cousins rode with Oromë, the Vala of the hunt, and his followers - lesser powers. My uncle studied metalworking under Aulë, the Vala of ores and stone and earthworks. My youngest brother spent a decade with Vána, she's Springtime, and recently there was a family dispute that was, uh, mediated by Manwë. He's in charge."
"Ah. Well, they have not visited Asgard to my recollection, but as I have not previously heard of this realm nor heard anyone else take credit for its invention I may as well presume it was they who made it. Complete, I take it, with inhospitable frozen wilderness."
"Yes." That's going to sound bad. There's no way to make it sound better without giving away too much. For some reason he's more uneasy with being thought a violent troublemaker by this stranger than with accidentally sharing critical information, but that's a ridiculous impulse. He ends up just blinking at her sheepishly.
"Well. In the absence of an objective and undoubtable source of context on the circumstances of your departure I can have few absolute opinions, but one of those I can have is that children ought not to be held responsible for the behavior of their parents."
We were leaving before the fight - it's what the fight was about - and we had a good reason. That remained a good reason once the sentence of the Valar was spoken. So we still left."
"You don't say. My father knows the name of every person, on all sides, who has died since it started, and he says them to himself over and over, under his breath. I don't think it's healthy but on the other hand - blaming yourself for things is still a way of feeling like you're in control of them, you know?"
"I am not sure. It is possible that the artifice which sends people between realms has broken, and that is why I am here, alone, instead of on Midgard, with my companion; it is also possible that my mother had a rare fit of cowardice and decided to have me killed in this oblique way under the pretense of sending me away while she decided what to do next."
Your family left you to die, something points out inside his head.
"Well," he says "it's not going to work."
"I don't think it very likely. If she wanted me dead it'd be more likely that I would, in fact, be dead, and would have been able to see this coming at the point of a spear. But it crossed my mind, because it is rather unheard of for the Bifrost to break. Perhaps some third thing I have not thought of occurred."
"Well. Thank you. Really, sincerely, I don't know if you know what it's like to watch people who trust you slowly starve to death, but - thank you. You should meet my father, he needs to know this right away - I mean, if you don't mind - it's just that there are people who actually might die today while we're figuring out logistics."
"Nolofinwë," he says, "it's a pleasure." And privately, with his thoughts, Finno, I don't like this.
You will, just listen.
I'm listening. But in the meantime - you went out alone and came back convinced that a stranger with no reason at all to be there needed to meet me immediately.
Yeah, he thinks, I realize.
Will you hand your weapon to Turukáno until I decide what's going on? It's not really a request.
There's no power Findekáno knows of who can command someone's mind in the space of a five minute conversation, but he complies.
"I cannot improve on anyone's comfort much. And I can do it only as fast as I can touch them. But I have a healing spell which will put someone in a state of 'not starving' and 'not, at that moment, freezing' - even if they then resume starving and freezing in short order."
"...I am atypical. Most could not do that; the sorcerers all specialize differently and in things I know how to do I suspect I am the best of them. There are some hundreds of millions, and we are..." She investigates the assembled álfar or whatever they are. "Shorter than you on average, with round ears, but we vary in coloring and style considerably beyond that and might not be distinguishable from all other races easily on sight. Although you can tell us from Midgardians because we have no soul-animals following us around."
"I do not remember any tales of the Bifrost in particular causing this problem, which is why I entertained the possibility that someone misdirected it maliciously. But of course we have stories of lost travelers. The current version of the Bifrost is thirty thousand years old, approximately; I would need to look up the exact date and have no references on hand."
"...It does not alter the mind. It is, at least, not designed to alter the soul, although being no expert in souls I cannot guarantee that it doesn't; when I have healed Midgardians it did not seem to affect their soul-animals, but obviously you have no such things. And no."
"I could probably construct something equivalent to a Bifrost eventually but it might well take hundreds or even thousands of years, and while I will miss my friend and my father and my sister I will not do so urgently and plainly enough for working on that to be my top priority in the next few decades, I expect, especially if in those decades none of them activate the Bifrost from their end to retrieve me of their own accord. I am uncertain whether local assistance could speed the attempt."
"I don't know. It depends on why I am here in this unheard-of realm. I may be by some accident too far for the all-seeing to observe, in which case I should expect to be here until I construct my own way back; they may know exactly where I am and be squabbling about my fate; my mother may have deceived my sister and disposed of my friend; I have far too little information."
"The Enemy was said to have the power to trap a soul, prevent it from returning to Valinor to be reembodied, twist it into something under his power. And the Enemy can wear a fair face when he pleases, though not such a thoroughly incarnate one, and if he knew we were here he'd just kill us all. I don't think you're the Enemy, but we'll walk carefully here."
"You said Midgardians have soul...animals? We are soul animals, I think. This form is chosen by the soul, willingly, and we have a fair bit of flexibility to remake it in our preferred image - we can generally heal very well, but after a few months without sustenance it's that much harder. When we die we used to just ...wander, bereft of a body that we could use to engage the physical world, and then the Valar found us and now they keep the dead in the Halls of Mandos, and judge us, and when we are found adequate they create for us another body so that we may take up our lives again."
"One of the terms of our ...exile.... is that we will not be reembodied for many Ages, should we die, and never permitted to depart Valinor again if we ever are reborn to it. So we are quite eager to avoid that. But the anger of the Valar may be tempered by the Ages, while the evils done by the Enemy are irreversible as far as we know."
Findekáno stares at his father searchingly for a second, then picks up his things. "Loki, while they're ensuring that no harmful effects manifest later, would you like to head out ahead? We can talk more, now that the important thing is in motion, and it's probably better not to have you in close proximity to him while we're checking if anything goes wrong."
"As far as I know she likes my father perfectly well. The trouble is that it is socially unacceptable on Asgard for women to learn magic, and by demonstrating the ability I revealed that I had been doing so in secret. If she tried to kill me in this way it is because she assumed I would sow some sort of chaos or destruction with magic she does not understand if she confronted me directly; so I do not much expect to be chased down here, at least not by her personally. She is... competent at some things. I do not actually think I could defeat her in combat, especially since she has her own, non-sorcery magic which is culturally different enough that it's all right for her."
"One normally does it in some unbearably tedious and not particularly effective manner that I was obviously never exposed to. I learned by touching a dangerous magical artifact and being imprinted with a sort of sorcerous alphabet with which I composed my own spells from the smallest parts."
She decides to answer this question with an illusory model of her solar system. "We live here," she says, pointing out Asgard. "It turns -" it does, look at it go, "and half of each day any given part of the realm faces the sun, here, which is much brighter than that thing currently in this sky. The other half, it is dark; but sometimes during that time there is a visible moon -" She points out the two of them. "Which reflect light from the sun and may be enough to see by if they are doing so at the right angle."
"Well, not this one. It was lit for a time by great globes on the edges, but the Enemy knocked them down; then there were two magical Trees, taller than mountains, that lit half the world and waxed and waned for the days and nights. But the Enemy killed them, too.Since then we've been managing by starlight, until the Valar got that working. What is the distinction between a Sun and a Moon?"
If we don't do that, I don't think they'll attack us outright but they'll be happy to let the Enemy do it, and alone and this weakened we'll be slaughtered.
If we go and - beg their forgiveness for whatever wrong we did in their eyes that justified leaving us to die, then they might give us food. I'm not sure. I think most of the people here would rather die than take that route. I'd rather die than take that route, but I can't choose that for the people under my command. But they want a fight. They want to take back the food that was stolen from us, even if it's now too late for that food to save our sisters and brothers and children. So -"
"Melkor. He's one of the Powers. He murdered our grandfather, destroyed the lights, captures Elves to enslave and torture and breed with other beings into his own races. That's why we left Valinor, because the other Valar won't do anything about him and there are people in the Outer Lands, and they can't stand against him for long."
So my uncle tried to steal some ships. And they fought back."
"You say 'of course', but you have to understand - until Melkor murdered the King, no Elf had ever died by violence in Valinor. Until that fight, no Elf had ever killed another Elf. None of us had ever seen anyone die. We didn't - it was't even the sort of thing you think of as possible. It was unimaginable until it was already over."
"And yet - the gods of the sea rose up in anger and drowned many of our host and many of the boats. The Valar Doomed us and our people to fail in every endeavor and meet our deaths on these shores. We committed mass murder on their shores! If you'd asked anyone how they'd react - honestly, it's astonishing they didn't kill us all on the spot. No, I don't think Fëanor was thinking that their deaths were worth it for the lives saved on the other side. I can't imagine even he'd be that ruthless, or that willing to provoke the Valar. I think he thought the owners of the boats wouldn't fight back."
"Sorry. He's also the one who abandoned us here. A lot of people decided, after that, that it was all his fault, the Kinslaying. I don't think so. I hate him, and I resent what he started, and if he'd been wiser or more capable he could have avoided it, and he's utterly undeserving of the title of King. But I don't think it was all his fault. I could have, and should have, stopped my people from joining in."
"I can't help but think it may not have helped that this was previously a society of pacifists, however admirable a state that may otherwise be. Skilled combatants can more neatly handle a fight nonlethally than unskilled ones determined to continue until they cannot."
Teaching my uncle to be good at fighting would be a very bad idea."
"Yes, he's only done that with people he'd enslaved for years. And even then - some people, released from his fortress, go back to their lives, as much as that's possible. Some of them seem to, and then murder everyone in the town that night. And many people are of course never released at all. So it seems likely that he has very low reliability. It's mostly a source of concern because it means we can't trust our own most vulnerable people, and because it's the process by which he created the orcs."
Their souls go to Mandos, when they die, but he's yet to be able to heal any of them."
"I can light the way if that's the issue. The usual manner involves less intelligent creatures finding themselves in a position where only their cleverest children survive, for many, many generations; although any given race's particular origins may be too long lost to discern in detail."
"Have you no predatory animals? Those often go for the vulnerable, including the juveniles. Diseases? There are no animals here, so they cannot be invulnerable to the weather in general, but perhaps in other places yours is mild and harmless? If they breed as they like how do they not run out of food, whatever it is the animals here eat? In most cases animals do well by being quick or good at collecting food or good at shrugging off illness - in some what they need is to be smart. If they need it badly enough, long enough, well, perhaps you have observed that people tend to take after their parents in some respects. Perhaps you breed horses, or something, picking the favorites to have more foals than the others, and have noticed this in them too."
"Smart animals won't have children if there are going to be too many for the land to support, just as you or I would. Less smart animals -" he laughs - "there's someone I'd ask, but I can't anymore. We do breed horses. You could make them more smart by breeding, but I don't think you could give them a soul that way."
"Well, it may be different here. There are no insects bright enough to restrain themselves that I know of. Other, more complicated animals might not breed - or, more likely, their attempts might fail for simple biological reasons - if they themselves are starving, to hope to live to a more abundant year without spending themselves on a litter of offspring. But if they're doing well and it's their neighbors who are hungry they will reproduce regardless. People will do this too, people of several kinds."
"Which is very civilized of you, but not all peoples think that way. Too, some of them have not invented the ability to decouple the having of children from the traditional method of doing so and cannot bear to be without the latter. ...Possibly that is also different here, I wouldn't know."
"Midgard does not know except as stories they take to be fiction about Asgard at all, let alone how to manufacture our conveniences. It is among the things I'd been hoping to change if I'd inherited the throne one day. I would have loved to go to Midgard with an entire library of knowledge -" She shakes her head.
"Well. Not very, as you can tell from the whole, socially unacceptable, banished, thing. My sister is not only older but has always been more in line with Mother's preferences. But I had some hope. And my sister as queen might have listened to me even if I held no formal power."
We also can't win it if we depose him, because his sons will never follow us and their people will never abandon them."
Finwë's first wife was named Miriel Serindë, and by all accounts she was stubborn, difficult, and a very unhappy person. She was more unhappy after her son was born. She stopped wanting to be alive. They tried to get the Valar to fix her, but the Valar said there was nothing wrong. And then - she died. She just left her body. We can do that, if we want to, but it's very rarely - Mandos offered to give her a new body, but she didn't want that either. She said she just wanted everyone to let her be dead for a while, and leave her alone. But Finwë was lonely, and ruling a kingdom and raising a child alone, and he'd plead with her, with the Valar, with everyone, to fix her and bring her back.
And she refused. At first she said "not yet", and then she said "stop asking", and then she said "I will categorically never return to life." And - and Finwë met someone else.
My grandmother Indis had loved him for a long time, and when he married someone else she had moved away, but her heart never moved. They met when Finwë was traveling, and she saw that he was lonely, and - there was no precedent, but they petitioned the Valar to dissolve his first marriage. And the Valar said that the marriage could not be dissolved, but that since Miriel never wanted to return to life he could marry again - but now she couldn't return to life. Even if she changed her mind. Because then a man would have two living wives.
Fëanor was opposed. He was a child of sixteen, at the time, and they didn't let him speak at the hearing but he made it well known he was opposed, and he hid the morning of the wedding and caused a great deal of pain to a good many people, and he never got over it, and he remains convinced that Miriel might have chosen to live again, eventually. And Finwë feels overwhelmingly guilty, and he loved his first wife more than his second anyway, so he's awkward around us. If he could do it all over again we wouldn't exist and everyone knows it. And he favors Fëanor."
"The truth is, everyone with any talent in the design and engineering of magic objects studied under Fëanor, because he's by far the best in the field, formalized most of its assumptions, and teaches it quite capably. And even studying under him, it takes centuries to get any good. So, yes, anyone with any talent spent centuries studying under Fëanor and is over there with him already."
"You have the healing magic. That counts for...quite a lot of diplomatic skill." Findekáno hesitates. "If you do go over there - I'd be very curious how they react to learning we're alive. There are a few people I don't think will be able to look me in the eye, which would be satisfying except that we're not going to come that close unless we're killing each other."
"Fëanor's firstborn, my cousin Maitimo, is a born diplomat. He is utterly loyal to his father, but at least sometimes that's 'loyal to his father's interests', not 'loyal to his father's word'. They're fighting for their lives, over there, and I'm sure they could use healing magic. So you provide the reason his father's interests are in not being stupid, he provides the grace and tact." He did not manage to say that without sounding bitter, but he did successfully say all the words.
"Uh huh. I should shovel snow or something. It's been - I'm very very grateful for everything you can do for us." That wasn't particularly coherent. He's feeling guilty and miserable and alone and the particular loathing that feels like the back of your mouth swelling closed and hopefully she'll forgive it next moonrise. Or not. If she's going to be doing that it's probably better if he avoids her.
"We're reorganizing the line - usually we have everyone in bad shape in patches between some people who are holding on, so there's people to make a rescue effort if a disaster happens. About half the deaths are a disaster, half the time someone's heart just stops. Now we're putting everyone in bad shape in the same area, so you can go through faster. Does it tire you out or anything?"
"Moving this many people takes some time, they won't let you near the host yet but I assume Dad started organizing this because he thinks you're legitimate. I think you're legitimate. If you were mind controlling Findekáno he wouldn't be -" she shakes her head. "He's damn good at this. He's saved hundreds of people, he barely sleeps, he barely eats, we would never have made it without him. Sometimes he even laughs. But I'm coping a hell of a lot better than him and I don't know why."
"Sure thing. My tent, this way. I share it with my aunt, but she's out helping reorganize people. Hey! Finno!" She doesn't noticeably raise her voice. "Can you help everyone who's still climbing the pass a mile back? The reorganization slowed that down, now we've got people waiting." She raises an eyebrow at Loki. "That's why I was looking for the two of you, actually. It's usually better to give him a minute when it seems like he might need it, because he'll never give himself one."
Irissë's tent is, indeed, built into a snowdrift. "Insulation," she says. "It actually sometimes gets too warm in here. We're probably about the same size, too, if you need warmer clothes - not that I have much. We grew up near the Trees, we had practically no functional clothing. You're quiet. Everything okay?"
"Asgardian women are generally expected to be, or at least esteemed highest if we are, warriors. And royalty are particularly expected to exemplify the cultural ideal, so where some anonymous citizen might instead design furniture or be a musician or an engineer, my sister and I were expected to learn to fight. My sister is very well suited to this, a prodigy. I'm all right but I wanted magic. And no one would let me have it."
"It's not entirely warrior. The men are not supposed to be warriors, for instance. My friend who I've mentioned defies this convention and at somewhat less cost to his acceptability than I suffer, but it's unusual. And we have other hobbies between practicing fighting and killing roving monsters and keeping in good condition."
"Very much so. When I was small it looked like I was never going to be able to hold a blade without getting myself killed. I tripped walking down a corridor, let alone trying to perform any sort of combat maneuver. Things improved when I secretly invented myself a spell for grace and pretended to grow out of it, but Thor was still better, and more - temperamentally similar to Odin."
"My father's a better King in every conceivable sense: more principled, more cautious, more just, less paranoid. Finwë couldn't see it even when it was literally dancing in front of his eyes. The Valar stepped in to punish Fëanor for that one, and Finwë held a massive protest and moved in with Fëanor to show solidarity."
"Our succession was never formally decided either way. I had only a slim chance, because Thor is not a political disaster nor even strictly a worse option than I - she has people skills I don't, at least when interacting with the sort of people who you must exert skills at to rule in Asgard. I'm just smarter and would take to the other details of statecraft better. But I did think it was a chance, at least if I could keep hold of my secret."
"There are very few people in the Outer Lands. There might be none at all, if we don't get there in time. If we win the war, we were sort of thinking - one way to do it, less stupid than the current system, would be to let anyone who pleased build a kingdom, and then the people who were good at it would attract a following. All those wide-open lands to reclaim from the orcs, or rebuild from rubble. If you're stuck here for a while you could have a go at it. Maybe show Asgard you have the talent."
"My friend, my sister, my father. I'm not sure what you eat when you have food, here, but I'm sure it's not exactly what I'm accustomed to. The libraries. I will need to write very energetically as soon as I have paper to be sure I remember as much as I can, my own mind being my only reference."
Stupid thing to do, but then - I hope we've made it clear already what kind of man he is."
"...right. Do you have any solutions on that front, other than 'ignore the fuck out of them', which is probably what we're going to end up doing if we can survive without them, or 'meekly beg them to let us join again', which - well, you haven't met my other brother Turvo yet, but his wife died on the way here and I am quite sure he'll choose to die rather than make nice with the people who did this..."
"Findekáno seems to think that if I operate through Maitimo I can convert healing magic into diplomacy. Whether it will be enough I don't know. If someone wants to die such as dying is for elves, and take their chances with the Valar's questionable judgment, and see their loved ones again that way, well. I have no grounds to try to interfere."
He tries to evaluate whether they can afford to push the pace faster, now that no one will drop dead of starvation as they walk.
She likes these people well enough but still makes sure Lævateinn is shaped in such a way that to remove it from her person without knowing how to reshape it, somebody would have to halfway cut her clothes off.
"Our demands are for the return of everything that was on the boats when they crossed," Findekáno's father says. "Nothing about the crown, nothing about an apology - those are both lost causes - return everything they stole. We have more than twice their numbers -"
Irissë shakes her head. "And they'll have had time to build a fortress."
"Where they will stay, until they decide to give us everything that was on the boats."
"We're besieging them?" She breaks into a grin.
"I thought we were avoiding them," Findekáno says, "if we have enough food to make it on our own?" Not that he's not also suppressing a smile, but -
"We were doing that, because we were afraid that if it came to an outright fight they'd slaughter us," Turukáno says. "That's no longer likely to be true. They cannot even murder one more member of this host with this trip; that's over. We won't arrive weak and starving."
"I don't think she'll help us start a fight."
"So we're not starting a fight," Irissë says, "just a peaceful protest."
They decide on a faster pace ahead. They assemble more people who could use magical medical attention. The silver disk rises in the sky, again, and Findekáno ducks out to find her before the host marches forward.
Maybe "I failed to hold your life dear enough", but that wasn't the problem in the first place. It's not that I thought they deserved to die, it's that they were killing my people."
That seems better to me than a world with no death at all."
"My opinions on death are in many ways shaped by my being accustomed to it being only ever eternal oblivion with no affordances for returning or gaining insights and personal growth from the experience. I definitely would not design an arrangement where memory loss was routine." Shrug. "Ideally I would have some opportunity to talk with the sorts of people who would be operating under my creation and ask them what exactly they were getting out of their extreme sports, what it was they wanted to risk when they cliff-dove. Certainly I would make extremely prolonged sleep or something like it an option for someone who was irretrievably depressed as it sounds like Míriel was, I have no wish to inflict life on the unwilling either. But I think there are better ways for one's choices to matter than the possibility of self-destruction. The most meaningful choice I am making today is not the choice to refrain from slitting my throat."
"I'm accustomed to fighting and probably better at it than any ten of you, maybe more, depending on how much your better sight and hearing count for and whether the fight takes place in the snow or any other terrain you have special maneuverability on. If I avoid it it will be because I see no one on the field I am certain I want to strike. This is doubly the case now that I no longer have the handicap of needing to avoid the use of magic lest someone notice. My healing spells are very good and you see how quickly I can cast them; while I might meet with ill luck I might do that stepping into an avalanche, here, or being assassinated in my sleep. As for old age it will not advance quickly enough for me to find it overtaking me before I have made a spell for it."
"I said Asgardians live for thousands of years? In much the same way children become adults, adults become, eventually, old - weaker, more vulnerable to disease, very gradually falling apart in almost the way of an old machine or well-read book. I have centuries of youth left and will then slowly decline, or I would if I were not planning to sidestep the process with sorcery."
"It can. Fëanor already solved it, not that we can count on him to share. The Silmarils - they capture the energy that pervades Valinor, that stops us from experiencing this problem there. In their presence we get stronger again; anyone who can visit them will be able to live in the Outer Lands indefinitely. It was his crowning achievement. Melkor stole then, and now they're strengthening the other side."
"Yes. Though - possible in principle only for the greatest of our inventors, and possible for him only in Valinor with all its resources at his disposal. The Silmarils were blessed by Varda, Vala of starlight. Fëanor says it cannot be done again at any cost; even if he's wrong, I'm not sure who'd figure it out."
"Do you know how satisfying it would be to see his face? I mean, I realize that this would change the lives and prevent the slow decline of everyone I know and care about, and that that's a good reason while wanting to outshine Fëanor is a bad one, but still. You're right. He had no idea you were coming, and you're better than him."
"I'm not counting on it, don't worry. It's an odd sort of whiplash. Two years ago we thought we had forever. Then a year ago we thought we'd come fight this war and perhaps die trying but, if not, be able to make something of our first chance to live outside the garden of the gods. Six months ago we were doomed to fail and suffer and die or wish we had, three days ago I thought none of us would even see the other shore, and now - can your magic solve a problem that we'll face ten thousand years down the road?"
"...It is entirely possible to get quite accustomed to and build a society around the having of involuntary children," Loki points out. "Midgard would not consider this anywhere near their most urgent problem were you to poll them. And non-spell solutions have already been created, just not distributed."
"If they don't realize how important it is, they're wrong. You can't - it's like people being erased when they die. If there's a culture that thinks it's all right they're just making a mistake. If they're used to it they'll get unused to it. It's really, truly that bad. I hesitate to ask what Midgard would consider their most urgent problem."
"Do you think building your bifrost is a higher priority than killing Melkor? If it's the only way we can get to Midgard, and if half of the children in Midgard die, and assuming that we could prevent this from occurring, then perhaps we ought to let my cousins have this fight and this continent, and go fix all the other ones."
"The Bifrost will undoubtedly take me hundreds of years bare minimum. It is enormously complex, likely used several forms of magic I do not have in its original construction, and I do not have it available to study. I will need a place to work and a way to support myself while I do it and some reasonable assurance that local politics and warfare will not set my notes on fire. It is only practical to first spend some smaller number of years arranging stability - even if I thought that running amok on Midgard in contravention of Odin's policy on the realm would not get me promptly stopped."
He finally starts moving again. "But - yes, the argument that you need stability and resources first is reasonable. "
"She might or might not stop you. She has intervened on Midgard in the past - frost giants, particular enemies of Asgard, were active there. I have asked her about her policies and received answers, if not good ones, and wrote them down, but I did not pack my entire lifetime of notetaking and cannot retrieve the memory well enough to speculate confidently. The last time I was on Midgard I did small, discreet healing and trusted that the all-seeing Heimdall who had kept all my practice secret would continue to do so; but Odin would not have known to ask, then."
"There are more Asgardians than elves, and they have longer memories of war than yours. And Odin wields a non-sorcery magic which is not much discussed in its mechanics nor often used but is by reputation - immense. It is possible that you could build up to the point of being able to challenge Odin on a mission. You are not there at this time."
I don't think my uncle will attack us, but it would make sense for him to do so if he thinks that we will; we'll be much, much stronger a month after we arrive than we will on our first day."
Regarding tactics, you should speak with my father. I have no idea what he's capable of, but I think my father has a good sense of him."
"So how about you just ask whatever questions would allow you to dispense with the neutrality? War is awful, always, but it's not impossible to decide which outcome is best whenever two groups end up fighting. You could train us, you could use your magic, you could end this instead of just trying to steer innocents clear of it. What would you need to know to convince you that that's worth doing?"
He sighs. "Maitimo is very good at giving that. I expect you'll find him quite compelling. Then you get away from him and it's like waking up from a dream and you realize that, yes, it seemed right when he was talking, but in fact Fëanor stormed the docks of a civilian harbor and stole their ships and killed their people and words don't actually make that right, and they don't make it better, and anyway he's just saying whatever he thinks will make you act in Fëanor's interest and has never meant a word that comes out of his mouth. Worse than that. He lies with smiles, too."
"He's not foolish. He's good, somewhere very deep down, and trying very hard to reconcile that with a set of loyalties that are deeply and fundamentally incompatible with goodness, and it's hard to see it and not want to help him try, and he knows that and uses it. I don't think you'd be invulnerable."
"Right, because it's the only possible way this ends without bloodshed. Worst case, you're seduced, you learn your lesson in a hundred years and I die knowing that I made the decision to ask you to try for strategic and not personal reasons." He smiles. "That's all one can really ask from life, right?"
"I mean, it seems like it might be more convenient to doom you if you all found yourselves with compelling reasons not to cooperate or peacefully settle your grievances. Not knowing how Valar curses work I cannot say if this may have literally guided anyone's hand to generate such grievances to begin with, but it crossed my mind."
"Oh! Yes, I think almost everyone agrees that Fëanor burned the ships because of the workings of the Doom - there's even a line in it -" he clears his throat - "'To evil end shall all things turn that they begin well; and by treason of kin unto kin, and the fear of treason, shall this come to pass.' So Fëanor feared we'd betray him, and betrayed us, probably at least in part because that's what he'd been told was Doomed to happen. I don't know how directly the Valar can guide our hands, or if it would feel any different than having a really good reason to hate them."
He laughs. "You sound like someone I used to know. So what are you going to do about it? Challenge them for the job? There are two choices, as I see it: love them, abide by their laws, and try to help them understand us better so they make fewer mistakes. Or else -" he waves a hand in the air. "This. Leave. And trust that now they've washed their hands of us."
".We teach children how to have private thoughts. Some communities much younger than others. So we know how to teach it. I would imagine you can learn, but I've never met anyone who can't hear in the first place. Range depends on familiarity. Two people close to each other and actively trying to contact each other could potentially do so over several hundred miles. Most people, you wouldn't notice unless you're nearby and they're crying out or you're speaking to them."
"But holding a conversation amplifies it so in order to avoid this problem on an immediate basis as opposed to after however long it will take you to teach me the privacy skill if I can learn it at all, I will have to travel the rest of the way alone, is that right?"
"I can always tell if someone I'm talking to is experiencing very strong emotions. It never occurred to me to wonder whether this was because I'm picking up their emotional state with osanwë, because I am reading it in their face and voice, or because I am imagining what I'd feel in their position and experiencing it myself. The distinction wouldn't be meaningful to anyone I know, and people would find all of those about equally invasive - like, some people might wish that no one could ever discern their emotional state, but they wouldn't be more bothered by someone inferring it from osanwë than inferring it from their voice. I know how to stop listening to verbal thoughts, because that feels distinct from information I'd get another way. I have never had cause to consider exactly what distinguishes the various types of nonverbal communication in a conversation. I am trying."
"If I don't want someone who isn't telepathic to know my mood I can not speak, or do so levelly, and compose my face, or not look at them. Now that I'm openly using magic I could turn invisible and compose all my speech with auditory illusion if I wanted to be very thorough. I have no such defense against osanwë. How long does it tend to take some unusually paranoid and motivated child to pick up the habit of hiding thoughts?"
"Fëanor famously went thirty years broadcasting absolutely nothing, starting when he was sixteen. I don't know how quickly he picked it up, a week?" He sighs. "You, uh, could try turning invisible and composing all your speech with auditory illusion, and I will see whether I have an intuition about your emotional state?"
"Well. That will I suppose inform any attempt at stealth I might have ever considered, so much for invisibility. But it at least means that I can tolerate receiving instruction in case it works and do not have to instantly flee and live as a hermit in some random wilderness."
"I cannot hear you at all. I had no idea anything out of the ordinary was being communicated. Although I suppose I should recontextualize some instances of your people staring at each other and then parting as something other than your superior hearing and prolonged acquaintance, in retrospect."
Finally he settles on something. He and Irissë are in Valimar on holiday The searing heat of the Trees is making the day almost unbearable, and they jump into a river fully clothed and then lie on the shore, drying until their clothes are no longer transparent, warm and safe and unimaginably far from here.
If the particular visual metaphor doesn't work for you, that's fine: the important part is thinking of your thoughts as possible to view in two domains, a public one and a private one. Some people imagine reaching for their thoughts with their left as opposed to their right hand; some people have a public color and a private color. There's a scroll somewhere with a hundred suggested approaches, so people can pick the one that resonates with how they think of thinking, but guess who stole it?
So - well, usually I'd say "take out a thought and put in on the table in front of you' - this being exactly what you're doing anyway, every time you think. But I assume you'd rather try this without any exercises that involve me accessing your thoughts."
She has ciphers, for writing, half her notes written so Heimdall who sees everything cannot make use of them.
She imagines writing all her thoughts in cipher. The fact that she exists at all, has thoughts at all - in cipher. Plaintext reserved for special circumstances.
And in plaintext she presents - is this working?
Text is text. She has excellent, perfect, regular handwriting betraying nothing of her clenched teeth or fluttering heart. All she is doing is writing a note -
Like so.
"That's very principled. But if you went to Alqualondë, the harbor where we killed those people, and you said to them "don't you realize that they didn't have any options? They weren't powerful, not really - they did this because they were so powerless!' I think they'd be justified in feeling quite annoyed with you. The murder of your loved ones isn't an easy thing to abstract away from in favor of some big compassionate picture - especially not when we're not even speaking of forgiveness, which they haven't even asked for!"
"I didn't say 'being trapped justifies whatever you might care to do'. Given my current understanding of the situation in Valinor I probably would have prepared a series of stern lectures for the Valar about how to not be such colossal failures as deities, rather than trying to escape, let alone killing anyone. Certainly I wouldn't tell someone acting in self-defense that this would be the perfect time for them to develop empathy with their attackers."
"But you're asking exactly that of us! We should send the civilians separately, try to make it easier for Fëanor to murder just us. We can't learn to fight, that'd be you taking a side. You're unwilling to even discuss how to protect the kids, lest you give us an edge in a fight with them, because you want us to forgive and forget and you seem to think we are silly not to want that ourselves."
"...I was not suggesting sending the civilians elsewhere to make it easier for Fëanor to murder you, because I was not assuming you favored the tactic of using noncombatants as shields. That was my idea for keeping the children protected, it turned out to have unacceptable drawbacks, and I dropped it."
"It is most likely purest chance that I met you first, if it's not chance it's because someone wanted me to freeze or starve and not because of your personal virtue, and I think my conservatism is where it ought to be. I will heal your people; if you need me as some sort of neutral intermediary I will do this to the limits of my ambassadorial ability; if I meet the Enemy and he has as few redeeming qualities as it sounds I will do my utmost to cripple or kill him; and if I am very fortunate one day I will reinvent the Bifrost and you and your rivals can live on separate planets and never have to interact again."
"Yes! I didn't have that option, I handed them over to the guards and I assume they're in prison or executed by now, the one Thor hammered upside the head may have died in the moment, I was too occupied to look into it - but what good would it do me if I ran them through? What harm would it do my father if the way in which he is safe from them involves distance, lost motivation, insufficient assassinatory resources - and not the I remind you permanent loss of their lives?"
And then we could meet them as strangers, and see what we thought of them from there."
"Why on earth would he not murder us the moment it's convenient, if he knows that should he succeed he's rid of us and should he fail we'll patiently say 'regrettable how that happened, we don't believe in retaliation, I hope you won't get into that kind of mood again'? I want to ensure that he never again has the power to hurt my family."
"Sure. All right. Even if they never again had the power to harm me, I would like them to have to face the consequences of what they did. Since they do, I am more concerned with how to change that. Your solution of sending us to separate planets fixes the second problem, but not the first. It's much much better than any options actually available to us, but it's not really what any of us want."
"And it will not work any time soon." She sighs. "I don't know how Fëanor's people feel about the entire debacle - and I suspect you don't either. Many of the reasons you have not to show forgiveness apply to their incentives not to show remorse. Neither of you is strategically well-served to look vulnerable, like you might hesitate to kill to get what you want the next time there's a conflict."
When those twelve decades had passed they met at a festival held by the Valar. My father said "As I promised, I forgive you, and remember no grievance." Fëanor took his hand and said - nothing. He'd started the whole thing with a sword to my father's throat and now he just stared at him. And my father swore to follow him, and expressed his hope that no new grief would ever divide us, and Fëanor said "I hear you. So be it."
That is what I want to avoid, if we can. Not again. Not when he gets away with more each time."
"So... It sounds to me like Fëanor, however brilliant, is bad at setting priorities and worse at managing his extremely volatile emotions and was sufficiently badly parented that he never picked up the skill, nor has he ever had cause for this to give him a moment's trouble from anyone he had not already written off and ceased to value. Does that sound right?"
"And what you want is the chance to receive - not only receive but spurn - an apology from him. But he does not have the maturity to see the merit in this course of action from a standpoint of pure ethics, and doing it anyway will profit him nothing. He has already attempted to dispose of any help or companionship you could stand to offer in the future, you are not prepared to render any he may have come to miss since he abandoned you, and as mentioned if he looks unwilling to back his demands with violence by admitting to any of the more restraining impulses he may or may not have this puts him at a tactical disadvantage if someone of your faction becomes demanding. Try to picture his personality itself as a resource limitation. It is fairly clear that he does not have some skills and habits that might normally considered basic for a healthy adult. Assume that it is literally impossible for him to suddenly cultivate them. Given that, can you make it worth his while to give you anything you want?"
"I don't think so. Having the things they stole from us is better for them than giving it back to us. If they don't believe we'll attack them, and they're not moved by guilt, they have no reason at all to return them. Fëanor thinks, presumably, that a smaller host with unquestionable loyalty is better than a larger one who knows he's not a good King, so he doesn't want us for the war. We have absolutely no hope of getting anything at all from them without a fight."
"Then perhaps, given that you seem to have rather more of the skills considered basic for an adult, you - as the psychologically functional party - should consider meeting them as strangers without the intervening steps. You could also assail his party, but - well, I don't get a very consistent picture of how much you value people's lives, so I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad idea from your perspective."
"We don't want a fight. But what would meeting them as strangers even look like? He doesn't trust us. Even if we can bear to say 'oh, we're over it, we don't regard the things you stole as ours and you may keep them', I don't think they'd take that at face value. We could settle on the opposite end of the continent and just hope they don't bother us too much - if we can survive at all in Melkor-controlled territory without any seeds for agriculture. Or horses. Or tools for weaponry. Or most of our best weapons and armor."
She shrugs. "I have some hope I may be able to talk some sense into them when I meet them. If I can't, if they are just as you say and determined to remain that way, I will do my best to help you settle peacefully elsewhere and start over and fend off orcs. I've lived off hard land and while I was not a scholar of all the disciplines I would have read up on if I'd anticipated this landing, I did read a lot and may know things sufficient to bridge the gap. In the meanwhile, well. None of you need starve to death."
His father hears him out. "What if she just makes it known," he says when Findekáno is finished, "that if either side starts a fight she'll help the other side finish it?"
"I don't know," he says. "I'll ask her."
There's twice as much work to be done with their pressing pace, though, and before he gets a chance the horizon goes a terrifyingly unfamiliar bright grey.
"We'll use rope and be more careful, then. It's not worth losing anyone now. Oh - my father wanted to know if you'd be inclined to prevent trouble by committing that if either side starts a fight, you'll make sure the other side wins it. That's his way of saying yes, he won't make trouble, but he thinks Fëanor will."
"If it is that simple, this is a reasonable summary of my intentions. If it is more complicated in some way - if your factions split further, if someone acts alone, if there are sabotaged attempts at peace talks, if it seems likely that the Enemy is mind-controlling the active parties, anything like that - then my response likewise will have to be more complicated."
"Fair. Oh, another thing you should know! Our scouts can see much better in this weather, and went out ahead to find land. We're perhaps forty miles from it. The Enemy's fortress isn't visible, it's in the mountains, but we conveniently know exactly where, because there's a dense artificial cloud of smoke around one specific area in the mountains, not three hundred miles from here. Looks like he doesn't like the sun."
"I know nothing about the tactics of orcs or the lay of the land, but I can turn them invisible when we're close enough that being unable to see their feet and each other will be less of a hazard. Maybe send illusions of some of them with you, although I can only operate perhaps a hundred of those at a time and I don't know how convincing they'll be to elf-quality eyes, not being designed for same."
"Yes. They made everything they touched beautiful, and being around beautiful things is a great source of joy to our people. And they gave us more energy, made us better able to use our wills to shape the world, so enabled every other endeavor. And our cities, our artwork, our architecture, was all designed around the light of the Trees, to do interesting and novel things with it. We are a people who care about beauty more than anything, and we'd have an Age to build places that expressed every possible conception of beauty."
The vision stops. "After the Darkening it was lit by torches everywhere and it was like a strange place anyway. We were desperate to leave."
They reach land before the Sun sets. Findekáno can hear all the scouts, even the ones who are now quite far out, and reports everything they see and share. "There's one major river on this side of the continent, and the cousins are camping at a lake in the mountains near its source. They know we're here by now, if they didn't already; we've seen one of their scouting parties. Our scouting parties have orders not to raise weapons against them even in self-defense, but the one we saw left immediately. No sight of the Enemy yet, except the cloud concealing a section of the northern mountains." He bites his lip. "Setting up south of them on the river seems unwise."
She comes back and transforms without landing. "If you want to cross an extra mountain range," she says, "there are many choices of rivers. Without going that far, it's the ones coming from the lake your cousins are using, or an unappealing marsh lake." She provides an illusion of what she saw.
"I think that if you go to the lake they're at you should be prepared to cross the mountains abruptly anyway, considering, so you might be well served making the attempt all at once and giving them a wider berth. If some of you can make the climb and some cannot I could turn some of you into birds - there's hardly time to learn to fly but birds are light and could sit on those with better stamina."
Nolofinwë looks at it. "So we're going over the mountains. Twice. That's going to be a very difficult trip, for those of us who can't fly. Turning people into birds is appealing, but might make them nervous. I'm not sure how our specific relationship between mind and body endures being turned into things."
"I volunteer," Irissë says from behind him. "But once we start turning people into birds to cross the mountains, they'll learn that we can turn people into birds, and then Tyelcormo will make a point of killing every bird in the vicinity. So don't start that just yet, if we want anything useful from them."
"You," says Loki, "cannot turn people into birds. I can turn people into birds. If I think people are learning to fly for spying excursions I haven't approved instead of merely being birds so as to be carried over the mountains by abler companions I will be very annoyed."
"I have taken and am taking every conceivable step to avoid violence between our peoples," Nolofinwë says. "I have told every scouting expedition we have out there that not only should they never open fire, they shouldn't fire back, and they should drop their weapons and let the other side kill them. It is tremendously valuable to us to know what they're planning, and it mostly helps us protect people, not kill them more efficiently. If they are not intending to war with us we gain nothing from spying on them. What's your objection?"
"My objection is this is not the purpose for which I suggested turning anyone into birds, and if someone spends enough time as a bird to learn to fly I lose a way to gently contain them later if some unforeseen circumstance comes up. Would this be a good time for me to go visit your cousins?"
He takes a deep breath. "My brother copes badly with interactions where he thinks the other person secretly dislikes him; open dislike is fine. Contempt, concealed or not, will make him defensive and he'll probably hate you. He is more trusting than you'd think: he tends to take people at face value about their motives. Most people just aren't interesting to him. He's good at engineering, and respects it, and it's what he tends to respect people for. He's brilliant. He doesn't mind being asked for things but he hates being told to do them. He tends to jump on opportunities to make amends that don't require him to admit wrongdoing or face people he wronged. You're entirely right that that's not enough, but - do have a go."
It's hard to pick out anyone who's obviously important; they're all dressed in formal, elaborate Elven robes, but no one has obviously more formal robes, and the royalty aren't wearing circlets or anything. There are scouts returning from a trip up the nearby mountain (Elven scouting seems to involve finding somewhere with an impressive line of sight and then looking around.)
"It looks like they're crossing the mountains," someone reports.
"Great. Let them."
"Well, yes, that is what we are doing, given that the alternative would be stopping them and, not being a Vala, I can't make mountains impassable at will."
"Are they coming here?"
"Too soon to tell."
"I should speak to everyone," a voice says, hoarse and the least musical of all the Elven voices she's heard.
The room goes quiet. Then... "Can you?"
"Yes, obviously."
"You don't need to justify yourself to them," someone says hurriedly, and there are murmurs of agreement. "You need to focus on getting better -"
"Getting better, the outcome, has yet to result from getting better, the focus," the hoarse voice says. "I should speak to everyone."
It's a library; there are around two hundred books, every one clearly written by hand, every one set out on gloriously colorful tapestries on shelves that fill almost the whole room. The rest of it is a conference table, where four people are currently sitting and blinking at her. "I'm sorry," one of them says in a tongue other than Quenya, "are we acquainted yet? Curufinwë Atarinke."
"Yes, that is grammatical. I do not know exactly how I came to be stranded here; I was intended to arrive somewhere else, and with a companion who did not land with me. Possibilities include a broken artifice, sabotage, duplicitous or even murderous intentions, etcetera; at any rate, rescue does not seem forthcoming but I have not been murdered in the process, so here I am. I came here to talk to you because the principal parties between whom I am neutral are you and your cousins and it seemed time to hear your side of things."
"What's Asgardian for 'short' or 'brief'?" When she tells him, he goes on, "Which of these are grammatical? This is a short sentence in Asgardian. This is short a sentence in Asgardian. This is a sentence in short Asgardian. He motions at one of the men, who starts taking notes. "I have no cousins and the only war I'm on any side of is the war against the Enemy, who draws his strength from the neutrality of his brethren the Valar; therefore I think poorly on neutrality, but commend it as the appropriate stance on the disagreement between me and the cousins I don't have."
"The first is correct. The Enemy, and for that matter the other Valar, have not come off remotely well or deserving of my neutrality from the descriptions I have received. I did not see a family tree and cannot literally comment on whether you have cousins, but was not sure how else to collectively refer to them."
"Did he neglect to tell you where we grew up? The paradise of the Valar is very carefully and actively cultivated; I have seen many the exercise of power but heard only two languages spoken, and I find magic less interesting than speech. Did you know that when our people arose by Cuivienen and first invented words for the things we saw, we called ourselves "Quendi"? It means 'speakers', or arguably 'namers'. Thus the language. Quenya. The Valar renamed us. They told us we were the Eldar, "people of the stars", because we'd been born under the constellations created by Varda Elentarí, Vala of starlight. They told us that we loved starlight more than speech and loved Varda best of all the Valar, for her gift to us. It was true by the time I heard the story, but I always wondered if it was true when they gifted us the name."
My third son couldn't read. I tried to redesign the letters for him so they didn't flip in his vision while he tried to decipher them, but that might have been a mistake; he eventually attained proficiency in our private alphabet, but no one wrote it but the two of us, and he was even worse at the widely-known one. He did not have a particular talent for gem cutting, which was my fascination of the time, and he did not enjoy diplomacy, and he was merely typical at music. He was desperately unhappy and it was an unhappiness I recognized but could not cure, because my cure for myself had been to become the best at everything.
One day Oromë, Vala of the Hunt, came by our door and asked Tyelcormo to go out riding with him. They did not come back for three days, during which Tyelcormo's parents fretted, and when he did he knew the name of every plant in our forest, and could build a bow from scratch and explain to me the mechanics that made it work, and if he did not make an Elven friend for many centuries later he had the Valar as companions, and he was happy, and now he knows enough to make a way for us in this world. The Valar love the world, and they are not begrudging of their knowledge of it."
He leans back in his chair and coughs, several times, painfully. "They have absolutely no business ruling it."
"All are grammatical but the second and third are - unidiomatic. The magical language is very different from an ordinary language and I do not think many of your expectations about it will hold; I could get technical about what these symbols do do, but it is not what letters do."
The orcs had been hiding in the dense brush of these foothills, and waiting to attack until the weary host was in their midst; then more of them came pouring in, tens of thousands of them, and the front of the host was overwhelmed and desperately trying to back up into the middle of the host, which was desperately trying to protect the supplies and children.
It will keep doing that until there is no more fight. She can wield Lævateinn with enough strength to decapitate an orc even if the thing is long enough to do ten at a time, with the right shape of handle and a firm grip. She clears swaths of them, working her way outward from the host, not bending to tap but twisting to kick downed elves and see if she can get them up again.
"Well, for one thing when I'm using sorcery I am certainly no worse than the third best warrior in the realm, possibly first, I haven't used sorcery in combat enough to be sure; and for another I think the typical Asgardian warrior would take with alacrity to being aimed at orcs instead. And for a third I doubt that if I were supposed to be banished here I should expect company or that if I were not they would use the Bifrost again before discovering its problem."
"Fëanor invented our writing system, is the only Elf to speak the language of the Valar, and ran the linguistics guild until he'd managed to generate so much political drama that it collapsed under its own weight and now we have three linguistics guilds. Most of what they publish is articles about the shibboleths that have arisen among members of the linguistics guilds. I didn't share that because it seems unlikely to either kill us or save us."
"Oaths. Are a really really bad idea in general, but particularly if you have an enemy. All I'd have to do, should I wish him ill, is figure out how to orchestrate a situation where he has no choice but to kill us but we're not technically doing things in those three categories - for example, let's say I'm going to murder a random child who isn't one of Fëanor's people. I'm not the Enemy, threatening him, or going after the bloody jewelry, so he's sworn not to harm me; he's also sworn to protect the kid if there's a way for him to do so that doesn't threaten his life. Boom, broken Oath, horrible fate. Giving your sworn word is giving people strings to play you by. He knows that. That's reckless even for him."
"Well. Then it does not speak of good judgment on his part, but it may well serve your less malicious purposes as well as your hypothetical child-murdering ones. If you are that certain he'll abide by the oath you should feel quite safe settling away from his people and ignoring them and concentrating on defending against orcs and building up your own infrastructure, shouldn't you?"
"The major concern is the horses. Cavalry make a war like this a lot easier, and even a few of them would mean we could communicate reasonably quickly across significant distances. There're also precision tools for crafting - hard to make unless you already have them - a few strains of grain and legumes from Valinor that I doubt grow here, and sentimental items - tapestries and so forth."
Nod. "I can probably only offer to go through a dictionary and translate all of the words in it into Asgardian the once, so something more itemized might have ideal results - I have the impression he would prefer to pretend the entire trade is a matter of my personally wishing to carry off some items and not have to guess what you would want. ...On the fabric of the universe, I hope but do not expect you spoke hyperbolically? Oaths do not do that at home."
"Anyway, learning Asgardian is almost completely practically useless because Allspeak is customary for everyone in the speaking population, so I'm not sure even a Bifrost would make it more than academically useful for anyone. Anyway. The oaths? The fabric of the universe?"
"Oaths chain the will of the speaker, they don't just commit him. And since we don't have free will in the first place - we're Eru's creations, we're designed to play our part in his song - chaining our will isn't robbing our later selves of their free choice, it's pulling on the threads, sort of, of the fated arc of history. I think that's precisely why he does it." He hesitates. "That's how the Doom acts, as well."
The Eldar are bound to Arda for as long as it endures, and we cannot reject the creator or turn to the Enemy, though we can serve him by accident or resent them as a child resents her parents. And our fates are already decided, though most people prefer not to know them. Some of us have reliable foresight, which is only possible because everything is already settled. Men can do all of those things, because they're more like visitors to creation, and no one knows where they go when they die. You - I don't know. I'm guessing you have free will, because no one foresaw you."
"Well, there were immature adult Midgardians, to be sure. But we have seen that there are immature adult elves as well, and Asgardians too. To be sure, the Midgardians skip a lot of things. Most of them are not very well-rounded and those who aren't highborn are more likely to be illiterate than not and so on."
He shrugs. "The Teleri mostly don't read. Writing is a new invention, and Fëanor's invention, so they can't be bothered. I'm more thinking that no one could possibly parent at twenty. That's one of the most demanding tasks out there, and you hurt other people so badly if you try it and aren't up for it."
If he knew you and trusted you and some of his people had asked your aid and benefitted from it, he might be willing to discuss it. He doesn't. And his association with healing is with the Valar using their powers to assert how indebted to them we are, and treating his mother - less than ideally."
"Well," says Loki. "I can go back, ingratiate myself to his people with other, lesser injuries, and see if he will accept my help, keeping you under the protection of his oath. I can not do that. I could, I suppose, go and look for some Men and live among them instead and be assured that their generations will pass quickly enough that if I delay a succession or prolong a political mess at least it will be history in a century. And that no one I meet is operating under some sort of inexorable fate imposed by a sadistic creator which I may or may not be able to ameliorate however I try."
"Why would you fix him? He deserves to die. And if your concern is how to accomplish the most, that's obviously by defeating the Enemy; our family politics are engrossing but don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. And Melkor's defeat is fated, and not supposed to come by our hands, so even if lots of things are fixed that may be up to you."
"We're going to learn to fight. We're going to do it whether we have your aid or not, because this is a dangerous land and we need to be able to defend ourselves. My father's been planning drills for as soon as everyone's recovered physically from the ice. I am sure you have a great wealth of cultural knowledge of fighting that it would take us a thousand years to arrive at on our own, but you can't prevent a war indefinitely by keeping us incompetent at it."
"I may as well stay for now, in case orcs come back, to reinforce the idea that you have orc-blinding powers," she sighs. It is probably inconsistent to find Fëanor's priorities ridiculous and simultaneously consider the prospect of someone whose primary interest in her is linguistic soothing.
"Close enough to the source of whichever river to easily defend it if the orcs get the bright idea to poison your water, but not so close that there's not enough streams joined up to irrigate whatever you manage to grow. If I were you I'd find out what the Men grow and ask them for some of that."
"There are plants here, however disorganized their cultivation; find out what the Men have been eating and where the things keep their seeds as opposed to guessing and finding that you have discovered a poisonous berry. Is my advice, based on the plant life of worlds which have always have suns, which may be completely incorrect and which you may ignore if you like. I am planning to try my luck at fishing for my breakfast and then fly back to your cousins."
"Do we have any indication that Endorë's native population is still alive?" asks one of the strangers, a blond Elf with spiky hair.
"Well, Fëanor's people are not only alive but seem to have fairly free movement in their region; therefore other people probably survived, they'd have known the lay of the land even better. Fëanor's host may have scuttled the possibility of diplomatic first contact, though, depending how they went about it."
"All the more reason to reach out."
"Yes, I think so. Loki, you didn't happen to run into anyone else while visiting?"
"I was traveling by air," she points out. "However, they did not immediately react with bewilderment to my appearance before I introduced myself, so they may have encountered natives with round ears and other cosmetic distinctions before and do not find it remarkable that one might visit them."
"He's not?"
"Are you two speaking?"
"No," he says. "Though I think I'd talk, if I saw him. Fëanor's dying."
"Good," one of the strangers says rather fervently.
"Just, maybe," Findekáno says, "but not particularly good. Anyway, not our concern. Hunting down the locals is probably a bad way to open relations, but waiting for them to come to us seems awfully reactive. Loki, let us know if you see anyone?"
"Oh, you'll have some time now," one of the others murmurs. "We're leaving."
His face goes rather determinedly blank for a second; then he smiles. "I understand. It's my sincere hope that we can discuss this in a location that's more comfortable for you at some later time."
They both ignore that, their eyes still warily on Loki.
"That would not technically make my above statement false, would it?" He sits down and gestures at the space across from him. "We discussed it after you left. I think he might ask, given enough time, or he might not wake up - he sleeps for twenty or so hours of the day, these days - and then if we acted on his behalf he'd be grateful, later."
She sits. "Opinions are divided on whether I should heal him even if invited to do so; but apparently oaths in this realm are very serious and whether it was wise of him to make one or not it seemed well-worded to protect the peace, and will, if I understand it, expire entirely if he dies and Maitimo leads your people."
"Angband is very deep in the mountains, under magical cover, swarming with orcs, and very large. We don't know where they're holding him, if they're holding him. The locals have on occasion attempted rescues of enslaved family members, and every one of those rescue operations has ended with more people captured. The Enemy is a Vala and we're not strong enough yet to face him."
"I am a warrior sorceress from a people better acquainted with war than yours, better armed, better armored, better practiced. I do not know exactly how terrifying a Vala is in combat but it is not impossible that what seems insurmountable even to groups of your people might be doable for me."
"All right? No. Nothing would make torture all right and nearly as few situations make death all right. But I am not omnipotent and I must juggle many things I could be doing. I could be training armies to fend off orcs. I could be working on a spell to get home and travel to other realms which may need help more than yours, or for more people, or in some more efficiently deliverable way. I could be learning about the Men and seeing if they have any needs as great as yours and less fraught. I must put these things in some sensible order or I will sit, paralyzed."
"I can give you all the information we have about the Enemy, and depending on what you're intending to do I might be able to loan you a palantir. Those are all worthy ends, and at least some of them might be advanced by it." He hesitates. "And it sounds like healing my father wouldn't take long or distract from any of those priorities; why not do that now?"
"In addition to needing to order my options by how safe they are and how much good they might do and how emotionally appealing they are - I need to consider the possibility that some things I might try will make something worse. Fëanor is a charming conversationalist and I imagine if we'd met in a better circumstance I would want to be his friend, but you can imagine what I have heard and - have not directly contradicted any of it."
"I would be entirely delighted," she says, "for Fëanor to spend the rest of eternity studying languages as they morph around him, inventing alphabets and artifacts and arcany. I am simply aware that I cannot guarantee this is what he would do with restored health."
"It's not your war effort against the Enemy that has me concerned. Well, I suppose there might be a problem if it turns out I can cure orcs and they resent attacks on their uncured relatives, but that's rather farfetched. But however well I have preached charity to your cousins, they needed it preached for a reason, their resentment was not random, and I do not know what further provocations might be imagined in the millennia to come."
Melkor arranged evidence - false evidence - that my uncle was trying to persuade the King to disown my father, and evidence that my father was trying to persuade the King to exile his second wife and her children. They both disbelieved it. They took six hundred years of careful lies on Melkor's part to start mistrusting each other. It was another two hundred after that before it devolved to the point where my uncle demanded before the full court of Tirion that the King disinherit my father, and my father responded by pulling a sword on him.
It wouldn't have happened otherwise. It is not organically going to happen again."
"I don't think so, but they want me to train them in combat and I've been reluctant so if they meant to they'd have every incentive to mislead me. Also, they want some items currently in your possession and I don't know how many of them I can retrieve by offering to translate a dictionary into Asgardian."
If he said that, he means it. Is that your question?"
This is my fault."
"Well. Want better things, next time. This time - if there is no particular looming disaster associated with healing Fëanor given the conditions extant, I think I will do that, and then cruise around Angband, see if I find the entire setup laughable or at least navigable - see if I can spot Maitimo."
"Yes. The locals are calling me Amrod, which is something like what you'd get if you translate 'Ambarussa'. We're using their language for all internal communications that aren't time- or clarity- sensitive, to make it clear that we're here to aid and not to supplant them." He hesitates. "I mean, that's the official reason: the real reason is that my father is happy to engage in even the costliest of signals of friendliness if it lets him play with languages, and otherwise finds diplomacy very stressful."
"Well, sometimes stressful things are necessary. But if I find a situation in which sincere goodwill, a willingness to clearly state my opinions with arbitrary amounts of context, and the option of veiled threat do not serve me, I will be in a bit of trouble."
"When we were in exile Melkor came by the house and offered to help my father find the means to leave Valinor without the consent of the other Valar. My father was intrigued, that having been a persistent goal of his, and stood at the door to hear him out. Until Melkor implied that he would, of course, claim the payment he rightly merited for that service, and then my father slammed the door in his face. If he'd asked to negotiate payment he'd have been fine; it was the implication that he did not need to." He cocks his head. "I think my father's awake."
"Good morning. It occurred to me that it might entertain you to hear some Asgardian in another accent. My friend and I were separated on leaving Asgard but I can produce illusions of his voice and he's from a different part of the planet." She helps herself to a chair. "You should be advised that if you touch me you might spontaneously recover from some or all of your ill health due to healing magic."
"No, it doesn't. Self-repair is a physical process operating on a physical body and needs something physical to work with; you can make your blood move, or clot, through conscious control, you can ask your bone marrow to produce it faster, but you cannot spontaneously generate it. Likewise with starvation. How does your magic do it?"
"It has a high-level understanding of what being 'healthy' looks like. Healthy does not necessarily include being full; I cannot make starving people comfortable in this way. But I can undo deterioration that has already been caused by lack of fuel the same way I can close a wound or replace a lost layer of skin. Sorcery isn't incapable of creating matter. ...Also, I cannot in fact do those things."
"I doubt it, and wouldn't care to try to explain such a thing to your children. I've healed Elves before with no ill effects so I know it works on the species, at least. But I don't know what's wrong with you in the first place, so I cannot be absolutely certain."
She illusions these sentences too. "Although, referring to houses as Asgardian is odd. One might say the architecture or one of its features were Asgardian; in other contexts you might refer to Asgardian homes; but a house doesn't have a nationality in the sense most readily attached to the word 'Asgardian'."
"I'd like to go to my workshop; I'm significantly more functional when I can spend most of the day in there, and now I can again. Thank you. Would you like to walk there with me? This is a sentence in Asgardian, which is self-referential and exhibits most of the phonemes. Be as self-referential as you can? "
Loki bursts out laughing. "Grammatical. Slightly bizarre but I can imagine you saying it for its content anyway. I will accompany you. Although I do not mean to stay here all day; I want to discreetly investigate Angband, see if I find it seems as unassailable as others have reported."
She makes an illusion of the capital of Asgard and floats it along as they walk. "I've been trained in combat since I'd mastered the task of walking; I suspect I am stronger and more durable than an elf, if worse in the senses; and I have illusions and I can fly and the healing spells can be cast on myself; and I brought with me one of the finest weapons of my warlike and technically advanced culture."
"The powers of this world are collectively called the Ainur, of which the Valar are the greatest; they can all adopt forms of their choosing, though it takes a long time and most of the ones who have bodies have a single one they use persistently. Many of the Ainur who serve Moringotto take the form of warped and distorted creatures of fire. If you are near them they'll burn you; if they strike you they'll leave serious burns to your skin in the areas they touch; damaging them sufficiently will make them retreat, but we have yet to kill one. They generally don't aim to kill, they try to take prisoners. There are Elven slaves in Angband who may be made to open fire on you. There are orcs, which I assume you've already encountered. The whole place is shrouded in magical darkness and in the middle of a impassable mountain range. The mountains can crumble at the Enemy's will. There are other creatures he has bred or is breeding, but we know very little about them."
"I have not killed anything that was a creature of fire in particular; it's been frost giants and assorted giant reptiles for the most part. But the healing spell will work on burns. I have met orcs; I routed some thousands of them when they ran upon being blinded and deafened. While I'm investigating the place I'll see if my illusions can beat the darkness; I can make them cling to real objects and would be able to navigate that way if the darkness yields, even if I can't see the real things."
"This should be both," Fëanor says, "hand me drawing paper? Thank you, Loki. Be as safe as you can. Be as deadly as you can. Be as self-referential as you are."
"All right. We have storage rooms here." He starts walking. "I suppose I should verify that you are taking these to my cousins instead of running off with them, but it makes little difference to me one way or the other. How about one of the tapestries, a map of the region, local population, and local borders as far as we've been able to discern it - that's not rightly theirs, of course, but as a gesture of good will - and a few of the magic artifacts? They'll need a palantir but if they use it to communicate with my father they might rile each other up again, and they'll need some things from the workshop but Father and Curvo have barricaded themselves there. And the grain and the horses are bulky."
"These," he says, picking one up. "Anyone with one can see through any of the others, and communicate with anyone in possession of one. You can also use one to disrupt the others or send misleading messages through them, so we really cannot afford to hand them over, but Father gave one to Nolofinwë as a gift a millennia ago and that one is technically theirs. ...It can go in the second round of deliveries. You're welcome to look, but understand that if one of them were to go missing we'd have to stop using all of them under the assumption it's in Enemy hands, and that would greatly hamper our war effort."
"They held festivals at which my father's attendance was mandated, and my uncle's, and demanded that they talk through their differences in front of Manwë's throne. They exiled us until my uncle forgave my father. They held very lengthy and tedious hearings to unravel all of the accusations and hurts on both sides. They Doomed us all together." He almost smiles.
"These seem substantively different from my plan, but perhaps mine will not work either. I do not require any particular individuals to participate, anyway, there are thousands of you, the relatively unrelated to the dramatic proceedings could be the ones to receive the instruction."
"It seems plausible that you, personally, would benefit from the chance to take large numbers of Elves with no strong attachment to their current leadership and train them extensively. It seems less plausible that it would benefit us. I would counsel my King not to permit anyone to take part in such training."
"I have the same impression, but I honestly don't know if it is or not. Anyone can learn sorcery in the usual way, but I do it - backwards. If we think of my two hundred nine symbols as an alphabet, I'm inventing languages and writing librariesful of meaning with them and ordinary sorcerers make literary allusions and compose found poetry. It may be impossible to do it the way I do without receiving the same gift from the same dangerous artifact."
"Seeds are most useful in significant quantities; I don't know how appreciative they'd be of two pounds of them, especially when we had relatively low yields in the first three iterations - we have greenhouses, we've been trying different growing conditions...anything else they mentioned specifically?"
"I know more seeds than that will be needed eventually, but they may make some blunder in their first attempt at irrigation or planting without divine intervention leaning over their shoulders and could benefit from an initial trial of some crop that isn't too dear. And I'm not sure how to reckon the season when the sun is a novelty; perhaps it is about to be winter, perhaps you're going to have monsoons, a sun is a rather major factor in the weather on most planets."
"Please don't. If they think we're wracked with guilt they'll ask for more, and my father will decide to set them straight by doing something to communicate exactly how little guilt he wants them to believe he feels, and then everything will be much worse. I would, if it were in my power, have every one of them healed, safe, secure and well-fed, but not if they'd know I did it, or wanted it."
"Maybe, yes. I could aim for a destructive spell. Or I could do one that will let me travel freely and see if my mother wanted me dead after all and if she didn't I can fetch an Asgardian army - or if I can't rally one of those, someone else, maybe someone more suited, there are many realms. Asgard as a culture makes a number of tradeoffs against its efficacy."
"My father thinks that we can hold a siege of Angband for four to five hundred years before the Enemy's ability to breed new soldiers, and the results of his new experiments, and the fruits of the magic he can, as a Vala, work over great lengths of time would make that untenable. He's aiming to kill him in three hundred, to be on the safe side. Is that a timeline you could conceivably work with?"
"None occurs to me. Findekáno is probably very afraid that you'll decide you like us; he regards it as a terrible and costly mistake which well-intentioned people can make in an instant and repent of at their leisure. So go back to them, mention how callous we are and how little we care about them, and everyone's happy."
"I've known him for more than a thousand years. And he and Nelyo went through this when my father threatened his, when the exile happened, when the Darkening happened, when the Kinslaying happened - it wasn't a cycle, exactly, because every iteration drove them farther apart and hurt them both more, but it was a spiral of sorts. Coming back to places that paralleled places they'd been before. And I know what Findekáno said to his sister about caring about the House of Fëanor, because she repeated it all to us, quite angrily, the last time she and Tyelcormo fought."
They currently don't want to interact with us. It seems that you and I have an interest in ensuring that remains true; that means not sharing that I wish them well, just as it'd be cruel to tell Findekáno that Maitimo never broke his word to him. Given how much transpired here, it seems it wouldn't be at all hard to share information that confirms their impression we are indifferent to them, will not react to petitions, and desire never to see them again. That's completely different than telling them something false. That would be evil and cowardly; I would wrong you greatly by suggesting it."
"Because it's his choice, and I know the one he would have made. He never wanted their sympathy when it was bought by making him the good one, the victim of my father's choices, the exception. And - he cared about Findekáno, and if Findekáno grieves a little bit less because he falsely believes that he was deceived and betrayed, all the better. Grief is not -" he grimaces - "a helpful emotion."
She didn't come with a bow - she was planning to get one on Midgard; the ones they have are adequate for hunting - so when she wakes up she looks around for edible plants, spearable animals, or an orc to capture and distract her from hunger.
When they circle back around to his family, he nods at them and keeps going.
"Shame you scared off all the orcs," Irissë says.
"The next time I see one I'm going to catch it and see if being an orc counts as 'injured'," Loki says. "Have I heard it rumored correctly that you would enjoy learning to fight via the expedient of you and Tyelcormo beating one another up on a routine basis? It was suggested that for some reason this would make it look less like I was training people to be my private army, although I think I may be missing a step or two in why that might be."
"I'm not, and I don't want it to look like I am, but my idea for avoiding unbalanced combat training was to train only mixed groups. So you could see what they were learning and vice-versa, and learn enough to have less lethal fights if it came to that while simultaneously being better equipped for opposing the Enemy. Maglor thought that - especially if to avoid awkward family drama it was mostly people not closely related to the royalty who attended - this would look like I was trying to amass a force of my own. His suggestion to avoid this impression was you and Tyelcormo being present and fighting."
They have better arms and armor, because Fëanor is gifted in the forge and because they stole ours. Just in case that affects the calculus here."
"I wouldn't start you on armed combat, for all that you've been accustomed to swords. You start learning to fall and move your feet. The absolute most important things to know about fighting is that you should not let the floor be a weapon against you and you should not be in any place about to be visited by a weapon."
"Then maybe I could skip you along. But if they want to learn and not just look good they'll share their better swords if they're better enough to make a difference and everyone will be paired with a partner of similar sword quality so it's their skills and not their equipment that's affecting the feedback on their performance. If we don't wind up just using wooden practice swords, which is also an option."
And I'm really not sure that if you put us and them in the same place with swords you won't just get, uh, violence."
Nod, nod. "Fëanor's people intend to hold something of a siege of Angband for the next three centuries and try to kill the Enemy in that time frame. I should have teleportation that will go between realms by then, and can probably find reinforcements or at least useful supplies that way."
"If I ever really need to distract Fëanor I suppose I can tell him that there are thousands of languages throughout the realms and while I can only use my translation magic to speak so that those who are near me will understand, I can write for an arbitrary audience."
Mind, they'd both have been dead if they'd both been home. But I don't think he got that. And he went from unreliable and frustrating and obsessive but about intellectual things, to dangerous, polemical, and utterly single-minded. It was - really scary. If that happens again, I don't know what we'd do."
She laughs. She sends a memory. It's of some great white space, very very dark, crowded with people holding torches. Fëanor is speaking. "Fair shall the end be,” he cries, "though long and hard shall be the road! Say farewell to bondage! But say farewell also to ease! Say farewell to the weak! Say farewell to your treasures! More still shall we make. Journey light: but bring with you your swords!"
"No, he's not. It was a beautiful speech. Very moving. If you've ever seen a hundred thousand people stirred to war in an hour, though - it's scary. And -" another flash of memory - "After Morgoth to the ends of the Earth! War shall he have and hatred undying. But when we have conquered and have regained the Silmarils, then we and we alone shall be lords of the unsullied Light, and masters of the bliss and beauty of Arda. No other race shall oust us!”
I'm not saying you shouldn't teach them to fight. I'm just saying if you've seen Fëanor the way he is normally, you have not seen him when he's cornered or hurt. And when he is, what he does is -"
"Come away!" he shouts, in her memories, and people stamp their feet, and the torches bob in the air. "Let the cowards keep this city!”
She's still lost in thought. "Anyway. Sorry. You got our stuff back from them and I didn't think that was even possible. I just don't want you to start thinking you can manage him, because he usually reserves his really trying for things that don't matter and you're going to get hurt the first time you two are at odds and he starts really trying."
I'm not Findekáno. I knew he'd choose his father, and I knew he'd sell us out, and neither of us were ever under the illusion that there were any promises there. He's never going to apologize and even if I'm okay, being friends on terms like those, it wouldn't be fair to my family. But getting the chance to, uh, work on something together again, without it having to mean that I've forgiven him -"
He's never once admitted that I'm a better shot than him - well, not when sober - but he's also never ever said, even when I was a kid and he was teaching me, that I'm a remarkably good shot for a girl, or for a Nolofinwean, or for anything at all other than an archer.
And he left us to die and it'd be very satisfying to smack him around for it."
"I was an intensely clumsy child. I could walk. Barely, if I was very careful and went very slowly and had a walking stick or touched the wall. I couldn't run, I couldn't even think about trying to do footwork with a sword in hand - they had me on archery, because I could pull a bow all right, but I was never going to be able to do it from a horse or on the move. They thought I grew out of it. I didn't. It's a spell, the first one I made, it lets me move perfectly. I pretended that it had turned out that, all along, all I needed was a good dance instructor; and Thor practically shouted down the palace for joy and crowded out half my tutors trying to teach me everything herself."
"I can't let you go if you're going to hurt Elves," she murmurs. "Or bring information to Melkor."
"Elves don't marry or have children in troubled times," she says. "There are only so many Elves now. But if orcs weren't attacking them, they would calm down, and there would be many, many Elves, and even without orcs around they would find things in their lives that hurt them; and eventually they would die, because eventually they would meet with accident or violence from some non-orc, or they'd fade away; and this could be billions and billions of Elves, over long enough, which would otherwise never be born to hurt and die."
"I am asking you to think. You know what I want from you and you know I'm strong enough to get it. Can you think of any way for you to get anything you want given that? For you and for any of your friends and family I can catch or get Elves to catch for me."
"Well," she says. "There may not be a solution."
"You could turn us into mountain goats or wild cats? It's a bit closer to being an orc so it wouldn't be as scary, we couldn't go home because the other orcs would think we were food and eat us. Or you could send us to a faraway place with no Elves where we can only serve Melkor by having more children and teaching them."
"How does Melkor's mind-reading work?"
"...Depends on what you mean by 'orc'. I don't want there to be people who are in pain all the time. I don't want there to be people who have to hate and fight Elves. There might be other things that are true of the orcs that there are now, that I don't want. But if there can be orcs who don't have those traits then it would be good for those orcs to be, and be happy."
She lets it up, the better to pace. "I don't know what would happen either. I think I need to talk to someone who knows more about oaths than I do. Unfortunately, short of going and seeing if Melkor feels like talking without having to read my mind or kill me or something like that, all of those people are Elves; and I definitely can't leave you here unattended."
"Yep. And you know a lot of things Melkor mustn't know, now. So I suppose I could turn you and your friends all into birds temporarily and tie you up and carry you to the Elves, which I imagine you'd find very unpleasant but it'd mean I could keep an eye on you while I asked them about oaths."
"Because then you have more information to use to think of ideas. There are things you know that I don't, and if something I know plus something you know is a good idea, and if you don't know exactly what to tell me or you can't tell me, then I can put those pieces of information together by telling you. I couldn't risk it if I didn't know that I can kill you if I have to, but I'd still rather not."
"No. We're named when we're born. Some people have the same name, but there are still enough names that usually people can tell who you mean. I did have to earn being considered an adult, though, I had to go kill a creature that was bothering a town without help or magic."
She has string - she has, in fact, fancy high-tech string that in Asgardian fashion looks like twine. She knots it around wings and loops it around feet.
She turns the other four orcs into birds too, and ties them up, all in a line. Then she heals them, in case they wake up on the hike; she can't carry five swifts while she is one and she's going to have to walk. She scoops them up; she could dangle them but this is more comfortable.
The swifts can't speak. But Loki can. She explains, on the way, the contents of the conversation she had with the one orc, and where they're going, and why they don't hurt anymore, and that they will not have to die as birds even if it does turn out they have to die; and she will listen to their ideas, if they come up with any between here and their next chance to talk; and she will not let Elves kill them while they're helpless.
Hike hike hike hike hike she only just recently learned to turn into a bird and walking shouldn't have become this tedious this quickly.
She trudges, fully visible and with an armful of birds, up to the walls of the settlement and inquires after Fëanor's availability.
"Speaks Asgardian, can turn invisible, can fly but doesn't seem to work for Manwë, can do illusions, can do illusions with accents, my father assigned you quite a lot of unique signifiers before he got down to 'has healing magic that saved my life.' Tyelcormo, incidentally. The greenhouses are on the other side of camp."
"Ah, you're the one with the mutual desire to brawl with Irissë. Thank you for the directions," says Loki. "Incidentally - these birds are presently under my protection, and completely harmless at this moment, and I would appreciate it very much if no one made me drop them in order to look out for their continuing to have all their feathers; but if they were not birds you would certainly not invite them in. Should I explain further before I bring them in or does my guarantee suffice?"
"I can speak with animals. Father says it's clearly a linguistic talent that anyone would have if they tried, or if not they'd fail only because they lack the relevant sensory acuity. Oromë says it's a blessing from Eru. It's sort of like osanwë, only requires much more mental...the ability to put yourself in something's head, know the thoughts that will resonate with it and use those ones. I can talk to your swifts, too, but they're scared and panicked and I don't know them, it'd take a little while."
In she steps. "It was suggested that they were made from Elves originally. I wondered if a healing spell might turn them back. It doesn't. But - I'm not an Elf and therefore not inherently abominable to orcs, and confronted with a small group of orcs I did not need to kill them to assure my own safety. So I talked to the one I left conscious. This one," she indicates the one, "and I had quite a long conversation and I learned many heartbreaking orc facts and we are jointly out of ideas for ways orcs can be safely allowed to live. But I think very highly of Fëanor's intellect, and too suspect him of expertise on the local phenomenon of oath-making, and thought he might be able to think of something."
"Well, that sounds like an excellent but time-consuming plan, and I am not patient by nature. ...You could consider it a mercy the next time you have to kill one, especially if there is no solution found today. Apart from these five they are - all in constant pain."
"Well, no one told me that it was a chronic condition until this one expressed confusion that it had stopped. And they didn't start shapeshifting when I applied the spells. I know little enough about what it would have taken to provoke you to lethal force; I am badly calibrated about Elves' willingness to go to war."
"So are all of us, apparently, because if you'd asked a few years ago..." he shakes his head rather like a wet dog. The similarity is made more obvious by Huan shaking beside him. "Anyway. Greenhouses. Dad. He'll have heard us coming so if he pretends to be surprised that's just his way of communicating that he resents interruptions."
"I'd much prefer to be 'Loki' and not 'Odinsdottir' if you shorten my name. I have mixed feelings about my matronymic. Asgardian for 'my prisoners are undoubtedly distressed and ought not to have to wait' would be -" And she renders that sentence sans Allspeak.
"I accept your apology. And yes. And they do not like Elves. Because they were obliged on learning to speak to so swear. But they don't want to die - insofar as the one who spoke to me can be called representative - and this is the way I have to make them harmless while seeking advice and not letting them out of my sight."
"To serve him, and to hate and hurt and kill and take as prisoners Elves. With apparently enough leeway to allow them to retreat if they're guaranteed to lose a battle but not enough to make the problem of how to humanely treat a captive orc very tractable."
So she goes outside, and unties the orc she spoke to from the end. Swifts being unable to walk and incapable of taking off from the ground she doesn't have to be particularly careful with an untied bird; she puts it on the ground held down by one hand, forks Lævateinn around it for an orc-sized pin, and reverses the transformation.
Tyelcormo whistles. Huan whimpers.
"Okay," says Fëanor. "I think I can work with that."
Fëanor is still writing. "It's an engineering problem, yes? We have constraints and a goal and an underlying physical law. Principles of oaths: you can't get around them, exactly, by a narrow or legalistic interpretation: it's as much a binding to the intent you gave voice with your words as to the words. I say 'as much' because the opposite is not true: if an oath obliges you to do something that went against your intent in speaking it, you're still stuck. The person who taught me this said that the forces of Fate are sticky: they will entangle you certainly every time when you intended it and sometimes when they didn't.
I have sworn, for example, not to harm anyone who does not serve the Enemy, threaten me or mine, or withhold a Silmaril. Can I escape this by deciding 'anyone' is the name of a specific acquaintance, and the rest of the world is fair game? No, of course not. Could I have done this if it were the latter interpretation I had in mind when I spoke that oath? No. An oath is a realization of an intent - in that case, my intent to reassure you and get my father's children by his second wife to go away - and can't be subverted with trivial tricks of language.
But a child chanting words they've been taught has the intent to recite the words correctly and win their parents' praise, or the intent to be the cleverest, or the intent to be seen as grown. When she first spoke these words, she bound herself, don't get me wrong. But with the intent absent we have only the words, and alone they're not as sticky."
Loki murmurs what Fëanor says to the orc as he says it. ...And blinks at the orc, whose sex she had not been able to discern. Female orc, okay. "This is all new to me," she says, when he's done. "...What about making an oath makes it an oath? I was surprised that a little child new to language would be able to do something that counted at all; and apparently it loosens but does not eliminate the binding...?"
Anyway, yes. Tell her - I can understand her but I don't think I want to try saying something this precise in her language -
Tell her that we are not Elves. That 'Elves' is a name the Powers gave us, the Powers that Melkor hates, when they wanted us to be their pretty pets in paradise. Before that we were the Quendi, a name of our own choosing; we, too, hate 'Elves', an ideal of what our people should be that exists in the minds of the Valar and bears only a distorted resemblance to the creatures we are. Tell her that the only Elves are in Valinor; every creature that walks these lands is a Quendi, and she needs not hate us."
"Yes... Fëanor, I'd actually already gotten as far as 'it is not necessary to attack anyone because if you hold off they will calm down and have children and then billions of Elves will eventually stub their toes and have accidents while undertaking extreme sports, causing much more total hurt and death'. The problem is that if they are let go they will return to Melkor for new orders and I assume he is not so easily out-logicked."
"That's clever," he says approvingly, "Hmm. 'Melkor, greatest of the Powers'. Every people know the powers by a different name, many different names. For example, I don't call the Enemy Melkor, you should stop calling the enemy Melkor, I think the only Quendi who call the Enemy Melkor are my father's children by his second wife who are doing it specifically to annoy me. She serves the greatest of the Powers, and at least someone must know the power she serves as Melkor. Well...does she know the Vala who kindled the Stars? By most accounts she's the greatest of the powers, and I imagine we can arrange for someone to know her as Melkor. That wouldn't normally work. But if the Enemy's fond of descriptive flourishes in his Oaths that could be used to identify another, and if the Oath was spoken by a speaker with no concept of what she was speaking..."
"For that matter, does the understanding of 'Power' admit of beings from other realms? I don't know exactly how to quantify the power of Valar but there are things and persons of outrageous might elsewhere in the multiverse, bearing epithets like 'planet-eater'; conceptual entities; sufficiently canny bearers of artifacts like the one that taught me magic..."
And so Loki tells a story from her childhood about One-Above-All, who supposedly created literally everything in every realm and world and reality at some remove or another - she edits out the part where he is supposed to be supremely loving, as this has always seemed dubious to her and does not improve the verisimilitude - "and it seems reasonable to translate the theme of his titles as 'Melkor'."
If it works, then she's chosen that interpretation, with intent, and the ambiguity is resolved and she's a servant of your One-Above-All so we'll hope he stays out of things. And she's bound for all the Ages of the world, but I don't see a way out of that. If it really works then that resolution of the ambiguity of the Oath would become the one the universe defaults to, and any orc who is aware there's a choice between Melkors could choose yours.
If it doesn't work, then I'm not sure what will happen. It is not impossible that it would cause her the same pain she'd experience on breaking the Oath, in which case I hope you are prepared to kill her immediately."
"I mean on the part of the speaker, I mean can I blanket Angband in silence and force him to move or stop using this method of orc control -" She turns to the orc. "Yes, you have the idea right. That and the part where if you don't hurt Elves more of them will be hurt in the long run, remember that part too."
The orc is watching this exchange nervously. "What if I don't want to say it anymore because I wish I never had?"
I am reasonably confident that One-Above-All does not allocate his attention in any sensible way if he exists in the first place, Loki doesn't say. "Yes," she says. "- And the only Elves are the ones in Valinor, so you will not need to try to kidnap anyone here."
She breathes, a little unsteadily.
Loki shakes her head. "We weren't sure if it would interact badly with the first version of the oath," she explains. "But if you're all right, if it worked, then no, I don't have to kill you." And she withdraws the shape of the blade until it's just a short stick in her hand. She offers her other hand to help the orc up.
"I don't think it'll work unless they want to transfer their loyalties and are grateful to learn that they can, which may not describe all of them," Fëanor says. "On the bright side, you shouldn't personally be required to do it; we are in fact capable of pinning orcs down and persuading them of alternate interpretations of their fundamental belief system, and perhaps she can help us."
"I'll still need to come by to solve their pain problem, but that I can do as quickly as I can touch them. And I'm not entirely sure they will be willing to talk to you, especially if they're skeptical to begin with of the 'Quendi' part and also without the pain relief. So yes, her help would probably be invaluable." To the orc: "...Would you like a name? I could give you a name or you could make one up for yourself."
Vár takes its hand as it starts to react and says, "no, it's okay, she serves a more powerful Melkor, that's why she can make us stop hurting. It has to be! Think about it! We're sworn to pain undying if we don't serve Melkor, and she can make the pain stop, and wants us to know about the Melkor who's a greater power. Clearly, we've been hurting all this time because we weren't doing our oath right!"
They talk it over at length, Vár quite enthusiastically. Eventually the new orc, looking bewilderedly between Vár and Loki, says 'the Melkor you know wants us to swear again, but we have to understand that all these" - it gestures around the camp - "aren't Elves and we should let Elves multiply before we kill them?"
"You don't have to kill them. They can die in other ways; and the longer it takes the more time they have to accumulate hurt from their lives; and you should not lift a finger to help that along either, just find other things to do. There are other not-Elves on this continent; it's only in Valinor that there are real Elves."
"If you came by every Elenya and Aldúya we could be sure to have something for you every time you do, and it'd give us a bit of time to catch new ones up to speed in between - mind, we can only use and would only feel safe having around a hundred here. Beyond that, maybe you can fly them way down south and hope they'll draw the conclusion your Melkor wants them to stay down there? What does your Melkor want?"
"Well, as noninterventionist deities go he's generally understood to be a very nice sort," says Loki. "I imagine he'd like the orcs to settle somewhere and have a thriving trade relationship with their neighbors and make sure that their children do not have the chronic pain issue or have to swear any oaths; oaths are not his standard modus operandi at all."
"Convenient," Macalaurë murmurs. And then, "I'm sorry, that's appallingly rude of me; you've given me no reason to doubt your honesty. How long would it take you to fly orcs sufficiently far south that even if they end up having inaccurate beliefs about what your Melkor wants of them they'll still probably be out of trouble?"
"I can't carry them in the air even if I turn them into birds," she says. "They'd have to learn to fly themselves, which took me a few weeks since I have no actual bird instincts. They might be able to do it faster since someone could pick them up for repeated attempts at takeoff and won't have to hide that they're practicing, but takeoff from the ground is impossible. How far is far enough?"
"Well, top swift speed is a little over a hundred miles an hour, so once they do learn to fly - they will need me to change them and someone to pick them up and repeatedly drop them until they manage not to hit the ground - they can get farther than that. I can go looking for a reasonable place to settle orcs next time I'm out flying without anything pressing to do. What and when are Elenya and Aldúya? Are those days of a week?"
Loki laughs at this description of her. "All right. So day after tomorrow and then three days after that I will swing by to apply various magic to orcs who are undergoing their philosophical swordpoint conversions. If my Melkor sounds convenient do mind that I had an array of powerful entities to choose from; no one would have known any better if I'd said the multiverse power level topped out at the disagreeable fellow who snacks on planets."
"It is untrue," she agrees. "Although... I think a story about the most powerful entity in the universe who simply happens never to do anything substantial might not be so popular if he were rumored to lurk malevolently instead of supervise in a benign manner; so I might not have heard of him if he were terrible."
"No, I'm wondering if Fëanor's available for consultation on a related matter, although perhaps you can answer the question. According to him actually generating sound is necessary for an oath to hold, absent sign language. I can blanket Angband in silence. The trouble is Moringotto might then decide that the thing for it is to move, and even though this will not be very effective it could disrupt the plans of anyone in his way. So I would like to time the thing intelligently."
"Don't think he'll move," Tyelcormo says, "it took thousands of years to lay the foundations of Angband."
Macalaurë nods. "He'll probably develop a signed language - though I don't think he has a particular gift for that -"
"He can ask Nelyo," says Tyelcormo rather tightly, and they both go silent.
Nelyo was our older brother."
"I occasionally get the impression that people are trying very hard not to offend me and I don't know where I gave the seeming that I am easily offended. If Moringotto can crush me like an insect this is important for me to learn in as unembellished a form as possible and I will not consider the messenger to be slighting my various abilities. I would like to know all available detail about how he might choose to do that so I can consider options to circumvent him and evade detection in the first place and so on."
"Moringotto has crushed everything that has gone up against him, save the other Valar, like an insect. I have no idea what that means, because I don't know your capabilities, and you keep revealing new ones. Moringotto's servants are Maiar, and should have all of the attendant abilities, and yet they haven't tried assassinations and we don't know why not. Perhaps the Enemy swore not to, at some point, back in Valinor when he was pretending to have reformed; if so that Oath might apply to you, or might not. We are facing an utterly unknown situation, which is why we are behind a mountain range and some thick walls rather than rescuing my brother. I assure you, this family does not like being ignorant and wouldn't pretend at it. If i'm telling you that nothing makes sense, or that the things we know are inconsistent, they don't and they are."
"I am actually running out of new abilities to reveal, but I can develop more if I know what to aim for. When I have sustained downtime I'm planning to begin work on a teleportation spell. It may be entirely reasonable for me not to approach Angband again at all until I can do it with a million Asgardian warriors and some of the technology they don't like to use because it's considered tacky at my back. What are the attendant abilities of Maiar?"
"She should talk to Thindicollo's wife," Tyelcormo says.
"Oh," says Macalaure. "Yes, she should; I should have suggested that first. The native population in this region is ruled by an Elf who married one of the Maiar. His name is Elwë Thindicollo, and we have not been able to secure an audience because he is professionally paranoid; his wife's name is Melian, and she uses her abilities to magically protect a realm several hundred miles across southeast of here. That'd be the person to ask about all this. Though, out of curiosity, what kind of technology is it considered tacky to use in an Asgardian war?"
"It is considered tacky to use certain technology in Asgard at all. At least visibly. There are materials we don't use because they can't be made to have the look and feel and weight of things we could have made before they were invented; sometimes it's hidden - the string I tied up the birds with was an example - but you have to look very hard to find anything that will admit to needing sophisticated industry for its construction. We could fit the complete written works of a hundred worlds in a box you could tuck under your arm and carry; but if you do that, your libraries will look empty and won't smell like leather and paper and vellum. We could make weapons that outclass a bow of any draw weight for range and shoot bolts of energy either more or less lethal than an arrow, as the wielder prefers; but if you do that it's hard to feel like a rugged warrior with hard-won combat skills. We could make vehicles that fly. They can even be lovely to look at, and if made well they can fly in silence. We ride horses because we like horses. I like horses myself but I think we have made too many of these concessions. But Asgardian engineers pride themselves on making their technology look like magic and their magic look like simple underdeveloped but exquisitely fine tools."
Tyelcormo shakes his head. "Nonetheless, at the moment there's a war on, and if there's any occasion to compromise our aesthetic sense..."
"I don't disagree," says Macalaure.
"Yes. So perhaps I won't go to Asgard except to verify that my mother meant me to survive, collect some treasure out of the treasury, and go to another realm and outfit an army of Quendi with ray guns and skimmer ships. I am afraid I do not know how to do most of these things myself. As a child I considered engineering as a pursuit - it's more socially acceptable for a girl than outright magic, as long as she walks the fine line of which projects she can and cannot bring to the sparring hall - but then I had my magic building blocks and it commanded most of my time. So I have read more books than most Asgardians on where all our technology is hiding but I haven't practiced to retain it well."
A sigh. "Her kingdom is magically hidden. It's also large - several hundred miles across - so it ought to be chartable, but we're mostly surveying by climbing mountain peaks and that's not a good way to find a magically hidden stretch of territory. Southeast. The locals all know it, though they're on bad terms with Thindicollo for reasons they've yet to confide in me."
"So perhaps that would be intractable. Especially as it occurs to me that I know how to ride Asgardian-trained horses and it would be an astounding coincidence if yours were taught the same. I can ask permission to have a couple of your people along to divide the horses into shorter strings and see what your cousins think of that."
"If Moringotto or one of his Maiar attacks me personally I will probably have trouble - of some unclear magnitude; I do not know exactly how much and that's what I'm going to look for the hidden land to find more about - but if it's orcs and it's too many for me to knock out and take captive, they have shown willing to run if they're suddenly blind and deaf."
"I gave Loki my word I'd give her the things our cousins have a claim to," Macalaurë says.
"Did you say when? Because I'm not putting people in danger so you can redeem your word faster."
Tyelcormo interrupts him. "They're very large, burn everything in close proximity, have fast-moving whips, and we have yet to determine how to kill them; it might require specialized weapons."
"I'd strongly prefer not to make a production out of it," Macalaure says, "on the assumption that they would be unwilling to play such a production as grateful receipt of an act of charity and we'd be unwilling to play it as an admission of past wrongdoing."
"Without rather forcefully tacking on 'which you stole from us when you abandoned us to the mercy of the Valar?" Tyelcormo shakes his head. "I'm impressed that you've talked them into moving to the other side of the continent and not confronting us. I have to imagine they're itching to, no matter how much they've concluded it's a bad idea."
"While I'm looking for Doriath I will drop by and mention the logistical trouble and the reformation of orcs and the associated linguistic updates they will need to make. I assume it doesn't matter what they call themselves or Moringotto as long as it isn't specifically 'Elves' and 'Melkor'?"
She lands just outside the forest of headache and turns pedestrian, Lævateinn a harmless stick at her belt, and looks for a good place to stash her wyvern-tail dagger before approaching. Lævateinn she doesn't want to put down but the dagger is more replaceable.
"I seek information on the powers of Maiar and Valar - the Enemy in particular - so I may better plan to address the problem the Enemy presents. I have unusual powers from another, faraway realm, but they are not designed for combating a Vala, and before I design further powers I need to know more about what I am dealing with. Your queen was recommended to me as someone to talk to if only I could find her."
"Very well. I am from another realm - in most realms, incidentally, everyone you might meet has free will - far from here, stranded in this world in what was most likely an accident on everyone's part and certainly was on mine. I have a variety of magical powers, including healing magic, the bird thing, and the illusions. I can convert orcs to harmlessness given long enough to talk to them and I am significantly stronger and a little tougher than an Elf, but I have worse vision and hearing and some impairments of osanwë. And I can't walk on snow. I can invent more spells. I have considered silencing Angband by illusion to prevent new orcs from being forced to take their oaths, at least until such time as they have a sign language; but this would be conspicuous, and I do not know how well I can afford a confrontation with the Enemy or a balrog. I would appreciate your Queen's guess."
Back a few minutes later. "My queen conveys the following: No other realms are known to the Powers of this one; if Ilúvatar had a hand in their creation he did not speak of them to us, and it might be best that their existence not become known to our shared Enemy. Your compassion for orcs speaks of a virtuous heart; you will be relieved to know that when they die they go to the Halls of Mandos, who judges them justly and rehabilitates them for a new life if this is possible. You should have a sense of how your magic behaves when you attempt to use it to counter my own; the Enemy is a power far stronger than I, but I can sometimes defeat him in specific and narrow contexts when I do not have the whole force of his attention."
"I've never encountered a need to concentrate on an illusion I'd placed before at all," says Loki, permitting the darkness to completely recede. "If the Enemy has pushback like that arranged over his fortress I will not be able to keep it silent as effortlessly as I'd envisioned. I was able to turn some of his smoke invisible, and myself both that and inaudible, when I attempted reconnaissance; but I don't know if that was a matter of scale or my being unexpected."
There are actually quite a few variants on the enchanted forest look, though the silvery light pervades all of it. There are rivers in places the geography would not naturally produce rivers, bubbling with fresh and clear-looking water, the colorful stones on the river floor clearly visible. There are valleys full of yellow flowers, with the trees curving in overhead to still obscure the sky. There are gorges with fallen trees lying across them for makeshift bridges; there are shimmering pools where deer and hummingbirds drink.
"Welcome to Menegroth," the Elf says, now quite proudly.
They descend a very long staircase into more wide-ceilinged hallways. The walls are carved to give the impression of trees, quite capably; between that and the flowers still carpeting the ground, and the much greater density of Elves hurrying along on their way, one could almost believe they were still aboveground.
"The Enemy can force us underground, but gains rather little from it." He turns another corridor into the largest room yet, easily the size of a stadium; trees - real or stone - grow up all around it and wind into hypnotic patterns in their upper branches, a waterfall makes the back wall into silvery glass, and the floor resembles a pristine field of delicate grass, despite the hundreds of people (and numerous small children) currently walking through it. Two people sit in elaborate state at the opposite end.
"I would first hear more of who you'd share it with. The arrival of visitors from overseas was unexpected. We had petitioned the Valar for aid, when we combatted at once the Enemy and his greatest and most terrible ally; the Valar communicated that no aid was possible, and not much afterwards we heard of a great fleet afire on our northern shore. A surprising turn of events."
She squeezes her husband's hand. "We are ill-equipped to rule your kind; our hearts move differently and the Ages rush by for us. That is why Elu rules here, save in questions of the land and the safety of our protection against the Enemy. It does not surprise me that some terrible misunderstanding resulted from the well-intentioned efforts of my sisters and brothers to do right by the peoples of the world they've so struggled to make a safe one."
"I have neither the patience nor the powers of a Vala," the King says, "and no obligation to them besides. I will not risk the wellbeing of my people to let strangers prove themselves better than their own recent actions, least of all actions they are not confessing to me on bended knee but permitting a stranger to convey without profound apologies."
"I will not risk my people to achieve a justice I trust the Valar to already deliver," the King says.
So Loki explains how she caught some orcs and talked to one until they were out of ideas and then went to Fëanor for help and the solution he came up with and how well-behaved those orcs now are around - Quendi. "I am a little concerned that I have inadvertently set myself up as the sole prophet of a religion, but better me telling them that they should be good neighbors than the Enemy telling them to attack everyone they meet."
"This at least permits mercy capture instead of mercy killing and I believe there will be less wear and tear on the consciences of those orchestrating it," Loki says. "Perhaps I am biased because in other realms when people die they simply cease to exist forever; but if orcs can live happily and peacefully alongside others instead of being funneled to an invisible fate elsewhere, I cannot see that as an unworthy goal."
"The Halls of Mandos are quite visible," says Melian, "though I respect that would be difficult to understand, if you are a creature of an unknown fate."
"I have not been invited to supervise the process to which deceased orcs are subjected," Loki says. "Presumably it is visible to someone, but I am the one who can heal an orc of what hurts it and tell it stories of an alternative 'Melkor' who is a benignly noninterventionist omnipotent being. I really wasn't expecting them to want so much micromanagement about the details of his opinions on whether they are allowed to have names and so forth, but that is what seems to have happened."
"I am phrasing my speculations as such and they are being taken with considerable gravity. It is entirely true that the entity in question does not use oaths as part of his usual modus operandi; entirely true that I have never heard of him having any opinion on whether one must earn one's name; and entirely true that if you lined up every entity I have ever heard of next to each other from most to least powerful he would be on the far end by orders of magnitude, for all that he is not known to exercise this more than very occasionally and at times that seem random to me."
She nods. "He might. That would be dangerous for you. He is like me; our powers are more easily manifest over Ages of careful development than in immediate action, but we can still do a great deal immediately when stirred to it. I would ask you not to attempt it while here, lest our kingdom be caught up in his retaliation."
"Of course," agrees Loki, instead of I can't even do it from that far away. "I'm loath to spend decades on another spell or two to be that much surer of myself and condemn generations more orcs and everyone those orcs will meet; but it may be the only responsible option."
"Yes. I was trying to travel between realms, but with a friend and to a different destination. I arrived here, alone. It could also have been someone's intentional sabotage. Either way, no one has been sent to retrieve me and my friend has not followed after, so I expect there is some sort of disagreement or technical problem at the source."
So Loki makes an image of Sigyn, smiling, wearing the clothes he was when they prepared to leave for Midgard.
"I know little about local magic. My own is as far as I know unique in method, if not in principle; I was taught the underlying pieces by ill-advised contact with a dangerous artifact as a child and built up the rest from there, while other sorcerers begin and work with larger pieces."
"The magic of this world is worked through contact with the great symphony by which Eru created it. I'm not sure what resemblance that bears to the pieces you are speaking of, but it seems likely that they are both inadequate metaphors for the true fabric of creation. I use them mostly to order my realm according to my will, which involves pulling on the threads very slowly and carefully. It sounds like your abilities are more immediate."
"And yet your magic, when you channel it towards an end I can sense, feels no different than the magic of any of my sisters and brothers. It invites speculation that however different our methods, we are somehow operating on the same fundamental forces, and were granted our abilities by the same divine grace."
The room is clearly engineered for Elf songs, because the acoustics are incredible, and her voice carries across the room and harmonizes with its own echoes. The King starts singing too. Then strangers start singing.
It's not exactly an illusion, it's not that she's seeing it, but she can visualize with astounding clarity what they're singing of. Two young men, Elves, beside the lake Cuivienen, hearing the Valar's offer and deciding to take the chance.
And she had to travel a while to get here and it's kind of late now and she's tired. Well. This is still a pleasanter way to stay up late than trying to avoid getting drunk during an interminable feast during which she must pretend to listen to stories she has heard forty times before.
On the way to a midnight rendezvous with Finwë, Elu gets lost and runs into Melian. They fall in love at first sight and stare into each others' eyes for three hundred years while the trees grow from saplings to ancient oaks around them. Finwë searches for his lost friend, but in vain, and beseeches the Valar not to leave without the third host, also in vain.
When Elu awakens from his trance, even the delight he finds in Melian cannot comfort him in the knowledge of what he has lost, for now half his people have departed for Valinor without him, in bitter grief, and thought Finwë prostrates himself at Manwë's throne the Valar will not be swayed to return for the lost and forgotten third host. The two men share thoughts, occasionally, across the long and cold sea; but their memories of each other fade with the centuries and at last, when they call out at night, they hear only silence.
The notes of the beginning are floating back again, the images of two ambitious young men who decided to take a chance on a powerful stranger offering them paradise. Elu - the real Elu - watches them, eyes distant, and brings the song to a close. His people follow suit. The images fade.
"When Finwë and I first knew death, we thought it was forever, and faced it together. Now we know it may, in the long ages of the world, be amended," he says, "but he faced it alone."
Melian squeezes his hand. Maybe just a bit possessively. The Elves very slowly disperse.
"You clearly didn't expect that you'd be coming to deliver such painful news," she says. "And, uh, my parents rather sprung that on you. Lúthien. Uh, there's a long list of titles, but I don't get much use out of them myself and you must have a lot to keep track of already."
She pauses. "Not that that excuses - I should have learned, I should have guessed, I should have wondered. I didn't, and now the world is pressing in on us and all I have is that my dancing makes people happy. I can pick up new things but it takes a very long time."
"I have gathered that things in general work more slowly here than I am accustomed to. I have tended to consider my spell-development process just this side of worth it and it is just decades per, speeding up with each new one I learn as long as it's similar in any respect to a previous."
"Oh, that's impressive. I think for me it would be centuries, though I get more powerful at things I do by practicing them, so I can also do a lot of dancing in the meantime and see if it has more applications when it gets stronger. And likewise there are advantages from similarity - that's why I'm thinking I'll learn healing next, it's related to what I can do already and it matters."
"I'm sorry," she says when she pulls away, "I just - I know there are kingdoms in Valinor, where there'd be other people who understood, but Valinor is a painful subject in this family and I could never even express curiosity or my father'd look so pained. So it was rather like I was the only person in my position in the world. Why is it socially unacceptable for girls to do magic?"
No hair-touching. There's kind of a lot of hair on Lúthien but Loki avoids it. "No need to be sorry. It's a completely pointless social convention. Asgardian girls are supposed to be warriors and the boys are supposed to turn to gentler occupations - and the latter rule is more flexible."
"Well, not all girls take it up. My mother is very strict and I was unusually conspicuous. If I'd been some ordinary Asgardian girl I might not have been able to study magic but I wouldn't have had to learn to fight, given that I had no aptitude for it when I was little."
"Well, I was, but that was because I had to keep substantial parts of my life a complete secret until someone tried to assassinate my father in public and there were no other healers in shouting distance. I don't think most people are, and I did eventually have one friend who knew. Anyway, I can send things, and see things sent to me, but not pick up passive thoughts, and I learned immediately on finding osanwë existed not to accidentally leak anything."
"So what do people in your realm do if they're stuck in a political meeting and it'd be tolerable if they were there because their father wanted their insights but instead they're just there because their father thinks it's educational and they'd be doing something actually educational if they weren't there but here they are so they construct an elaborate mind-palace with a friend and chase each other through it?"
"You poor thing," she says emphatically. "Well I don't know how to be revitalizing without also making people happy so I suppose you'd better recover from your exhaustion the old-fashioned way. If you want to find me in the morning the little white lilies are mine so you can find a trail of them and follow them."
"Sorry, I have substantially worse hearing than Elves do and little sense of when you are and aren't within earshot. Orcs take oaths to - behave orcishly - very young, before they have sophisticated concepts of the nouns involved; and can with enough argument and threat be talked into re-swearing with the same wording to instead serve a benign noninterventionist deity known to other realms and encourage Elven population growth - for, of course, more total eventual suffering and death - and consider groups of Elves who don't use that word for themselves unsuitable kidnapping targets." Yawn.
"I'm sorry, I'm being rude, you're tired. That's - fascinating. Tell me more in the morning. White lilies. The convention is that the intensity of the color indicates how recently someone passed, but of course they chose white for me so you can't really tell without looking closely at the flowers, and you can't tell which way to go." She shrugs. "Rest well."
In the morning she wakes up inside a spacious Elven guest room that is not lit at all except for silvery light emanating from everywhere. It has a closet with several elaborate Elven dresses in her size, and a plate with an unfamiliar food. There are white lilies trailing to the plate and faded violets trailing to the closet.
She eats the food... considers the dresses dubiously and winds up leaving them there... makes sure she still has her possessions and violets-wardrobe-person did not relieve her of anything... panics for a moment over the dagger before remembering she left it in the woods so as to come "unarmed" in the loosest technical sense she can qualify for as long as Lævateinn remains small and blunt... and follows the white lilies.
"They're all the same job," he says, "I tried developing writing but it never really took off, so songs for stories and history it is. Lúthien says orcs swear oaths, and you're trying to get them out of it."
"I thought it would wind up that way but it turned out they solicited a lot of information about what the absentee god might want. I'm their only source of educated guessing. It's awkward. At any rate, orcs who can do as they like are better than orcs who are bound to serve the Enemy and some of them are quite friendly once you get to know them."
"Calaquendi," says Daeron, "Because they came with the light. Though then that makes us Moriquendi, 'dark Elves', which is rather insulting. Anyway, I've heard people using that."
"Calaquendi," she says, "sure. Or Amanyar, or Finwë's people. Will you write a song using those? I'll dance to it and sing it in the halls."
Daeron nods, looking a bit enraptured with her. She smiles at Loki. "Done."
"I might have cousins among the Amanyar," Lúthien says. "When my father was lost, our people were sundered. His brother, Olwë, went on ahead with half our people. The last we heard, he'd settled by the shores and had married and had children. If there are any of his children among the Finweans, Father will surely desire to invite them here."
Anyway, if I ever really want to marry I can just present it to him as a fait accompli, he probably wouldn't kill my husband."
"The orcs and you, I've just been unable to stop thinking about you. You're in a desperately strange situation in the middle of a war and you seem to have taken it all on your shoulders, which is reasonable, because the rest of the world sometimes won't move and the only way to work around it is to start considering yourself the only real way anything good can possibly happen. Except when I've gotten myself in that hole it wasn't good for me, and you at least have real magic but I just wanted to make sure you were okay, and say that you have a friend here and I can teach you how to do the memory palace thing when bored."
Unable to stop - do not think about that. "I appreciate the thought very much. I'm not sure I have the mental architecture to think in any other way as long as there are problems that exist, and it seems stable for me, but it is kind of you to think of me. I am occasionally frustrated that the problems do not line up neatly to be solved in invariably straightforward and sensible ways but I am sure I would also be occasionally frustrated if I took up any other occupation worth doing."
"Oh, I very much like being alive and am persistently fond of at least the theory of the world. I will see if you have any cousins to relay that to. I have been asked not to turn into a bird within your borders; which way should I go to get to where I was brought in?"
"I caught some orcs. I cannot turn them into non-orcs, but I can do the next best thing, which took long enough that I stayed with Fëanor's people to sleep after that. And then I found the kingdom of Doriath and stayed there overnight. You should not attempt to find the kingdom of Doriath with the possible exception of descendants of Olwë, whose cousin and possibly also uncle wish to meet them."
"There definitely aren't any in the Feanorian camp. My father's brother - full brother, not half brother - married Olwë's daughter. Neither of them are here, because they turned back and repented after Alqualondë. My cousins on that side fought on the other side at Alqualondë. Some of them are here - crossed with our host, because they still wanted to leave Valinor. That's one of the reasons Fëanor gave for abandoning us."
"...This is all hopelessly complicated and any day now I am going to mix something up and hope I don't do it in front of someone easily offended," she says. "At any rate. The queen, who is a Maia, wishes to investigate sorcery with me; she let me test some of it against her magic and we both found that interesting. Unfortunately, the results of the test suggest that my simple idea for stemming the tide of orc production will not work even if I am willing to risk the Enemy's attention." And Loki explains orcs, orc conversion, and the silence thing that she will not be able to keep up for long against resistance.
"And I suspect none of you speak their language and they won't tend to speak yours, either," she says. "If I happen to be handy I will take as many as I think the Fëanorians or some future converted orc colony can absorb, myself; if not all I ask, when live capture is not safe, is that you refrain from using the word 'Elves' to refer to anyone who lives on this continent - 'Quendi' is an option but it doesn't matter as long as it's not 'Elves' - nor 'Melkor' to refer to the Enemy. 'The Enemy' is fine, or Moringotto or Morgoth. That way if any of them run home and talk to other orcs it will be easier to convince them of the necessary revisions for the re-oath to work."
Loki sits. "The king - everyone has so many names, I can't remember which one is the one you'd know - met a Maia and they apparently stared at each other for three hundred years, and then got married and at some point came into possession of a kingdom. They have an enchanted forest and a charming daughter."
"He apologized and we refused to accept his apology and we figured that we'd just civilly avoid each other, it's a big host. But he's been hard to avoid, these last few days, he's either trying suicide by overwork or just thinking that the sooner he fixes literally every problem anyone has the sooner he can try suicide-by-Melkor."
I suppose I sound unsympathetic but I watched half my family murder the other half and it's entirely Fëanor's fault and as long as he lives it will happen again and as long as they're in denial about it it will happen again sooner. Findekáno doesn't think his own actions were forgivable, but he's quite obviously already forgiven Maitimo all of his."
"She seems smart, magical, and eager to fix stuff. I don't think she tends to think of people as obstacles, at least principally. She volunteered, unprompted, very empathetic reads of actions that she might have reasonably resented instead." It was attractive.
"I'd like to meet her. The complication, of course, is that it'd be a betrayal of the host that my uncle lead across the ice, some of whose members are innocent, to tell my great-uncle Elwë that the new arrivals betrayed and slaughtered and robbed his family and set their stolen gifts on fire on the opposite shore. And it'd be a betrayal of my family here to let them try to decide whether to trust us without knowing that."
But the one who benefits most is obviously the Enemy, who'd love it if the major powers of the continent despise and mistrust each other, so." She makes a buttoning motion over her lips.
"I will regret it if I think that the likeliest result of letting him die would have been better, all things considered, than whatever comes to pass in this version of reality. Presently his being alive enforces his oath on his people and gave me someone to think of something I could not when I and my first captive orc had run out of ideas on how I could safely let her live and earns me the goodwill of his faction, which I have partially converted into the return of some of your host's possessions. The rest may be delivered by converted orcs, who ironically are least likely to start a fight in so doing."
"I'm a little short on things I'm willing to stake, myself. I am not infallible. But there seemed to be reasons to heal him and if I must have a bias it will be in favor of healing." Shrug. "I used to sneak into hospitals and heal people without even learning their names."
"I have a sister. Thor. She wouldn't have been able to heal anyone in the host, although she could have flown ahead and fetched back something to eat and would have done so. She would not have wondered much about the politics of it. She would have thought you seemed like very nice people who had been very badly wronged and would not have felt the need to complicate the situation, and while I am not sure she would have suggested going and massacring Fëanor's people it would not have been hard to talk her into it. And it would have been easy because her hammer, in addition to letting her fly, can control lightning. They would all be dead, because she's never been in a fight that was both real and non-lethal and restraining her mid-combat if anyone had a second thought would have been impossible. And then she would have killed orcs, and she wouldn't have been able to save them even if she'd wondered about the possibility, which I doubt; and she would almost certainly have challenged the Enemy directly within a week of her arrival and I don't know if he can take a direct lightning strike or a hit from a hammer that treats inertia like its plaything or not, but she would have tried..."
"You're really going to hate me now but that sounds pretty great. I mean, I don't blame you for not being able to do it, but the Enemy dead in a week would make everything else worth it, and I'm not sure he could survive that. And there are no innocents in the Fëanorian camp - your sister wouldn't have killed children, would she? The rest of them all fought at Alqualondë, all torched their ships while we were waiting for them in Araman."
"I've never seen her on a battlefield with children present, although if she found herself on Jotunheim for some insane reason I wouldn't put it past her to kill juvenile frost giants. Your species doesn't look like frost giants, so it's not unlikely she'd leave the children alone, at least anyone smaller than yea high who wasn't brandishing a weapon - and boys a little older than that unless she'd really cottoned on that the local gender roles are different. And maybe it would have been worth it to have the Enemy dead; but Thor could do that herself more easily than I and you got me, not her. I might be able to do it too, but it might turn out I need Fëanor."
"And the minds of everyone who died at Alqualondë? Everyone who died on the Ice? Findekáno had a sister-in-law, Elenwë, a good friend of mine, who was the most gifted mathematician of our generation and also the kindest, most immediately compassionate, most good person I have ever known. You arrived too late to choose between having Fëanor or having her. But you are making choices like that, every minute that his heart is still beating."
"Please, point me at anyone who I might need to bodyguard and consult on the problem! I am eager to have more resources!" exclaims Loki. "I can hardly have too many and I cannot reasonably expect to sway Fëanor on behalf of someone I have not met and cannot defend the strategic value of!"
You were right about everything you said to me on the ice. I apologize for wasting so much time that could have been spent filling you in on family politics and the enemy's capabilities on stupid, misplaced bitterness."
Speaking of which." He squares his shoulders. "Artanis - is one of the people you should be protecting, if necessary, and relying on for intellectual problems. She's brilliant. That's the reason she and my uncle hated each other back before they invented good reasons. She is friendless and surrounded by enemies, here, people who she tried to kill and who are tolerating her because we feel so guilty about killing her family, and frankly she's not going to be any easier to work with than Fëanor, but."
I don't think that's a good idea, and Father wouldn't let me, but now I can't get it out of my head."
"It was my fault. More than anyone else's save Fëanor's himself, and I guess whoever gave the order to start killing people on the Teleri side though that might have just happened spontaneously. I don't want him thinking they're a pack of murderers, because they're not, they're a pack of people who trusted me."
She memorizes landscape and when it seems likely that the Nolofinwëans will stop for the night she wends her way back to sit up for a while, spellworking, and then sleep.
"Elwë alive and very angry with us is honestly much better than what we'd expected to find." He shrugs. "And the long Ages of the world soften hearts etcetera etcetera but I don't really expect this war to stretch for the long ages of the world. If you do run into any other locals, any chance of getting off on a better foot?"
"Well, we could offer them food, tools, animals, except guess who currently has those? Just, you know, I'm sure they're apprehensive about these numbers moving in; tell them Valinor taught us many things but most importantly that they made the right decision in not leaving for it; that we're here to fight, and will be focused rather singlemindedly on that, and will respect if they ignore us and go about their lives."
"Yes. Swifts have the best overland flight speed - falcons can dive much faster, but not sustain anything like that velocity point to point. And swifts can sleep on the wing. Swifts can't walk, take off from the ground, or do much of anything that isn't flying; but I can change in midair and I already had serviceable feet for walking so it seemed the right choice, given that what I wanted was to fly."
"Does it help if I mention that it took me weeks to learn to fly and the intervening attempts looked like me changing, yea high, and then plopping unceremoniously to the ground?" Loki asks, hovering a hand at about chin level. "Swifts can do it on the first try - they have to - but swifts have instincts I did not."
"Well, I don't know about here, I have no idea why there are plants that have clearly been around in advance of the existence of a sun and this isn't even Valinor, but in other realms yes, I imagine some swifts do not manage on their first try, and they land on the ground, and something eats them or they starve; and the ones who do pull it off are the ones who have the next generation, so in theory swifts as a group are getting better at flight-with-no-trial-and-error all the time."
"No one on Asgard would be likely to teach you. When I wanted to sneak into a magic lecture I had to disguise myself as a boy. I may eventually try to teach someone the way I do it but it could be a complete waste of time without Tesseract-granted knowledge."
"I just walked in and thought it was pretty and wanted to pick it up. It wasn't a totally pleasant experience but I liked what I got out of it enough that I tried to do it again after it had knocked me off my feet - not that this was difficult to do, when I was that age - and then my mother swooped in and seized me and sent me to my father to be checked for arcane ailments. He didn't find any. And no one paid attention to my clumsily babbling that all it had done was teach me things."
"Uh. Given centuries, could your sister be convinced that you're untrustworthy and unstable and going to hurt your family if she doesn't stop you for your own good, and could you have ended up convinced that she's incompetent and reckless and it'd be dangerous for her to end up in power, and could your mother have become convinced she needs to immediately and dramatically choose between you for the good of her kingdom? I expect that to be a recipe for disaster anywhere, and your kind don't even find fighting surprising."
"Thor is... I think very trusting of family by default, but I don't know what would have happened if her introduction to my sorcery had been anything other than me healing our father and I never was confident enough in her to actually tell her. That, and I still don't know how she'll react to learning that I have this little respect for Odin's dictates. She is incompetent at many things and reckless and might be dangerous to have in power. I am not sure what would have happened to make Odin need to choose between us suddenly. If she were dying, maybe. But it's a big multiverse and Thor is the sort of person who fits as a ruler of Asgard in particular and would be much more palatable to the people than I would; so if she wanted rid of me and was not convinced to leap immediately to assassination I would have gone somewhere else and done something with myself there which was less of an uphill battle. I can't see Thor thinking it matters in the way Odin does if Midgardian quality of life jumped suddenly or Vanaheim had a new professor of sorcery."
"There was an engagement against frost giants there, and I decided to stay and explore for a few years, and I mostly liked it there and found their standard of living pitiful. I'm sure there are many equivalent realms but it's most accessible as an example."
"Taller than Quendi. Some of them by a lot, although they vary. Some natural magic with cold. They live in a place that is much colder than the ice you crossed, with no warm places in the whole realm; and I'm afraid I don't know very much about their society because it's not the sort of information easy to come by in Asgard and the interest would have looked strange."
"Short-lived, a hundred years at the outside if nothing gets them first and it's a harsh world. They keep their souls in animals outside their bodies; one is born, and the 'daemon' appears and accompanies them for the rest of their lives, settling in a single shape only when they approach adulthood. Prone to intense intricacy of culture, I think partly because they are so young; a twenty-year-old has grown and may have children already and thinks things have always been the way they are, maybe with a little context from parents or grandparents, and embellishes from there without reference to anything older than that. They have thousands of languages, nearly as many religions and more cultures, although I didn't wander the entire globe."
"I've started a little preliminary work on it, no better priorities having come to my attention. It's going to be fiendishly complicated, especially if I can't go and look up the answers to any question about physics I need to know; there's a reason I learned to turn into a bird first, it was in fact simpler. I might be lucky and master it in fifty years. I might have a partial in-realm version in a hundred and one between realms in two. I'd be surprised if it took me more than two hundred years even given the lack of advanced physics books but not floored."
"The first thing El- uh, Quendi do, every place we've settled, is build beautiful public spaces. Usually also beautiful homes, by necessity sometimes beautiful defenses, but always beautiful public spaces. It's what we're for. We can't be happy without it. You saw Elwë's, you must have a sense of what Valinor was like..."
I don't know if we handle grief badly because we were born to Aman and don't know how to handle it, or if it's something more fundamental. Everyone I know has been absolutely shattered. Some people die of grief. They lose someone on the ice - a child was the worst, almost no one survived losing a child - and they stopped wanting a body, their soul sort of rejects it. It's a startlingly violent death, for being entirely internally inflicted."
"No, it's not like that, it's not voluntary. It is mediated by the mind, but not the conscious mind; one could desire to keep living but die of grief, if it gets overwhelming enough. The Valar can prevent it. As can the Enemy or all his prisoners would choose the escape of death. We probably could too, if we knew how."
"And then I would cease to exist and the half a thing of the one and a half nice things I have heard about the Valar would be downgraded to a third of a nice thing. Not worth it. They are not good enough at their jobs to get better at them in any way I can help them with."
"Fëanor has a lovely story about one of them taking his third son out to discover something he was talented at; and it seems possible that going to Mandos instead of being obliterated as a conscious being altogether is better even if he's flagrantly abusing the ability to preserve people in this way. And if they killed me they would not be being careful to obey any systematic principle opposed to annihilation; it would just be something they do most of the time, maybe, probably, badly."
"Eru's bad at their job too, but I don't think they have a clear enough location that I can even form a coherent daydream about flying over to tell them so. Anyway, the Valar wouldn't check to make sure I was one of Eru's, would they? They would see a transgression and lash out like angry toddlers without thinking about the possibility that there could be consequences they couldn't account for, or whether punishing me would accomplish anything worth the attention they'd spend to do it for my development or theirs or the cowed obedience of the bystanders!"
"They don't think like that. They don't do things because they'll have good results, they do things because those things are deserved. You're actually the only person I've ever met who doesn't talk that way. They would punish you because you had done something that warranted punishment, not because they expected it to make anything better."
"We left, didn't we? I basically agree with you The Doom wasn't the best way of reacting to the Kinslaying, awful as it was, and I'm not even sure exiling Fëanor was wise, though I was happy about it at the time - since he'd threatened to murder my father and all - they might grow into it, in the long ages. But it wouldn't go well if you tried to teach them."
"I was trying to imagine it - I don't think we would have admitted to ourselves we wanted to kill them, we aren't monsters, we'd have told ourselves we were just going to take back what was ours, but we know what stealing the ships was like, of course they wouldn't have let us do it, and then we could have attacked them righteously, having secured to the last our assurance that they started it. I am frightened by how easy it is to imagine."
"'You know your brother who is currently being tortured in some manner worse than what any of us can possibly imagine, and we've all devoted a fair bit of thought to imagining it? Your brother who was beloved by literally everyone in Tirion? Can you give us a step-by-step account of when he decided his honor and his word were worth throwing into the abyss of your father's insanity?'"
"Like, in a way that would actually make sense and seem sensible, probably. If it'd been him rather than Fëanor for the King I think we'd probably all have tolerated it. I think Fëanor at one point planned to pass the crown immediately to him, but they ended up at odds, a lot, in the later years. Unless that was faked for our benefit."
"Everyone has something to say about family politics. It seems like you've heard quite enough about the Valar, and you'd laugh at the chemistry debates that were popular back home. I expect Findekáno is keeping you more or less apprised of our strategic and logistical position, at least the relevant bits, and I don't think Turukáno wants me sharing personal details. That exhausts the areas in which I have particular expertise."
"Chemistry at home was two divergent fields - the study of the properties of metals, mostly by people who were using them to forge things, and the study of the properties of the earth, and of the internally-uniform powdered types you'd get by separating it. And then they converged, because people realized there was the same thing going on. The thing being a sort of cyclical tendency, apparent both in divine properties and in mundane ones like weight and density. People thought it was the key to the fundamental nature of the universe. It was all very exciting."
It does not even take a minute for about a dozen intrigued people to emerge from the host and find themselves a place at least fifty feet away but with a line of sight. "So that there's space for more of them; crowding demonstrations is considered very very rude," Irissë explains.
"All right." And high up enough that the diagram won't be blocked by Loki's own body but she can still see it, she starts assembling what she remembers of the periodic table. "I was not a chemist and will not remember all of the elements, but if you name a substance I can tell you if it is one or not and try to remember where it goes; it might help jog my memory if you can tell me whether it is in pure form heavier or lighter than other elements I have placed. Paler colors mean I am less sure that I have the thing in the right place." She's very confident of helium and hydrogen; she knows that copper, silver, and gold go in a column together but is not sure she remembers which one, so the names are pale and the box around them dark. Noble gases... nickel's here, right...? Lead's hereish...
She places - mostly pretty pale - names of the substances; she makes a list off to the side of the non-elements; she explains the composition of water and answers what else she can remember from having been on a chemistry kick for a couple of months a hundred years ago.
This easily takes up the rest of the evening. By the end Irissë is glowing with delight. "I should have asked you to do that earlier, after Findekáno mentioned how you'd explained life on your planet and how round worlds work. It's good for people to start thinking 'once we can build a library' instead of 'once we reach the Enemy'."
She swoops back down. "Didn't see orcs. And the smoke over Angband is gone. I think I know my way around well enough now that I can correct if I get blown off-course gliding in my sleep; I might head for the Fëanorians overnight so I can try another flyby as soon as possible."
"We tried on a few of them, the first ones back, but it didn't work, they weren't buying it. Wouldn't talk with us at all, which might be part of their orders, and your friend Vár just kept insisting that the sorcerer of the greater Melkor healing them proved that the greater Melkor had a stronger claim, but they hadn't seen you and weren't clear on what it is you're healing. Obviously we can try again, but it might be that you can't actually do this in any reasonable timeframe while they're still in pain."
"Yeah. I don't think she made it permanently impossible or anything: they were unpersuaded, not exactly hostile. Well, one of them was kind of hostile. I can't understand what they said but it sounded very insulting and she was very upset by it. Oh, also, Fëanor says don't use 'it' even if we can't tell their gender, he's added a series of appropriate pronouns to the language."
"I was on Midgard - Allspeak is not necessary on Asgard, everyone speaks the same language there - but Midgardians are quite as easily told apart; I just didn't spend a lot of time talking about Midgardians to each other. The result was that after I'd been wandering around telling Asgardian stories they had the genders of every character wrong."
"The Melkor we know is but a shadow of the real Melkor, and acting against the real Melkor's will! When we serve the false Melkor, we suffer. If you serve the real Melkor, you'll never suffer like that again. But the Melkor we knew is too cowardly to try to demand we make oaths to him, because the real Melkor would smash him down. So he has us make our oaths to the real Melkor, and then tricks us into thinking we're sworn to the lesser false one! Don't be tricked anymore!"
"Oh, I don't serve the Elves and my magic's all my own. I grew up in another realm altogether and had never seen an Elf in my life until a few weeks ago. I got my magic from an artifact," she makes a little illusion of the tesseract in its blue box, "and hard work and no one else has any like it."
"I said nothing of the kind," Loki says. "People can deny him all day long and nothing happens to them; he's above such minor concerns. The problem is that in so denying this fellow has fully bound himself to the Enemy, who does things of which Melkor would certainly not approve with his servants." She shakes her head and looks at the guards. "Is Fëanor available to pull another clever idea out of nowhere, or...?"
Loki gives it to him. "I do apologize. But If you can think of something that works for this orc it may be replicable and save more than one of them without having to bother you further." She wraps the orc in silence before he says something else regrettable; that worked on the friendliest of the thirty-six who agreed to test case.
"Yes. I just - thought you might think of something. You're good at that and you know more about what's going on than I've had a chance to pick up. And I don't think much of Mandos's reported opinions on anything, it feels a little like remanding custody of a prisoner - however obstinate - to a known atrocity-committing tyrant."
"That's precisely what it is. But the way to fix this is to figure out the underlying machinery of the universe and swap out some bits so orcs have free will, which is after 'break everyone out of Mandos' in my list of priorities, and even if this one did have free will it sounds like we might still have to kill him."
Building a pen for them seems even less conducive to not having a revolt on my hands eventually. I don't suppose there are any legends of your Melkor that suggest he likes his acolytes to sleep tied up, as a proof of their devotion?"
"All right. I'll tell them not to be enthusiastic about seeking them out until then, then. The locals here - who incidentally have a long list of grievances with Elwë, you should ask Macalaurë to give you the whole story - say that everything is settled from here to the sea, there's an unsettled island, and the eastern part of the continent was slaughtered in the beginnings of the war and is now unsafe and uninhabited."
"It's not a particular taboo in Asgard. It is for me." She shakes her head, catches Hœnir the orc nodding out of the corner of her eye and thinks that's the last one who wanted to be named, and continues, "They tried to shoot at me. A lot. They didn't know where I was."
"They wouldn't have," she says, her voice a few feet behind Macalaurë. From her own mouth she elaborates: "But when it was clear they were going to keep doing it in this case they were willing to tell me which way to fly to approach via the border instead, and then I spoke with the queen by proxy until she found me interesting enough to relax their policy on free-willed creatures entering the forest. The princess is extremely friendly."
"That's useful," he says, amused. "I am glad in that case of your competence rather than their carelessness. And rather more glad - I'd rather they be able to defend themselves. Do you suppose the princess has any political power? By the accounts of my contacts here, people have been killed within sight of Doriath's borders, to the pronounced indifference of its leadership. For a while there were people sheltering just outside the territory, because the Iathrim would at least shoot any orcs that came within range of them, but eventually they ran out of food and had to leave. Civilians, mostly families."
"...My impression is that she does not, at least to any significant degree on subjects where her parents are known to have opinions, but is trying to grow into it, on the sort of local schedule that always winds up seeming to me like 'as good as never'. But I am mostly guessing."
"Wise. Well, I appreciate your attempting it." He sighs. "The news here: some of the plants we tested after the Sun rose seem to be thriving, so we're now cultivating those; we're setting up an armed camp for mining around thirty miles north of here, we have limestone and therefore have started on more glasswork, if there's anything glass you might need. We're trying different approaches to parchment. In Valinor nothing ever decayed; here, things do so quite rapidly. Your friends are alarmingly obedient, so much so that several people have come to me with ethical qualms about demanding labor from them. My expectation is that they feel safer around us if it's obvious to them that they are useful to us, but if you disagree we can discuss it."
"Make them take breaks," Loki says. "Lunch, and a few fractions of an hour they may place wherever they like but are obliged to take, days off once every week or two if you can afford it and they're here that long. And see that they're doing educational work when it's available, so they'll be able to settle - the island will have them living densely compared to any settlements here and they'll need to be able to use it efficiently. Farming, construction, manufacturing the tools for both. I can talk to Vár if you like but I wouldn't have you keep them idle and I'm not about to chide them for being cooperative... I'm afraid I can't remember what we treated paper with in Asgard to make it last and wouldn't know how to manufacture it if I did."
I don't give my own people days off, or lunch breaks, or take them myself. Father notoriously only sleeps once a week, and eats when people bring him things he can feed himself one-handed while working. We can certainly give them work that they'll need to know how to do when they leave."
"...Well, you don't need to pamper the orcs more than you are your own, assuming it turns out their needs are more like those of Quendi than like mine; that was just me reciting union labor practices from, what was it, the maintenance crew or something like that on Asgard. What happens to the paper in the span of months? I would expect it to last longer than that even if all it was were wood pulp. Do you have some kind of mold or are you just noticing imperfections I wouldn't be able to see for years?"
Loki produces visual aids. "You make a lot of backwards alphabets on little pieces like this, and assemble them into a tray for each page; and then you smear them with ink and," the illusion demonstrates, "like so. It won't make the books last any longer but if you needed redundancy for something."
"She's - she reminds me of an Elf child. Astonishingly carefree, for what she's been through. Father says the oath-switch probably wouldn't work if it's given just so we'll spare their lives, so I told her it's important that she not just walk them all through it, that she really convince them it's the right thing. And -"
"Listen," says Loki. "I do my magic in a way that nobody else does. I haven't tried teaching it to anyone yet and I don't know if I can. I might be the only person who can stop an orc's pain, or at least the only one who can be fetched. It's important to know if orcs are born already hurting or if that won't happen to ones born among the converted. Because there is only one of me and I can't heal billions of orcs' children, not even if I did nothing else with my entire life and didn't sleep, there is only one of me."
Loki shakes her head. "That is not why I can make it stop. I make it stop with a spell, that I invented. Melkor does not interfere with the affairs of lesser creatures like you're thinking. If Moringotto did something that made orcs born in pain, instead of - whisking away the new babies and doing something to them then - that will still happen. They will be born, they will hurt, and if there are too many of them I will not be able to fix it."
"You don't need to explain the mechanics of it," Loki assures her. "But if orcs can have children whenever boy and girl ones are together even if they don't want to, there will be too many children for me to handle, and soon. There are things that can prevent it but I don't know how to make them and I don't know how long it would take to reinvent them."
"He wants orcs not to have to be in pain anymore, but I'm the only one around who can fix orcs that are in pain. And it sounds like neither of us know if you are born that way or not. What you could do -" She chews her lip. "I'm trying to find a place for you to move once there are too many of you to stay here with these Quendi. You could make sure you are very careful not to have any little orcs until you are there, and when you arrive and you're settled, anyone who very desperately and personally wants to have a little orc - not just to serve Melkor, just because they like little orcs - they can have a small, small number, and we can see if they're all right. If they are, it's not a problem. If they're not, there will be only a few, and I can heal them - and then you will have to stop."
"Ah. I'm sorry I can't do more to help; I wish very much that I could. In - probably not more than two hundred years, which is too long and I hope it's less - but in probably not more than two hundred years I should have a spell ready to go to other realms and we can see if other healers can help you."
Elves, all of them, most of them grotesquely disfigured: eyes stabbed out, genitals mutilated, scars running down their bodies that appear to have healed and been reinflicted repeatedly. Some of them might be recognizable if she were to show an illusion to their relatives. It is not obvious that would be wise.
When she has not thought of any improvements on her plan, she waits for a gap in orc traffic that will give her at least a few minutes; and she overlays a prisoner with an illusion of himself and turns him invisible save a small point of gray hardly noticeable against the rocks if you aren't looking for it that will follow his movements, and wraps him in silence; and then she reaches out a wing to heal him, and change him into a swift; and streaks to the ground to beat him there and change and catch him to decelerate him as gently as possible, because he is not a real bird and will not learn to fly on the way down.
It's okay. It's okay. I'm getting you out. You're easier to carry this way, I'll change you back when we're clear. She scoops up both birds, removes their color-marks, and navigates as quick as she can to the exit without bumping into any orcs and steering well clear of the wolves, who look like they might have good noses.
"Right, he uses mind control," she mutters. "Your skepticism is understandable but I'm not going to leave you here. Would you like to tell me where you'd rather next hallucinate being, then? And would you rather imagine being carried while again shaped like a bird or as you are now, since you don't seem inclined to walk? If you don't pick something I'll take you to the Fëanorians', they're nearest at least of those I've met."
"The only place I know to be persistently uninhabited is an island a truly unfortunate hiking distance away from here," she says, gently scooping him up. "And it would be irresponsible to leave you alone there, either, and you don't seem to be in the mood for flying lessons. What's your name? I'm Loki Odinsdottir."
"You can even run off into the yonder like the other one did, although I will try to tell you first where we are relative to various things before you get out of my extremely pathetic osanwë range so you can find somewhere you'd like to be and not wind up in Doriath pincushioned with arrows or similar. Would you like me to put you down?"
"I will presumably be met with despairing loved ones when I find out who you are and who I have to notify that you are dead after all. I don't relish the prospect. Perhaps you could bear with me long enough to get where we're going and then decide if you want to kill yourself."
"I assume that the information your master so desperately desires from this iteration is precisely how I will react to the sight of my loved ones, and what I will find suspicious in the manner that your puppets purporting to be them will respond to me. That is precisely the information I am therefore disinclined to give you."
"Okay," says Loki, "then why don't you tell me where to find some people who don't know you, but who might be able to give you a place to sleep and wait out the standard duration of your mind control episodes? I have no permanent residence, myself, and unless you're actually from Doriath I doubt they'll let you in, but there are locals I haven't met, maybe they'd suit."
"I was taking you to Fëanor's people, because they're closest of people I know how to find, and it is hours away yet. If you'd rather go to the Nolofinwëans I will have to walk all night to get there, or stop at Fëanor's and borrow a horse, but I can take you there instead and it will take longer and I will be up all night but I'll do it. If you're from some village I've never heard of in the forest or something I can take you there too. If you want to learn to fly and go to fucking Valinor, well, I don't know if it's actually open to flying visitors or not, I've heard it's closed to boats, but I'd have let you try it if only I weren't so sure you'd dive directly into the sea and drown. It certainly sounds very unpleasant to spend the rest of your life assuming that Moringotto is just really really patient but at least you will not be dangling from a cliff face being routinely tortured; I can't help but consider that an improvement."
"Well, this is going to be really fucking tedious, then, isn't it," she says. "This way, I'll stop at Doriath for directions if you don't want to be any more precise. I am afraid I will have to turn you into a bird or tie you up or something while we're near it because otherwise you might commit suicide by trigger-happy archer and I think this would strain my tenuous diplomatic relations." She turns Doriathwards. "Does he fake osanwë too? Can't just think at your family and friends from here? What the hell good is a telepathy ability that can be spoofed, what a rip-off."
"Since you control all of my sensory input, you can also fake osanwë convincingly. I agree that Eru should have designed Elves to be more resilient to the torment of his deputies. I would like to hallucinate not being tied up as we approach Doriath and will walk a little faster towards my home village if you will agree to this."
"My suicide ends the hallucination. You are right that I prefer waiting this out until the Enemy grows bored and ends it to ending it myself and launching into whatever he has planned next, as long as by waiting it out I don't give you anything of value. I don't expect that a walk through the woods will give you anything of value, so I have no particular interest in ending it prematurely."
"You know what," she says, "this is actually ridiculous, I have an appointment with the Fëanorians in three days and if I spend five escorting you to some random woods village because you're too suicidal to be left alone I'm trading off any orcs they find to rehabilitate against that, and they'll be spending an extra couple of days with a chronic pain condition and an increasingly frantic missionary. If I don't drag you to any other Quendi to see how you react, if I just leave you here to be really, really bored, are you going to kill yourself, or will you just enjoy the state of not being tortured until I've figured out who you are and maybe gotten a horse?"
"If this is a place where I can live alone without contact with others, I will happily do so not just for the next few weeks but for the next few centuries. If you come back declaring that my relatives found me and insisted on seeing me, I will lie back down and stop reacting to you or to 'them' until you cancel the hallucination."
"Well, I don't know who lives around here but if they do so very nearby it's not obvious. I can turn you invisible and you can sit up in a tree if you want to avoid whoever wanders by. I'm really not equipped to handle you in any more sophisticated way, most of the orcs I have met are less frustrating than you and they will probably have you outnumbered by the time my appointment rolls around, and I suspect you're lying to me about where you're from because you have no way of knowing which villages I have and haven't heard of yet five days' south. I'll have a bit of a flyover and see if there's a better place to put you for your extended introversion than right where I happened to get fed up but that's the extent of my patience right now."
The festival is ongoing when she arrives. Macalaurë is singing. The song seems to intertwine melodies in two languages, and its accompanying osanwë-illusions are of two different worlds: glowing, glimmering Valinor, joyous Quendi racing through wide white streets, and a sparkling, starlit treetop people, leaping from branch to branch. He has an astonishing voice; it carries. The Quendi are dancing.
"One of them just ran off, I tried to osanwë where we were so he wouldn't get too lost but I'm not sure if it took, and I wasn't trying to take anyone yet again prisoner so I let him go; and the other one was, well, behaving really sensibly for somebody who considered me a malicious hallucination but it didn't make it easy to reunite him with whoever he belongs to."
"...Yes? The Enemy has mind control powers and he thought I was more of the same, if rather novel. He thought I was trying to bring him to other Quendi to see how he reacted to meeting his loved ones and only stopped threatening suicide when I left him in the middle of nowhere by himself to be extremely uniformative to the hypothetical orchestrator of a malicious hallucination. But at least he isn't dangling from a cliff anymore. I think it's an improvement but I'm not sure whether to just... leave him there."
"You're welcome. How are you going to convince him you're not just more of the mind control? It's supposed to be complete sensory override, and the orcs say the Enemy reads minds, too, there's not necessarily anything you can do, nothing that could only possibly be you."
"Time in Valinor does not pass at the same rate as time in the Outer Lands. The Valar can alter the subjective experience of time in their realms, and they all do it, to varying degrees. The Halls of Mandos are even farther off. Even after five Ages of the Earth he will not be able to be sure that the Enemy isn't bored, because only a few minutes need have passed for the Enemy."
The other is to drag him back in. Tell him that I and my father are marching on Mithrim and his father and brothers are preparing a defense and he had better fix everything immediately, and sure the Enemy can use this to get a better model of his family but if he's wrong that this is a hallucination, everyone he cares about dies on the point of each others' swords. He'll fix things. He'll tell himself it's so laughably implausible that we all survived the ice, that his father survived that injury, that it isn't particularly useful information anyway. And we will have a very valuable person back on our side and he will believe for the rest of his life that any second he will wake up in Angband.
I want to do the first. Maitimo would want me to do the second."
"I wouldn't phrase it as being about what he deserves, but I use the concept less - I agree, anyway, but even if he's an order of magnitude more introverted than I am five hundred years alone in the middle of nowhere with surreptitiously supplied food after which he still couldn't be confident he was safe isn't going to do him any good, is it? Solitary confinement is considered torture in its own right in most realms..."
What do you think about the second approach?"
"I'm saying I'd react differently to the conclusion. His response is not unreasonable but it doesn't - optimize, in the way that I do. He's completely discounting upside potential in the case where he was actually rescued. I'd have gone somewhere comfortable and populated, and read books and listened to people talking, even if nothing could convince me the people were real or what they talked about was true or that the books were worth the paper they weren't printed on. Given that the hallucination is purely mental I might be willing to do some sorts of physical work that would help if they were real and wouldn't hurt anything by information leak if they weren't. Maybe I'd take up art; I doubt very much that the Enemy would benefit from a supply of imaginary drawings. I would especially do this if I knew people who would be happy to take me in as a non-contributing guest."
"We aren't going to take him in," Artanis says calmly. The crowd around them has been starting to press in. "This situation is awful and the Enemy despicable and I expect that some members of this host will help get him food or materials or whatever, but he participated in the murder of our families, he left us to die, we are not going to say 'nice to have you, we know you don't think we exist, hang out and help dig fence posts.'"
"You could try suggesting to him that he live somewhere populated and read and do art, at least. I think he'd appreciate suggestions of that nature. It'd be a better suggestion if you had such a place in mind, but - telling him that I'm alive and forgive him will not convince him he's not hallucinating."
This might make him more vulnerable to the next game, but he knows himself and knows he will eventually do it and so may as well do it immediately.
Every branch or blade of grass that touches him has him recoiling in anticipation of searing pain. This isn't a torture hallucination, he tells his reflexes, for the moment the feeling of leaves on his skin is just that, and he makes himself do other hundred times until some part of him believes it. This will certainly be unwise later but he's not going to play out the rest of this particular game curled up and whimpering in the corner of his own head.
The long shadows on the hillside are not orcs. It feels as if they have to be, Every time he catches sight of them his heart doubles its pace and his muscles tense to flee but the shadows are not orcs. The rustling of branches in the wind is not orcs. He cannot practice this one a hundred times because it takes him too long to talk himself back down, and after twenty trials he feels sick with some kind of fatigue from provoking the reaction again and again. He resists the urge to keep pushing. It might be better that he's not fatigued.
He can't eat or drink, can't yet believe in food, and it is uncertain if they're managing this in such detail that they will bother slowing his reflexes to account for hunger. So he leans against the tree and rests, and then he gets up and starts walking.
The Enemy won't have any trouble finding him, of course, but whatever he'd told the Enemy sitting in a tree is not an tolerable way to drag out this reprieve, even if doing something interesting ends it sooner.
Now the question of interest: is he demanding some fraction of the enemy's attention? Does this game require constant management? If not, nothing he does - provided it reveals nothing, and he is already committed to that - matters. But if it does, he can at least aspire to be computationally demanding. Traveling could be a way to do that. Eating could too, actually, once he untrains all of the associations between sustenance and continuing to not die, between sustenance and being drugged, between sustenance and being toyed with -
- no food, yet, he'll work on that next subjective-time sunrise, but travel he can do. Is it his subconscious filling in the details, or the Enemy's? It has to be a little of both: clearly his subconscious could generate no premise for his rescue, which is why it happened by turning into a bird and falling off the cliff into someone's arms and then being walked out of Angband, which is implausible even by rescue standards. If he went to his family's home, certainly most of the details around him would be supplied by his own mind - the Enemy spies haven't gotten that close. Another reason not to do that.
An interaction with a stranger? Or a crowd of strangers? Did the Enemy have the time and energy to duplicate the thrum of dozens of osanwë-sendings, dozens of voices, dozens of movements? Or would Maitimo find this mirror-continent implausibly depopulated, its denizens only willing to meet him alone or in pairs? He's not sure it's wise to risk it: if one of the things the Enemy hopes to learn from this is how to make his manipulations more convincing, and if he'll eventually rip from Maitimo's mind the knowledge of everything Maitimo used to pin him down, then it's better not to think at all.
Focus on computation expensiveness, then. If everything the Enemy can do to be more convincing takes his attention, he'll do this less. He pulls out plants by the roots, dissects them in his hands, rubs them between his fingers just in case that helps. He sings quietly to himself. He's not even sure if his voice sounds normal.
And he keeps walking.
Loki wasn't expecting him to be in exactly the same place. When she wakes up in the approximate region, she flies low, listening, watching for footprints - do Quendi even leave footprints? - and finally turns him visible so she can find him again, hoping she has not done so at an inopportune time.
Looking looking looking she did leave him alone for quite a while this is a difficult search radius curse her inadequate eyes she could have built better vision into the spell, falcon's eyes, she didn't have to be a single kind of bird - only then it wouldn't have been done before she got here -
He wonders if being visible is more expensive than being invisible. Perhaps; now he can see his hands, and he holds them in front of him; now he can see his feet leave barely-present imprints on the grass. He has no scars, in addition to being uninjured. Did they think that would make this more plausible?
"Look," she says, "let's go ahead and make your assumptions a little more explicit. You think I am a figment of the Enemy's imagination and that for some reason he's decided to present himself as a wildly implausible otherworldly woman who hasn't finished her teleportation spell yet and therefore has to rescue prisoners by turning them into birds even though this is not the most efficient way to shrink or transport people. You are choosing to manifest this belief by doing things which are really annoying in the case that I actually am this implausible person - this implausible person with your best interests at heart who rescued a couple of prisoners without knowing who in the world they were, I remind you - yet will not inconvenience the Enemy much at all. Can I ask you to make better-balanced tradeoffs? I don't think you can ruin the Enemy's day by figuring tasks that are difficult for me are trivial for him and then making me do them anyway. I do apologize for being so implausible but there's nothing I can do about that."
He raises an eyebrow. "You request that I not run off, because that makes no difference assuming you are an early iteration of some rescue-scenario trick but is inconvenient if you are actually in fact a rescuer who turns into a bird? Now that I am visible I am visible from the location where we parted. I refuse to believe that I significantly inconvenienced you. And you are welcome to cease to be inconvenienced by me by going away. Would you like a tearful expression of gratitude first, so you can experience closure on the whole adventure? I cannot think of any drawbacks to offering one. "
"You are not visible from that location, I have dramatically inferior eyes compared to a Quendi - missing two colors, deficient in distance and detail by at least an order of magnitude. My hearing is worse too. It took me as long to find you as you spent visible." She transforms, falls into step beside him. "I do not require emotional catering but a little practical consideration would be nice. I don't want to go tell your loved ones that I found you and rescued you and then you went missing. We're only a few hours' walk from Angband and if you wander in the wrong direction - or in any other, for that matter - you may, in the case where you were actually rescued, run into orcs I haven't rehabilitated yet and wind up recaptured."
"What I have on me are a weapon I cannot replace if something becomes of it even once I have the means to go home, and a weapon with a finite supply of poison in it which I cannot replenish until I have the means to go home. I can see about getting you a knife from somewhere else, although I don't think the suggestion will be very popular. Speaking of things you can be gotten somewhere else, someone could bring you food - maybe leave it somewhere so you don't have to talk to them; or arrive with the understanding that you don't think they exist and only want to discuss the weather but might still experience some benefit from having conversations now and then - but I can't carry much of anything while a bird and all other means of travel are slow."
"Okay. Next time I'm visiting your family to heal orcs they've caught, or in Doriath, whichever comes first, I'll ask around about settlements like that, although unfortunately a lot of people are - fairly reasonably, considering the mind control, I guess - suspicious of people the Enemy has captured and not willing to stick their necks out absent personal affection or some sort of proof. It's hard to come by. You might want to move in with the rehabilitated orcs, actually, they're going to resettle when I've found them a place." Pause. "I convinced your father I wasn't the Enemy in disguise by demonstrating my native language. I don't suppose you can also determine if languages are related by listening to them for a while? I can turn my translation magic off."
Loki laughs, a little, and proceeds to explain (with visual aids) Asgard and her family and culture, the Tesseract and sorcery and the spells she made, her discovery and supposed exile to Midgard and her arrival on the ice without her friend. "Findekáno doesn't think it will help convince you this isn't a hallucination to hear that he's alive, but he is anyway and I have most of my contact with his group via him, so I'm telling you now rather than awkwardly talking around it -" She arrived too late to save most but she saved some; when they left the ice she visited their cousins; Fëanor was the charming nerd that he is; she sought advice and healed him to keep his oath in force and because Maitimo himself was not present to step in with all his much-made-of-competence if he wasted away; orcs; Doriath; the disappearance of the smoke - "And you were there for the rest of it, but last night I went to see if anyone could identify you and the other prisoner - I asked Findekáno because your family was mid-festival that night and I didn't know it was you and had only mediocre news in the case that it was so I didn't interrupt. I still don't know who the other guy was, but." Shrug. "He seemed to know where he wanted to be going. I hope it wasn't off a cliff but I didn't want to leave you."
The Enemy almost certainly already knows this, so - "The prisoner who was chained nearest me in Angband, and whose form you used to make it appear that someone was escaping and that you were permitting it was named Rodyn. He had, to my knowledge, no surviving family."
"Maybe we could condense the sentiment 'I still think this is a hallucination' into something nice and short," mutters Loki. "So as to otherwise retain the flow of conversation." Sigh. "Your family doesn't know I fetched you yet. Findekáno isn't sure it would be best for them to be able to find you; I think he suspects that they'd be able to convince you to - act, produce intellectual work, etcetera - and he's rather torn over wanting to put you somewhere comfortable and leave food on your doorstep and then go back to being extremely emotional about everything in between, versus wanting to get you where he imagines you'd in fact want to be conditioning on this not being a hallucination, which is according to him working in your family's interests. This is all a little complicated by the fact that he doesn't know you didn't participate in burning the boats. One of your brothers told me but said he wouldn't confirm if asked and said I shouldn't tell Findekáno, which I haven't... Findekáno asked me what I'd want in your position. I'd want enough information to build parallel models, one of the world where everything was a lie and one of the world where it wasn't. He can't guess that you might want that because he thinks you can't possibly care about lying that much after all. What a fucking mess."
"This is elaborate," he says when he has a moment to compose himself. And true to all of them; she'd done a good job. He probably shouldn't confirm as much. The most implausible thing about it is her own competence, and she could surely adjust that for the next iteration if he commented on it.
Maybe if he practices for a while he can see illusion-Findekáno without giving anything away. How far would she let him take that?
"If I had truly been rescued from Angband, I would devote all my energy for a year or so to researching the phenomenon whereby survivors of Angband carry out the enemy's will months and years later. I would try to determine whether it is safe for me to be near my loved ones. If it was, I would return home and speed my family in throwing down Angband and wiping your master off the planet he is trying so desperately to be relevant to. If not, I suppose I'd live with other outcast escapees until one of us lost their hold and killed all the others."
Probably shouldn't say it but - "your Findekáno is unrealistic. He takes his obligations quite seriously and would not waste much time on this, not when there are so many people dying."
"Well, you'll notice he didn't insist on charging up here with me even after he'd gotten your location out of me. I'm not sure how long you think the conversation took but it didn't ultimately slow the host down, whatever he came up with that he didn't follow through on." She shakes her head. "Maybe I should leave you mostly alone while I work on my teleportation and then take you to another realm and get you a fucking therapist, Quendi don't care much about a century here or there, right? I'm not qualified for this. Although I'm not sure anyone actually is and you'd probably hate therapy, so. I don't know where to find you a community of escapees and have no idea where Rodyn went so can't suggest you start one. Do you want to plan to join up with the converted orcs when they settle somewhere, do your research from their colony? They might be a little irritating about their new religion but you'll have no previous experiences - well, positive experiences, I can't guarantee that you won't have encountered any of them before - and they'd probably benefit a lot from having someone around to show and tell them things that wouldn't be remotely novel to the Enemy."
"Is that a limitation the Enemy has? Would you like to invisibly, inaudibly approach your family's camp and spy on them? Do you want to be a bird and fly around and look at the whole continent - it will take you a while to learn and it's fairly undignified as a process but I can teach you."
"Okay. It took me weeks to get the hang of it but I had no demonstrations to go on and I had to practice surreptitiously, when no one was likely to want to get hold of me; and I had to re-change every time I failed to take flight, whereas in your case I can just repeatedly drop you. Maybe osanwë will help; my people don't have it but I can send things to people who do, possibly including proprioceptive stuff. I apologize for the 'dropping' part; I wanted to learn to turn into a bird to fly, not to walk, so I picked a kind of bird that is very good at one and incapable of the other. You'll need to land on vertical surfaces if you want to rest, although you'll be able to sleep in the air too if you like. I cannot enable you to change back on your own, but I'm at the Fëanorian camp on a fairly regular schedule, every Elenya and Aldúya, it's Anarya now - you could lurk near it and catch me on my way out, once you can get around, if you wanted to resume being Quendi-shaped for any reason. Sound like a plan?"
"The spell will probably revert itself if I die, which could still be a real problem if you were a few hundred feet in the air. But I don't know for sure, never having died; that's just what happens to other sorcerers' spells on their deaths unless they do elaborate things I have not added to the bird spell. You shouldn't age while being a bird but I can't guarantee nothing will decide you look delicious, especially if you get stuck grounded; and you definitely shouldn't enter Doriath because they're wise to my tricks and are assembling preparations for defense against enemies in the shape of birds. If you die you will be dead, although your species gets an afterlife, which is - maybe arguably - an improvement on what mine gets."
"I am going to have to pick you up a lot for you to learn to fly. I am really uncomfortable doing that while you're so obviously unhappy about it in a situation less dire than 'scurrying you out of Angband' and if you're going to freeze up you're not going to be figuring out how to hold your wings right anyway." She drops her hand and sighs.
"Well, in this hallucination I'm an Asgardian visitor who has really terrible vision, so when I make illusions they are missing colors. If I make one of myself it looks like this." She makes one. "To me it looks exactly like myself; you can see heat and ultraviolet, so it looks off to you. Within the parameters of this fucking hallucination if I wanted to get a convincing instance of someone you knew I would have to go and actually get them, which we have established you'd rather I didn't do. It just crossed my mind that if I looked like one it might calm down the flinch reaction and I said it because I only intermittently have the skill of keeping my mouth shut." The illusion disappears.
I'd want enough information to build a model of two worlds, she'd said. Well, in one world everyone is alive and everything is all right and he isn't really needed. It makes sense to let most of his weight stand in the other world, even if it weren't also vastly more probable.
"I'm curious, who does he deputize to do his simulations for him? Am I meant to be a disguised Balrog or what? And yes, I have to live here in time with you. If it won't take that long I'll go to Doriath to ask their advice on where to put orcs and see if they're willing to be a refuge for children in an emergency and discuss sorcery with the queen and try very hard not to flirt with the princess" what, it's not like he's liable to meet her, she's not allowed to leave and he's not allowed to enter, "and stop here on my way back to visit your family to get started on dropping you."
"Not the Balrogs. I don't think they can change forms anymore. Thauron, for a while, but that was before they started just toying with me. I don't think you're him. Different strengths. Have a journey no more eventful than the one you've planned for yourself; I will aspire to teach my body to be comfortable with being manhandled."
"I described the ones I have," she sighs. "Anyway. Late Isilya or early Aldúya I'll come back and remove your invisibility and hope to find you somewhere hereabouts, and we can do flying lessons and discuss what I should tell your family. I can narrow that down if you need me to."
"If you are a Maia of some stripe you're going to slip up eventually; we incarnates are very different from you and you will not be able to convincingly imitate my acquaintances. When you make an obvious error I will not react, obviously, but then I'll know for sure. And I am looking forward to it."
"I'm working on my own recognizance. And you are very frustrating even in comparison with handling my constant impulses to flirt with Lúthien despite having less than no idea how Quendi navigate that sort of thing; your father interrupting every conversation we have to solicit Asgardian vocabulary and compose ridiculous sentences with what he has; and Findekáno being extremely emotional about everything. But I rescued you and you're making it difficult to turn you over immediately to anyone else and indefinite solitude is bad for the mind, so."
"You think that rescuing people obliges you to entertain them indefinitely? I release you of any obligation you feel towards me; I can take care of myself. Go seduce Lúthien, whoever that is."
"I'm not going to seduce Lúthien, I don't like her parents and they seem to have a vested interest in her love life and I've never managed to sustain an interest in a woman past succeeding in seducing one and I vaguely suspect Quendi of extreme monogamous tendencies and it would in general be a fiasco. I just find it a constant temptation and you are the only person I can complain to without a hundred other people in earshot. Anyway, it's not indefinite, I have no intention of doing this for more than a year tops. After that I'm probably not going to be able to improve on wherever I've set you up."
"I do hold my reasoning to that standard. ...I haven't actually been able to tell if you and Findekáno are or were an item, but no need to tell me; I haven't asked him either and I'd just do that if I really needed to know for some reason besides hopeless cultural bewilderment. Anyway. Anything else?"
He reviews the conversation mentally, trying to guess what could be learned. More than he'd like. He should be more careful. Part of him wants to keep giving them things, small things, to make this last a little longer, to hear someone speak with apparent sincerity of a Findekáno who is alive and well. That would be a betrayal. If he could outright buy his freedom with information for the enemy he wouldn't do it. He certainly won't buy a longer hallucination.
Loki, meanwhile, heads to Doriath. She tries painting herself a thin blue dotted line, which will blend in against the sky - maybe not to a Quendi who's looking for it, but to anyone who's not paying attention, surely - towards the headache forest, then blinkering herself until it's the only thing she can see. Should solve the veering problem and the headache at once.
She stops outside the forest, puts her dagger away, and is not sure whether to shout into the trees or wait to be noticed or what.
"I was hoping to take them up on the offer to remain here a little while and discuss sorcery and its applications, and I would also like to know more about where the locals are living and where it might be appropriate for other populations to settle without bothering anyone."
It's a pleasant walk. She takes it briskly, pleasant though the scenery is; she'd like to get some research (and her map of local populations, if they'll give her one of those) in today if the Queen or any other reasonable sorcerous assistants are available.
"It's because she's a Maia," Lúthien says over her shoulder, "when distracted she doesn't breathe and she almost never does facial expressions if she's not formally having an audience, which rather prompts her to stay on top of it. I used to tease her about it, growing up."
It didn't used to be like this - she used to never forget for longer than a few minutes - but with the land so dangerous she puts more and more of herself into protecting it. If you need something from Father you can ask now, or after he's done settling this -" she gestures at the throne, though as far as Loki can hear there's no conversation ongoing - "but you'll have to wait for her to have the energy for us, if it's sorcery you want advice on."
"Not just that. I also wanted to ask if the kingdom's available for a refuge for children, from the other populations, in an emergency; and I wanted to know where all the other populations are settled so I can make intelligent suggestions about what places are open or at least sparse."
"Oh, Father'll relent for Olwë's grandchildren. They had a 'no one with free will' business, didn't they? It's rather a pattern, he says something terribly harsh and then lets us talk him down to leniency. You can call it absurd, if you like, but it usually produces just results in enough time. Our greatest failing is that producing just result in enough time isn't good enough anymore, and the process of governance in Menegroth doesn't get half the best result with half the time to consider it."
Loki nods. "The pace of things here has seemed odd to me here. Asgardians live a long time compared to many races, too, and grow slowly and spend a long time physically young and without imminent fear of the eventual fate of mortal creatures, even if we don't outright persist forever; but time means more to us than it seems to for Quendi. And I am a particular quick specimen."
"We're here for ever, for all the Ages of the world. My mother remembers millions of years as they'd be measured now; everything happens in a blink, for her, and rushing it is both utterly contrary to her nature and exhausting and painful. But we know that now it's necessary, and we're trying. To accommodate your rather breakneck pace through life, if not to match it exactly."
"Well, I can't stay here longer than two nights this time, even if your mother doesn't wake up in that interval to talk sorcery; but perhaps you could coach me in the etiquette of addressing your father about the other matters? I'd know how to do this in Asgard; or for that matter on Vanaheim where my father's from, but I don't know the procedure here."
"Ooooh, later you have to tell me how to do it on Asgard or on Vanaheim. Not that I expect I'll be allowed to go there, but it seems worth knowing. Anyway, don't look at my father right now, it'll seem like you're trying to interrupt his current audience and catch his attention. Go to Mablung - in the blue, right over there - and tell him your question and ask to be presented to the King and he'll do it in what he thinks is the order of importance of the queries he's been presented with and then he'll request of the King an audience for you and then you can just thank him for listening and ask whatever it is. If Asgard has more protocol than that he'd probably be flattered by it, but it's not typical."
"I decided to sort of go for irregularity as my whole role, here, it lets me do things faster if they need to happen. I'm silly and get easily enchanted by an idea and then run around collecting the pieces for it, and everyone knows it, so they're unsurprised by whatever request I might show up insisting I get fulfilled immediately. I'm not sure how I'd transition from this to being taken seriously, but I'm not sure I could ever be serious enough to get Father to budge by arguing with him rather than by charming him and I'm not sure what else seriousness would be for. Would it cost you political credibility to be fetching things, back home?"
"If I ask people to bring you food they'll definitely be fast about it, but then I won't get to see the chefs and thank them and be seen in the hallways and smile at people and convey that you're our guest and so forth. And if I only did it when it was important then everyone'd know when I was doing something I thought important."
Lúthien is back before the audience is granted. Every single item on the plate she is holding looks to be a kind of fruit; at least three are glowing gently. "There was a baby boy born today," she says excitedly as she returns, "and I was solicited for names and encouraged to kiss him and I danced until the mother felt less tired, though I could hardly have made her happier, and I hope I didn't take too long getting back."
Nom. "Asgardian cuisine is heavy on the meat and alcohol. But there are fruits and vegetables and bread and cheese and eggs too. Usually nothing very complicated; the standard recipe is 'roast it with salt and onion and possibly two or three spices', with 'turn it into a stew' and 'make a sandwich of it' distant seconds."
"Meat turns out to be logistically challenging for a million people living in a cave system. The Dwarves do it, somehow, but we've never been able to make it a significant part of the diet. And nowadays we kill any deer that enters the forest." She frowns. "I feel guilty over thinking that fundamentally aesthetic considerations like welcomingness or forests with deer should take precedence over the lives of my people. But the way things are now is an ugly way to live."
"Do we strike you as the type to do underground excavation and stonework? Or metalworking? The Dwarves live in the eastern mountain ranges, or travel, but a few hundred of them live and work here in Menegroth and greater numbers took part in building it. My lilies went to the edge of their community, the day we met. I can introduce you? It sounds like you're juggling a great deal as it stands."
"It didn't occur to me that you wouldn't be able to do underground excavation and stonework if it seemed expedient," Loki says. "And I didn't know if it might have taken long enough for it have been done by Maia magic. I am juggling a lot, but I'm hoping to solve at least some of the problems I encounter by encouraging people to help each other; maybe the Dwarves are not in particularly dire straits and have a little to spare. That or they are having terrible troubles of some kind and I should prioritize them."
"Melian can make caves, she can't make them look like trees. Once they do look like trees she can make them come alive. She's not as limited as I, since I'm only half Maia, but it's the same principle by which I can dance to make people revitalized and happy but can't make them revitalized without making them happy. I can introduce you to the Dwarves after your audience. They are about three feet tall, very ugly by the standards of our people, and on civil terms with us as a people but unfriendly ones with most of us as individuals. Which is mostly our fault - we hunted them for sport, before we realized they were sentient."
"Oh, goodness. It might depend on how hypothetically I came by the power to hold the world and how long I could do it for... I'd invent a lot of spells. I'd sabotage the Enemy. I'd explore everywhere without being shot at for it and know where everything was. I'd run to all the other realms and curate the accumulated wisdom of a thousand worlds and bring back vast torrents of knowledge, here and everywhere that's struggling."
He looks startled and delighted. "Olwë had grandchildren? We hesitate to answer, not knowing whether they participated in the outburst of random violence you describe, but we remember our brother with the conviction he would not have done wrong, and would certainly see and speak to them, and come to understand whatever occurred. Extend our invitation."
"I will be delighted to convey it to them. Second, I am aware of more than one group seeking a place to settle, but I have been in this realm only a short time and do not know enough about what parts of the continent are already claimed to make intelligent suggestions to them. I would be grateful to have any information you would share with me about what space is open and who might be willing to have neighbors."
Loki nods solemnly. That's not exactly advice, but she can convert it into advice. "Thank you. And my third item is that I wished to know if the safety of Doriath is available to the newcomers' children, who would have lifted no weapons during the unpleasantness, if some emergency should put them in particular danger."
She hesitates. "My father rode out in the first campaigns of that war. He won, but at a terrible cost, and with many of his close friends dead, and he concluded war is never worthwhile and that it ought to be forbidden to speak of it as glorious. I think he would be right, had we any lesser Enemy."
"I want to entertain my guest while Mother's busy."
"It has been a distraction but in the most splendid sense."
"I'm not going to ask her to braid my hair."
"Yes."
"Okay." And she turns back around. "Uh, actually, maybe in an hour? I'm terribly sorry."
It might actually be nice to get out of her armor for a day, however well-designed for long engagements it is; she can always leave in her own clothes tomorrow or the day after. Loki investigates the pocket-having and mobility-permitting properties of the various outfits.
"I'm never sure if the times I visit the Dwarves are convenient for them, they tend to prefer to communicate that they were inconvenienced but are present anyway, and I'm starting to suspect that saying you weren't inconvenienced is like saying you don't work very hard. Unless you mean inconvenient for me? I really don't work very hard. I can ask whoever made this dress to make you more of them, and I'm not entirely sure what you mean by local formality."
"I meant both you and the Dwarves, but if Dwarves are not available in an uninconvenienced form then I suppose I can mean only you. I suspect it's not worth it to commission additional clothes for me; I travel a lot and prefer to travel in my armor, which is not designed to be worn over a skirt. And I mean that the more important an Asgardian dinner is the more likely it is to involve breaking dishes, getting incredibly drunk in toasting every noun that comes to mind, and casual brawling, which I find extremely unlikely to be the table manners expected at a formal dinner here."
"I don't really, no. I will not break your dishes or start fights. I'm not a particularly gifted singer and won't know your songs; am I expected to? Also, I've been operating under the continued assumption that I'm not supposed to cast any spells that affect living things, here, which would include my anti-poison spell, which I tend to surreptitiously rely on if I'm expected to drink like a fish because I dislike being drunk. Is it impolite to drink sparingly instead?"
"Well, most Asgardians can't turn into birds either. I could turn you into a bird if you wanted to try it and I weren't restricting my magic so. And no, I'm not at the point where I need hours on end to get anywhere useful, just early planning steps." She dismisses the symbols.
"If you'd like. I have no practice explaining this but it seems not unlikely that eventually I'll try to teach someone how I do sorcery." She resumes filling the air with symbols. "Some of these are magical symbols - representing an atomic concept of sorcery, two hundred and nine of them that were stamped into my brain when I touched the Tesseract as a child. Those are the ones you will still not be able to read even after I -" She applies Allspeak to the symbols - "suit my writing to my audience." The actual words resolve themselves into the local language. "I'm reminding myself what my existing spells are made of, and seeing what I can recycle for teleportation - not very much, but maybe some of the subcomponents of the parts that know how people are shaped - and trying to get an idea of what I need to write from scratch. I'll need an extremely solid conception of 'location' as a concrete concept, and one that works relative to objects in motion - I'm not sure if this realm does it, but most realms are enormous globes, constantly spinning and revolving around their suns. They feel still to people on them, but if I don't adopt their motion when I land on them, immediately, I'll go crashing into a wall at best."
"Yes. So I also have to rigorously define 'clear' - is someplace that is on fire 'clear'? Is underwater 'clear'? Someplace which doesn't have any arrows in it at the moment but did a moment ago and will a moment in the future? Do I need a full Loki-sized clear space if I am teleporting as a swift? - and maybe allow myself to remove that safety if I'd rather be in a location that was on fire than not." Notes appear in the air in a tidy branching structure as she mentions these concerns.
"Good question. I don't know yet. I could try to make it so I can land in a place I'm visualizing," a bulleted list sprouts into existence, "and get between, say, here and my home, but that won't take me to someplace I've never been and have only seen out-of-date pictures of, and I might want to go to such places. The spell needs to be smart enough to take me to a planet by name alone, match its speed, land me feet down and head up, keep me as safe as it can without failing when I'd rather it succeed, and maybe even fail informatively so I can tell the difference between 'the problem is there is no air on this planet' and 'the problem is this planet is on fire' so I know what protections to fetch. Maybe it should be able to find population centers, so I don't have to trial-and-error when my principal interest is the people of a realm and not the scenery. And I want to be able to take passengers, which is its own complication; and cargo, likewise."
"My mother found it exhausting to spend a whole year making sure she had the right heart rate and blood pressure and internal biochemistry. The Maiar don't usually take biological forms to the necessary level of detail. I don't think she'd have even done one, if my father wasn't heartbroken - he always had wanted a big family..."
"No one's in charge of protecting her in particular - we haven't had personal guards since we were little; it'd be admitting that we weren't living up to the standards of combat-readiness - and if they were, she would be better at their job than them." The illusion of Thor shrinks and she and a non-Mjolnir practice hammer knock three cooperating opponents across the room inside of eight seconds with perfect form and an enormous grin. Her friends roll to their feet and laugh ruefully.
"They make us fight. I had no aptitude for it at all but it's the womanly thing to do in Asgard and a princess can't get away with just not being particularly womanly. Thor's a prodigy. We weren't adults until we'd gone out and killed something nasty. She got a giant bear, I went along - I had my healing spells by then and thought I could bail her out if it went badly - and I got a wyvern." The scenes play out in parallel illusions: tiny Loki gingerly spearing an enormous bear covered in broken arrows and scars from the high ground while Thor clobbers it in the jaw. Larger Loki, Thor and friends looking on while she grounds a reptile and dispatches it. "Subject to the vagaries of my memory," she clarifies.
"Círdan's, to talk with him about your orcs. Eithel Ivrin, it's absolutely beautiful and there used to be a thriving nomadic community in the area and I want to make sure they're all right. Tumunzahar, the Dwarf-city, I've been invited and it sounds magical. Lake Mithrim, where the newcomers have settled - I could surprise my cousins! Or just greet them, if they dislike surprises. I could make their crops grow faster by dancing and singing and things."
"I'd really like a map of all these places and a list of all these people," she remarks. "The newcomers that have your cousins with them are not the ones at the lake." Pause. "It's probably a terrible idea to suggest it but I wonder how many guards I'd count for."
"I think I might rather not have him thinking of me as the possible equal of a hundred excellent archers like that. And Finwë's children and grandchildren are leading their respective groups, but there are many other people with both sets and the two factions aren't speaking."
"I can't dismiss them and get them back. But they persist as long as I don't get rid of them altogether, and I can manipulate them almost like they were real." She peels off a duplicate map. It shrinks and clings to the back of her hand. "And I can stick an illusion to a person. So I can wear it - maybe under my clothes or feathers - and then -" She shakes her hand illustratively and expands the image. "It loses a little fidelity in the process. But not so much that I can't just sharpen it up again, good as new." She does that; it matches the "original".
"I doubt the illusion carries the effect," Loki says. "I could add illusion of your voice but it would be dependent on my memory; and anyway, my memory of faces is good enough that I don't think there'd be much loss of fidelity if I made a new illusion of you when I arrived instead of carrying one along. The idea's very cute but I'm not sure it improves on an osawnë memory or a new illusion."
"No one's sure, since they're not El- Quendi, but none of them have ever been recorded to have broken their word, and Queen Melian my mother says one of the Valar created them directly as a personal project, and in any event we wouldn't have Menegroth without them, or metal weapons and armor to defend it."
And when he had finished, then Eru spoke to him, and said 'you have sinned against me, child, in overreaching yourself and trying to equal me; the Valar cannot create life, only I can do that. These are but automatons, extensions of your will.' And Aulë, weeping to have disobeyed his god, raised his great hammer to destroy them - but they screamed and cried and begged for life. And Aulë said to Eru, 'how can this be, if they are automatons?', and Eru said that, impressed by the sincerity of Aulë's repentance, he had given them true life."
"Yes," she says, "but they prize fine weapons very highly and had no subterranean neighbors, so they practiced and studied a great deal." And then she starts naming substances - thank you, Thor, for hours of weapons geekery comparing this lance to that axe - and their virtues and composition, starting with the ones she was surest of.
Loki apologizes for her spotty knowledge but winds up giving a more specialized version of her impromptu chemistry lesson. Do you have titanium? Here is what she remembers about how to get hold of aluminum if you can find it, but it is not state of the art as arms or armor for anything except arrowheads in this alloy, she does not remember the exact composition...
"What I mean is that I invented my first spell and it cured me of my poor coordination. They still don't know I did that. They think I grew out of it. And I think the situation would be substantially worse than 'temporarily exiled to a planet of my choice to give Odin time to think' - however stray my transport went - if they knew that I have never held a melee weapon without relying on magic I cast myself to do it."
"They don't see it that way. They think it's dishonorable to use magic in combat - an enchanted weapon is fine, however flashy its effects, but not sorcery cast by the warrior herself. It's... Is there a concept of a 'war crime' here? A thing you do not do to your enemies or prisoners even if they are absolutely trying their hardest to slaughter everyone you know, even if they wouldn't hesitate to do that thing to you given the chance, something that is simply not part of the repertoire at any price."
"Now, no one thinks I have committed an atrocity. But I have stepped outside the bounds of honorable combat. I have demonstrated that I am willing to acquire and have in reserve secret powers that are not supposed to be part of the repertoire. It doesn't matter that their first exposure to these powers was me healing my father when someone tried to assassinate him because no socially acceptable healers were present. It doesn't matter that they were never going to be happy if I were just an archer - an immobile archer - because I wasn't born with the ability to put my feet where they needed to be.
"What matters is that they are all operating by a set of rules that say girls are warriors, not sorcerers, never sorcerers, and warriors bring blade to blade and use their speed and strength and aim and tactical wit. Warriors do not blind and deafen ten thousand orcs to send them running away because warriors never learned to do that in the first place; it doesn't matter how many people I protected. Warriors don't shrug off their wounds in the middle of fighting the most dangerous megafauna on Asgard which has just swallowed their friend because warriors are supposed to accumulate and keep battle scars and either fight through injuries or let them be as impairing as they are even if they were inflicted by a dumb animal who outweighs them by a hundred times; it doesn't matter that the only reason either of us survived was that I could heal! It is all so heartbreakingly stupid!"
"Yes," she says, "sounds stupid. Really stupid. I'm sorry. They're wrong about what war is for, the only thing you're really truly supposed to do is keep everyone alive. I'm glad you were able to see that and do something better. Maybe after we've defeated the Enemy you can go figure out what went wrong back home and persuade them to stop being like that? I could possibly travel with you once the Enemy's dead, Father'll be less paranoid."
"Asgardians aren't immortal; eventually we age and die. I'm planning to live forever. With magic. But I am not sure it would be such a good thing if my mother lived forever, considering how she handles her power and how unlikely it is she'd ever stop doing it in precisely the same way if she never died; and anyway she wouldn't approve of how I'd do it. In theory she could choose either Thor or I as her successor. In practice it's customary to go with the elder, and that's Thor; and she finds Thor's virtues more admirable than mine. She had not yet rendered a formal decision when I left but I cannot imagine it likely she'll find in my favor."
"I am an above-average but not exceptional fighter, a uniquely skilled sorcerer and irregular in being a sorcerer at all while female, temperamentally bizarre, and - until I arrived in this realm and became very busy - not unusually storied for a well-born girl of Asgard my age."
"I miss deer," her neighbor says, "but word's gotten around and they stay out of our neck of the woods, mostly. When Melian's less stressed people were thinking about asking her to alter the defenses so they don't scare off animals."
So usually it's played as, like, an elaborate and destructive game of hide-and-seek. When the other person does something to the house, you can oppose it - say to yourself 'no, wait, that didn't happen' and that'll usually undo it, but that's less fun, it's the most fun if you just try to top it. Do you want me to start? Running away involves more creating on the fly, chasing someone involves more crashing everything everywhere."
Okay, well... if you go on something that is moving, you'll feel wind; but after you've settled at a speed, you won't go sliding off the back of the thing. The only time that will happen is if the speed changes, and it can happen either way. Osanwë: even better for visual aids than illusions in some ways. If it speeds up, you'll have to hold on or you'll fall off the back; but if it suddenly slows down or stops, you'll have to hold on or you'll fall off the front. As long as it stays a single speed, you just go along with it. Standing on a planet is like that. They turn and turn and turn, and zoom through the void in ellipses, and they do it very fast - but they don't change how they're doing it suddenly.
Before the quarreling overseas strangers came, when Mother was working herself far past her limits trying to fend off everything the Enemy was throwing at us, when we thought no help was coming, I thought about it. Didn't, because I didn't know what I was doing and I figured I should have a little more faith. I'd like to grow into more the sort of person who'd have done it.
The Valar actually sent them away with some sort of 'Doom' I don't fully understand fated for all their endeavors. I am loosely hoping that I can somehow manage to recategorize all of their most important projects as my endeavors somehow in such a way as to evade that, since as a complete outsider equipped with free will I may be constitutionally immune to the relevant form of fate or something, but I'm not sure if that will work at all.
Lúthien comes by significantly later in the day. "Sorry," she says, "everyone who'd drunk too much wanted me to do a dance first thing in the morning, except I'd probably drunk a little too much myself, so I was trying to sing myself into any kind of condition to help them and it took a while. Father is maybe possibly relenting on the "no refugee children" thing though I doubt he'll really budge until we have mother back. How are you?"
"I'm all right, although I really need a reliable source of paper so I can stop being so stingy with using what little I brought; I remembered two things I forgot to ask your father. You could have come to me about the hangover if your parents would have relaxed the requirement about magic use. Is the refugee children subject what had you distracted yesterday?"
"Yeah. Or indirectly, the conversations on that topic are all indirect. We were talking about how Dad considers all the population of Middle-earth his subjects - incidentally, the newcomers would win a lot of mileage by swearing fealty, he'd probably back down entirely on the children if they'd do that - and whether this obliges him to protect them all."
Loki pulls out her little notebook and her pen - stops - looks at the map still stuck to her hand - and illusions letters onto the page instead. "I'll mention the option; the Nolofinwëan crowd is much likelier than the Fëanorians to go for it but I don't know how likely that actually is."
"Thank you. I'd appreciate guidance on the phrasing - Fëanor wants to express his dedication to defeating the Enemy and his hope that he can consider your father an ally in this matter; one of his sons is wondering if Doriath can be bribed for such help with any sort of cunning invention. Fëanor's very brilliant and can be asked to cunningly invent things."
"Maybe tie it to the fealty thing? Say that he's Finwë's son and cannot, until his father is avenged, imagine taking another, but he'd be happy to honor the ancient friendship between houses by giving my father Middle-earth's rightful ruler nice presents? I don't know if they'd feel mischaracterized but I expect Father'd be pleased."
"I don't think I'll leave it for years, especially not now that I can take notes without having to use up desperately finite paper." Words appear; she turns a page; more words appear. They're written for herself and Lúthien won't be able to read them. "There are I suppose some advantages to being the most impatient person around: when I am the one a plan is waiting on I can operate on precisely my own schedule."
"I have a twice weekly appointment with the Fëanorians currently standing, because they're collecting and hosting orcs for me until I find somewhere else for the orcs to go. And when I do find somewhere for them to go they may continue catching more of their own fellow orcs for me to fix and I don't like to delay that. So I won't ever be here for very long all in a row until there's some sort of permanent halt to the orc supply."
"So this was once a natural cave system - we've expanded it tremendously - but we left the original caves, intact as we could manage them, as a tribute to Aulë, and they're spectacular. All these odd crystal things." She starts walking. "And you've yet to see any of the really big spaces, where tens of thousands of people live - there's ropes strung everywhere and occasionally someone falls and needs my mother, but it's much much safer than it looks. And there's an underground river."
She looks surprised. "We can wait. We can mostly just tell our bodies to stop, and they do, though it's unpleasant and you'd never do it for fun. And don't do it outside Menegroth, my mother's presence halts natural decay here. Outside, the things that live in harmony with our bodies wouldn't stop just because you told your body to, and something bad would happen. Is Asgard like that?"
Lúthien practically dances across. "It took a long time to talk anyone into living here, even with how nice everything is. The Quendi aren't really meant to live below ground. But in the worst case, we can seal the doors of Menegroth and survive here forever. Well, not if the Enemy is roaming the continent free, he could slowly crush us. But anything short of that, we'll barely notice. Everyone else has stopped having children but there are still children born here. We are very lucky. Want to see the river?"
It's not a bad story, it just doesn't ring quite right to me." She is picking the flower apart in her hands.
Oh good, Loki had been vaguely wondering if the flowers were supposed to be treated with some kind of special respect. "What I heard is that the stars thing - I hadn't heard about the men thing - was the Valar's story after the fact and before that, Quendi liked, well, words. Of course, I heard this from someone who cannot be diverted from being an enormous linguistics nerd even when he's dying and the source of the new language is also a source of healing magic, so."
"The name of the Eldar was given to us by the Valar, that's true, but I don't think that's when we started loving stars. Maybe the Tatyar loved words most? That seems consistent with what I know of them. See, the three first men founded the three tribes of the Elves - Imin the Minyar, all of whom now live in Valinor, Tata the Tatyar - some of them went to Valinor and became Finwë's people, the Noldor. Some of them refused. And now some of the Noldor have come back. And Enel became the first leader and the forefather of the Nelyar, our people, our very extended family. Some of them went to Valinor and became Olwë's people there, and some of them were left behind when my father went missing. We are the sundered tribe. I'm sad Olwë didn't come with the departing Elves himself."
"Well, it is a legend, mostly used to teach young Quendi to count. Imin, Tata, Enel, and the legend goes on with all of the other Elves who joined their tribes. Perhaps they formed a little later. Certainly no one is alive who remembers a time before them, but Morgoth harassed us beside Cuivienen and lives were not long."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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."
"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..."
"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..."
"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!
"Yes, but a pool that's not so pure and clear you can drink from it wouldn't be satisfying to swim in, either, it wouldn't feel like we were back aboveground which is what everyone is really aching for." She shakes her head. "I'll try a few things, see if there's a way it can be done. We're by the armory now, I don't suppose you want to take a look at that?"
It is not a box you could carry under your arm, and this has many practical disadvantages. But its aesthetics and the scope of the places aren't among them. It's twenty stories high, armchair-dotted balconies with stacks receding into the distance oriented around a floor of desks at the very bottom, trays of books wheeling after busy librarians, sunlight streaming in through southern-exposure windows that show the rest of the city sprawling downhill, the place absolutely saturated with the smell of books and soft comfortable silence; there are spiral staircases, but one of the support poles can be slid down if you are a child delighting in your sudden ability to move, and she can slide from economics to ethnography -
"Mostly lessons. And some of them have pictures in, too. But yes. Every single book - and it is usually only one or two of any given one - full of words." Allspeak doesn't seem to want to filter through an osanwë memory of Asgardian text, but here's the mental image of a book full of information on the otherworldly flora colossi, one on the history of Asgardian art from a certain period of two centuries long before Loki was born, one on comparative religion -
"Fëanor invented the alphabet the newcomers use, I think. Writing is enormously important on most developed worlds; memory's imperfect and even if it is perfect it lets your words be transmitted to people you never meet personally. Daeron ought to be very proud of the idea. I don't know what I'd do without writing -" She gestures at her little notebook. "I had no idea how long it would take me to be able to get another of these so I was trying not to write things down if they weren't important to remember very exactly, and now I have the idea of using illusion letters stuck to the pages and I'm going to be much more functional."
"The darkness is cheating," she confesses, "I just nudged the room to go as ultraviolet as it possibly could on the grounds that you can't see all the colors."
"But two very dubious things would have to happen for it to make a difference to me at all," says Loki. "I'd have to be the sort of creature that can wind up in the Halls at all; but not enough like a standard one that it would matter if you were accompanying me."
"I mean, it would also matter a lot if I was accompanying any Quendi or Man. I have a better understanding of how the Valar think, and they can tell from my thoughts that I love them and desire to take joy in their world and give it to others, and I expect I could get anyone released, unless there were a lot of complications."
"And... I told you osanwë was an alarming discovery, for me. You said Mandos would know from your thoughts. When I found out osanwë existed I was horrified to discover that people might have been listening to what I was thinking, without me saying anything or even making a facial expression..."
"No. Findekáno taught me right then how not to - leak. I'm told I picked it up very quickly, although I don't know if that's just because I'm not a child. And it's useful when I'm doing it on purpose. But I can't bear the idea that someone would look without my leave. I have a habit of writing out my thoughts - on paper, at home, before I had my illusions or if I was with someone who couldn't know. And I'd do it in cipher, a transformed alphabet that nobody else could read, because I need privacy to think straight."
"I thought it might be something like that. And, well. If I thought there was much chance I'd meet with his approval, it might be worth it, however - violating, abhorrent - if I could go back to life, make a difference, fly again, explore the cosmos - but. I do not think he would like me."
"I'd picked up on that. I want to discuss it more with you, but also I don't, because it might be that I am eventually needed to plead the case for Middle-earth to the Valar and right now I can do that and if you convinced me of whatever you apparently believe I'd be less good at it, and I'm not sure I'd pick up any comparable advantages."
And when Lúthien has gone Loki finds her flowered footsteps, changes back into her armor, and departs the kingdom. Dagger; bird; map under her feathers; Nolofinwëans next to pick up a knife or something for Maitimo if he runs into orcs and being invisible doesn't cut it.
Snort. "I got a decent map of the continent from Lúthien. I can leave you a copy." She pulls a duplicate from the one on her person, expands and sharpens it. "I can make it follow an object. Or a person, if someone thinks a map illusion tattoo would be fashionable. Elu doesn't mind this area," she indicates, "being settled, and says someone will have to ask the ruler of this city," she indicates Brithombar, "about settling near there. You're hereabouts, now." Point.
"Current plan is to teach him to fly because he thinks it's computationally expensive to simulate the whole continent. I don't know how fast he'll pick it up. I thought I should ask you for a knife or something - in case he runs into orcs while alone and being invisible isn't sufficient -"
Loki stows it. "You're welcome." Pause. "He said - I recently thought of a way to not have to permanently sacrifice my notebook paper to write things down but I hadn't thought of it then, I won't have the exact words - but he said that if he weren't in a hallucination he would want to convey that he's very sorry and that if there's anything you can think of you'd like him to do which wouldn't in the case of a hallucination help the Enemy he'll do it."
"No, I'd prefer you tell me everything he says. I just - don't know how to react to that. It's a manipulation on so many levels I don't even know how to think about it. On the one level there's that he thinks he's talking to Moringotto. That's what he wants Moringotto to think he'd say to me, it might not be what he'd really say to me. On another level, it's not certain that whatever he'd say to me would be true. He lied - and lied very very well - when it mattered and he cannot possibly imagine I'll take whatever he says at face value from now on. And then there's - what do I want from him? I don't want anything from him. I want things for him. I want him to be happy and to know that he's safe. I - I'm not even sure I'd want a sincere apology, and I know as a question of fact I wouldn't be able to tell it from an insincere one."
"He doesn't want to display interesting-to-the-Enemy reactions to people he knows and has said he'll go completely catatonic if any such person shows up and won't go away. I won't relay this if he doesn't want me to, either. But I want to know if I have your permission." Transcribe transcribe.
He nods. "Yes, of course, whatever you like. ...I think the Enemy must be planning to attempt to impersonate someone. Maybe Maitimo, maybe someone else, but why on earth else would they be seeking information in that vein? We should probably be careful, except I'm not sure how one goes about being careful that your relatives might actually be Maiar playing them."
"I don't know either. I suppose I'll keep a lookout for any of my magic suddenly being difficult; I have to concentrate to oppose the light in Doriath at all. I don't know any other signs besides acting out of character and I haven't been here long enough to know anyone in all their moods."
"It's not me you have to convince. And my impression of Elu's likely opinion is as I've said. Lúthien you can probably rant to a bit, separately, she's more, mm, grounded. And very excited to meet the four of you." Loki presents an osanwë memory of Lúthien expressing this.
"Yes," someone says from inside the tent, "I'm very much looking forward to it."
"My brothers weren't involved on either side," Artanis says, "so Elwë may have fewer reservations."
"Maybe you have managed to think of a perfectly innocuous way for me to go to people who have never - to me - been anything other than charming and helpful, mention that I know where their missing family member is, and, what, hold that information hostage? Offer it in trade? Do you think they're going to forget a horse you very much want back when the orcs are capable of horse-delivery and you have an address for them to deliver to and you want me to use it to make sure of that because the last time I exchanged the well-being of their family for something it wasn't good enough? What could you possibly mean?"
"Oh, you feel obliged to be friendly with murderers if they're nice to you personally? What I mean is that we need some semblance of a united command to have any chance of winning this war, we can't all just hope you'll pull the magic to win it out of your pocket in time. Elwë doesn't look inclined or suitable to step up and be that lead. Nolofinwë's qualified, but I think the current Fëanorian policy on collaborating against our shared enemy is "pretend as much as possible that they don't exist and we didn't do anything'. I don't know if the non-Doriath Iathrim have someone who could do it. But we need someone, and yes, I think it'd be appropriate to tell Feanor that he has to muster something better than "I'll pretend they don't exist' as a strategy for the level of collaboration we will need to win this war."
"I feel obliged not to throw my weight around to extract things from people who have not, in the entire course of their acquaintance with me, misused that acquaintance. I am not the sort of person who barges into people's lives and holds their children hostage, and I doubt very much that Fëanor's resentful and temporary compliance is worth more than his goodwill, look where that got the Valar. If you had rescued Maitimo we would be having a different conversation, I suppose, but you didn't. I rescued him because I wanted him to be rescued. I didn't even know who he was. He is not yet rescued enough to suit me and so I'm going to keep working on that. If someone who loves you ever does something unconscionable and then you are captured by the Enemy you may rely on me to do the same."
"So I've heard. But I also haven't heard him express a wish that an entire campful of people with only the possible exclusion of children all be massacred, so I am not sure if you are innocent merely by lack of opportunity, which excuse I find flimsy if we're talking about what people deserve. I don't care. People do not exist to be hostages for their families' cooperation."
Fëanor took it personally. He founded a linguistics guild and campaigned rather obsessively to preserve the 'th' phoneme. Thus his children will tell you that the local language is Thindarin, not Sindarin, that Elwë is Thindicollo not Sindicollo, and Maitimo will tell you Thauron when the Maia in question is known everywhere else - and he is very well known - as Sauron."
I'm open to your thoughts, though."
"I can see arguments for either response, although I can tell him that you'd like to meet and discuss it in case he'll make an exception for you as he did for Olwë's grandchildren. I have little impression of how he handles people outside the borders of his wife's protections. Within them it seems safe and pleasant compared to anywhere else you could be; but that wasn't what Lúthien guessed he'd offer, and the tradeoffs are different and less appealing."
"We're here to take down the Enemy. I wholly expect that the local population would rightly resent us if we just asked to join their settlements; we could have remained in Valinor, were it our desire to live in peace while others suffered, and not been a strain on the resources of their people. My concern isn't that I get nothing in return, my concern is whether he'd give sensible orders."
"I'm concerned also that, while he regards himself as King of the whole continent, the local communities don't seem to regard him as their King and might not be pleased if we aligned ourselves with him. That we can look into while you're absent. We are only just beginning to interact with them, and have yet to talk politics."
"I think his plan is to approximately besiege Angband for three hundred years - which is at least more productive than staring at anyone - and meanwhile furiously invent things so that at the end of this time he can kill the Enemy. My assessment of this plan depends largely on whether I assume the Enemy makes orcs because he likes being gratuitously horrible or because it is practical for him to maintain an army of orcs. If it's the former a genius advance of some kind is honestly more likely to help than a lot of people with ordinary weapons."
"If the orcs are around because he needs orcs - because a large group of individual humanoid creatures running around stabbing things is the best way for him to accomplish his goals - then it is reasonable to assume that opposing him with your own large group of individual humanoid creatures capable of stabbing things is a viable strategy. If he's just making orcs to be cruel because he's a sadistic bastard? If he doesn't need them, if they're his hobby? Then you need to hold out for the other Valar to suddenly become responsible and competent, or for Fëanor or somebody to invent something, or for me to get help from another realm."
"After the three Ages were up he prostrated himself at Manwë's feet and said that he was anguished with grief and guilt over what he'd done, and he would contently live out the Ages as the humblest creature in Valinor if only this would permit him the opportunity to make amends. So Manwë paroled him. And he devotedly set about being kind and helpful to everyone who crossed his path, and Manwë was apparently not watching closely enough to notice the lies he set in motion to divide our family. And once he was discovered he partnered with an abomination from beyond the Void, one unknown to the Valar, to kill the Trees, despoil Valinor, murder my father, steal the Silmarils, and flee."
"Monstrous spider-like creature about a hundred feet tall, drinks light and exudes impenetrable magical darkness that may have psychological effects or those may just result from the trauma of the situation. We've been calling her Ungoliant. She got more powerful when she killed the Trees, and it looked vaguely like she drank them."
"That misunderstands the nature of my concern. The nature of my concern is that if Maitimo gets better, or is pretending to be more disconnected from reality than he really is, or expects he can continue pretending to be unwell in exchange for detailed information about important strategic discussions, then he will appreciate these transcripts for more than the ways they're suggestive of our personalities. He is not an honest person."
She checks her notes, exploding them out from her notebook and arraying incomprehensible Asgardian symbols in the air. "Unless I've forgotten something from before I could start writing things down again, that's it, I'll just be having dinner and flying to Maitimo overnight."
"All right, breakfast for me, I guess." She makes pretty short work of the half-turkey. "After I leave here I'm going to visit your family. I haven't seen them since I rescued you and while I have not been convinced that they shouldn't know I did that, I'm not certain it would be the best thing if they knew how to find you."
He half-smiles. "I'm not going to answer questions about my family's expected behavior, except because it is already obvious to observe you wouldn't get anything out of them. You must know that by now: they did not, after all, attempt to rescue me, or make any concessions when I was in Enemy hands. If I had been released and was in someone else's hands, and that person attempted to extort my family, they would be ignored."
"Irissë recommended I quiz you on various Enemy capabilities," Loki says, flipping through her notebook. "I transcribed several entire conversations including that one, actually, and have two and a half permissions to share them with you, if you want exact words from her, Findekáno, or Nolofinwë; or I could paraphrase; or I suppose I could run it through forty instances of translation and hope it comes out really mangled by the time it's in Quenya again, Allspeak's very good but it's not that good..."
He reads it, expressionless and very nearly motionless. "Thank you. Moringotto is directly involved in the running of Angband, though most of his work happened outside my hearing because there is some kind of magic at work that dulls Elven senses, possibly placed specifically on prisoners or possibly ambient. There are several hundred prisoners; the average lifespan may actually be as long as two decades, because we are resilient and difficult to accidentally kill and you only rarely execute prisoners. All rescue attempts fail because the area has a lot of orcs, prisoners are never held in a way that would make it possible to just cut them free and when they are transported there are usually Maiar present. You allowed 'escapes' sometimes to encourage future rescue attempts, but you stopped that once it became clear my family wouldn't be baited into it. I think there are around 400,000 orcs, but this is a rough estimate based on the percentage of orcs I encountered in one context who I'd see again later and could be off by an order of magnitude in either direction if I failed to understand your assignment rotation. Balrogs explode when they die and kill everything within about ten meters. Moringotto wears the Silmarils on his brow, even though they constantly burn him."
Loki writes all this down. "Exploding Balrogs, damned inconvenient, I don't habitually carry anything that far-ranged, hate managing ammunition... Thor'd be better suited... Thank you. Although I'd be obliged if you'd talk about the Enemy in the third person." She tucks the transcription into her notebook. "Done with the Irissë conversation? Should I keep it, are you likely to want to read it again - or erase it?"
Loki dismisses it. "Nolofinwë had some reservations about strategically informing you in any way because he still thinks you're generally untrustworthy, but I know better and he said I could show his transcript too on my recognizance. You want his next or Findekáno's?"
Out comes Nolofinwë's transcript. "I mean, one of your brothers, I've forgotten which but could probably figure it out by process of elimination if you really want to know, told me that you didn't participate in setting the boats on fire. Honestly, not even those fucking oaths you people have keep tormenting you if you simply do not happen to succeed at a thing. As I understand them, I suppose I could have misunderstood them."
"So, the reason I am not at home is because she temporarily exiled me to think over how dreadful it was that I healed my father when assassins shot at him, did I mention that? I mean, I didn't bandy it about in public beforehand but that was mostly because I wanted to preserve my various opportunities and maybe be queen one day myself, not because a princess in violation of her gender role would have strengthened the frost giants or something. Anyway, I can't think it's that much better for whatever reputation you're trying to preserve to have everyone think you play fast and loose with the truth."
"What, do you think he's happy now? You're in approximately untreatable psychological torment and even thinking you burned the boats with the others he still - whatever it is the two of you are to each other -" handwave, "and the only thing he can do for you is give you a knife so you can kill yourself if you have to, and he can't even bring it to you himself, and you think it is somehow better for him to be going through all this while thinking it's stupid and disloyal and hypocritical of him to do so?"
"No, I don't." He sighs. "You realize that everything you just described is disturbing, not virtuous? It is not healthy for Findekáno or conducive to his goals for him to be miserable with devotion to someone who betrayed him. It is wrong to take advantage of that kind of personal weakness. I don't know how to avoid doing it, but I should be trying to."
"I didn't say it was virtuous, but I like Findekáno and I would like him to be less conflicted as long as he is in fact mistaken about the principal source of his conflict. Look, I think it's pretty likely he can avoid making any strategic decisions that hinge on your trustworthiness, especially since here you are, not issuing any pronouncements that he has to decide whether to believe or not! If he has a weird look on his face when third parties disparage your character I think everybody already knows what to attribute that to! And the weakness in question is not having been mistaken in the first place when he decided to trust you, and having difficult-to-revoke trust - qualities which go very well together until someone decides to lie about the actions of the trusted person."
"I suppose that's possible. I mean, I can tell him your brother said it first, but your brother wouldn't appreciate that. Nor confirm it, though I can't see Findekáno going to ask him." She shakes her head. "If I find myself at a point where I think he would believe me?"
"Didn't transcribe any other conversations, although if you want to know what else I've been doing with my time I can tell you from memory. What did you think of the suggestion that someone you don't know that well from your father's host could visit? It'd be sort of hard to arrange the meeting without letting the person know approximately where you are, but if you want to I can try to think of something."
"You don't have to, but if you can get used to the idea - and I think you'll have better luck with them than with any of the Quendi, as an escapee from the Enemy - it'd mean you could live not-alone without me just showing up every few days. I could try sounding out the Dwarves on it? They seem to like me, although I don't know how long that will last now I've exhausted my metallurgic memories from home."
"I don't expect you to get this today to the point where I can fling you into the air and then just sort of leave without expecting you to get grounded and stuck, unless being higher up turns out to help a lot, but I can give you a few hours of playing catch. Then I'm going to go give your family the good news and a sheet of notebook paper and some number of orc treatments and some messages from Doriath." Fling.
"I can fix it. I invented the healing spells first, I was a little too paranoid to then go on to invent a shapeshifting spell that made them not work. If you are injured and I am not around then you have a problem - well, unless your general control over your body extends to the body of a bird you happen to be, maybe it'll work, I didn't check the interaction in advance never having heard of your species before."
"For this sort of bird I'm not sure it would even bother to have a different mode. They launch out of the nest and then don't land. For years. Until it's time to build their own nest. But you may be right. Still, I'm not planning to leave you unattended and shaped like a bird until you have got the hang of flying, so it shouldn't be urgent until you have a good model."
"Once you're good at flying you'll be able to do a hundred miles an hour. While awake; I recommend slowing way down to sleep, but you don't need to sleep as much as I do. This is the current state of my map of the continent, Cuivienen not marked -" She pulls a copy off her, expands, sharpens. "With yea far being a hundred miles, ish." She appears a blue line. "So yes, if you don't keep stopping and doing things like me or stop to take in the scenery in any detail, you should be able to cross the whole thing in the time it'll take me to be making a scheduled visit to your family again."
She snorts. "I'm sure simulating a whole continent at the level of resolution a Quendi needs for it to look right would be ridiculously expensive on the hardware I'd be able to dig up at home. Probably easier to do with something offworld but Asgard just doesn't have the demand for it. I have no idea if mind control runs on the same rules." She makes a right turn, sends along the feel of it.
She flies and sends feedback. "For silly aesthetic reasons Asgard doesn't use most of the advanced technology we've figured out or picked up from other races, but if you start with something that can do extremely simple math -" Basic circuit. "And put a lot of them all together, you can get it to do more complicated math. And you can perch all kinds of things on math. Calculators and text are simplest, but you can do pictures, moving ones like my illusions if you like, simulate physics. There are certainly computers in the wide multiverse that, hooked up to the right doodads, could convince you of a whole continent; but I don't have any and more importantly the Enemy doesn't have any. I don't know where he did get Ungoliant from but apparently it wasn't a very tech-heavy place."
That too? This realm is just full of fun facts. Giant spiders and memory tampering and Valar. Look, if he can do that, what makes you think he didn't construct you an actual hallucination-person? I could be built from the ground up on some hapless substrate to think I'm exactly who I say I am. It'd make me seem more consistent and everything. I don't think that happened, but you don't know it hasn't, do you?
Well, distinguish two senses of 'care what someone thinks of me', here - I might wind up having to care what Mandos thinks of me if it turns out I've acquired the right or possibly wrong kind of soul in my travels and find myself trapped in his Hall until he likes how my mind's shaped. But the way I understand him to operate is so fundamentally abhorrent that I would not approve of myself one iota more if he turned out to think I was great for some reason, nor one iota less if he finds me as disagreeable as I'd expect him to. And if he had no power over me I wouldn't care in either way. Meanwhile, you have no power over me except to be annoying insofar as I care to spend time on you, which I can stop doing at will; but you are not an abhorrent person at all, just self-flagellating and through no fault of your own trapped in the belief that I'm fictional.
I could probably be induced to pretend that I think you are real. Seems a dishonest way to interact, but if you'll tell me the endpoint, or who you really are, I promise never to mention it or act as if I doubt you again.
I don't want you to pretend to think I'm real when you don't, but that doesn't mean you have to bring it up at every opportunity.
You should talk to my father about the boats. It was a terrible mistake but - less excusable than Alqualondë is a very strong claim. He thought they'd be stuck for a few decades while they learned how to build ocean-going boats, he did not expect them to undertake a death march. ...And, actually, I don't know if they did. I only have your word for it.
They did; the Valar kicked them out. At least some of them would have gotten across even without me bopping everybody on the nose and getting them to 'not starving, not frostbitten'. What in the world would the point be of a hallucination that ends as soon as you buy into it?
It's not that I doubt Findekáno could cross the Ice and survive it, it's that he wouldn't risk the lives of his people. The Valar kicked them out? After they had no way to leave?? Did they say how? Does my father know that that happened, or just that they crossed?
Your father doesn't want to talk to or about them at all, or acknowledge they exist; your brothers will say 'our cousins', but he insists on 'my father's children by his second wife' and I started shortening that to 'the inconveniently phrased' because it's too long. So I don't know what he knows. I wasn't taking notes when I heard all of this - I think there was technically an option to go fling oneself on the mercy of the Valar? Because that's something the Valar are really good at and definitely should be trusted to have? But the host that arrived here didn't do that, obviously.
She makes a note in the air in front of her as they fly and tucks it under her wing. I expect I'll wind up with his attention even if I don't solicit it specifically and he's in the middle of something when I land and start talking about you, so I'll mention you said that.
He doesn't say it. If the Enemy can't rip it out of his head the Enemy can't have it.
Thank you.
And then some impersonator will take the words and speak them and win the trust it will take to destroy them.
Sure, that's fine, he thinks quite neutrally.
I'm wondering what I'd pass on to Thor... probably even less than that. We've never had very much to actually say to each other that wasn't situational... and I wouldn't count on her to think through a situation and come to a reasonable conclusion about it either.
.As you describe it, any enemy taking you prisoner to understand your sister would have a laughable understanding of strategic priorities. There is no conceivable situation, save one that demands specifically and exclusively a lot of lightning strikes, in which you are most useful as an avenue to her. And yet that is exactly the sense in which I most serve my family.
Well, if he solves it she wouldn't have the same objections she'd have to taking a spell from my hand. Actually, I think your father would be very popular on Asgard for a variety of reasons. But my own planned solution would not sit well for her and anyway I don't want her to reign for all eternity.
The mental impression of someone shaking his head.
For my father, there's significant overhead involved in partnerships with people who only partially share his values. He can sometimes develop a sense that they are or are not trustworthy, or are or are not capable, but he tends to accomplish rather little through delegation to people whose interests only overlap with his up to a point. It constrains him to know that if contingent circumstances change he'll have to completely recalculate who is reliable. I think most people who play the game of politics do that recalculation intuitively, but for him it is entirely explicit and very demanding of his attention. Therefore he delegates more or less exclusively to people who he knows will act wholly on his interests.
You can imagine, then, that if someone finds their interests mostly aligned with my father's - ninety times out of a hundred, perhaps - they may realize they can best achieve their ends by adopting his, unconditionally, and becoming the sort of person he finds it worthwhile to delegate his goals to. Combat only works if a commander can trust that his people - or hers, I suppose, in your world - will obey orders. You can't win a war knowing that your battalions will only move insofar as their interests overlap with yours in ordering them forward. If you want to win a war, you don't have to believe that your commander is the best of all possible commanders at moving battalions, you just have to notice that he can't function at all if you cannot be relied on to move.
But I didn't burn the ships. It did not help anything at all. Perhaps I should have done it.
Huh. Yes, I'm familiar with the principle - although there are circumstances where people at home are expected to disobey their orders. Whole code of honor and list of war crimes that you're supposed to adhere to no matter what your commanding officer tells you and a procedure for addressing the illegal order if there's enough time to do anything other than knock her out and turn to the second in command. And you haven't had time to develop such a thing, I suppose. Sigh. I do not one hundred percent share his values, although I've avoided making any of the lack of overlap salient. Will it help if I can also do the entire calculation explicitly? I have some of the intuitive sense but I think best in writing so I learned to put it all into words one way or another.
And I very much doubt he is currently under the impression he can rely on you. If he in fact can't, then it's probably not worth trying to change that.
Well, he can work with me and expect me to show up when I said I would; I suppose I have no idea what he'd be asking of me if I were a more viable delegation target; but I mean, in general, will it help to have the ability to expressly break down what's going on when we find ourselves at odds of whatever kind. I don't think adapting the actual Asgardian code would be a good idea because it contains things like 'if in dire straits I accept men under my command I will release them without penalty for desertion when the reality of combat overwhelms them unless they are at risk of leaking information to the enemy, in which case I will hold them without requiring combat duty' and things like that. And there are a lot of explicit exceptions for frost giants, because we really don't like frost giants. But there's better stuff too. There are several inter-realm ways of marking a noncombatant healer that we recognize and - unless they're a frost giant - we don't hurt them. Children who are not frost giants are off-limits, at least if we can tell by looking that they're children and they aren't holding weapons. It is never acceptable to rape an enemy and you need a very good reason to torture them - I don't remember the exact parameters of 'good reason' because in practice you can always get away with saying you didn't have a good enough reason and the parameters are there for people who are looking for an excuse to go for it. If you're not immediately under threat you mercy-kill a mortally wounded enemy who doesn't have a designated healer making for them. The rules about how you remand prisoner custody to other authorities would be really complicated what with 'death' meaning 'going to Mandos, who is a failure as a person', so that would need revision.
...the difference between our worlds run much deeper than I realized.
We would not hesitate to kill orc children and I'm not sure that we should. It'd be difficult to persuade anyone to adopt a code of conduct for warring with Elves because if you're warring with Elves you've thrown honor so far out the window that it's absurd to discuss any code that might still bind you. I do not believe that personally, but am certain it is the reaction you'd get from anyone who was not at Alqualondë.
Has my father ever actually made any request of you? In general his reaction to competent people he doesn't trust is to aid them, insofar as their problems are interesting and either worthwhile or not a costly distraction from a worthwhile one, and not ask their aid or expect it or make plans that in any respect rely on it.
No, I suppose he hasn't, unless you count capturing orcs alive on the expectation that I'll show up and heal them as making a plan that relies on me. Orc children - well, pre-oath I'd want to whisk them away to be raised by the converted colony, who are not going to be having any children of their own besides a handful of test cases to see if they're born in pain. Post-oath I'd want to convert them. But this is how I handle adult orcs too. You could have an orc version of the frost giant exception, I suppose.
I'm not sure if they have anything like that going on but if they did it wouldn't be an unbreakable constraint on their will for the rest of their lives. Apart from Quendi and orcs I don't know of anyone who has that as even an option - I'm not sure about Dwarves, I asked Lúthien and she wasn't sure.
Asgardians just really don't like frost giants. Maybe we don't trust them to honor an approximately reciprocal code. I didn't ask; they don't actually bring juveniles to battle any more than we do and don't use an inter-realm noncombatant healer designation. Also since I'm a princess it would have been vaguely indecent for me to be under any command other than my mother's or possibly sister's so I had a small squad of people known to me I was commanding, for strike missions, and wasn't on guard against being told to torch a Midgardian village or anything.
Well, you don't abandon salvageable deserters to the enemy, either, let alone their families, you haul them back and have them up on charges and they spend the rest of the war under close supervision digging latrines and getting the last pick of rations and then get dishonorably discharged or if they did something really destructive tried and executed.
It's awkward to apply to this case anyway, because you weren't organized beforehand with a code with penalties listed for desertion or a command hierarchy that could stand up to a mean look, and you're a colony effort as much as an army. You could have considered them the Valar's prisoners of war but then we'd have to get into whether the Valar are relevantly honorable in any sense of the word.
I, obviously, think it was a grievous wrong and a terrible mistake. But I cannot convince my father of that by arguing they were his people, when they'd made quite a fuss over not regarding themselves as such. I need a different approach.
You can break out prisoners of war, but it's actually fairly customary - unless we're talking about frost giants - to trade them. With your own prisoners if you have them, with something else if you don't. Sometimes only after the war's over. But this would involve the Valar condescending to not have exactly their way all the time, which is unthinkable.
They would never agree to any kind of concession, no. Anyway, my father thought he was leaving them in neutral ground to build their own damned boats, and I think it'll be - shocking, to him, to realize that he left them to the enemy. It might change his outlook on making amends now. The larger problem is that even if that does change his stance, there are no amends we can make that would rebuild the trust we destroyed, and no real avenue by which we can end up working together. And we may need to, as Nolofinwë said in that conversation you presented to me.
I asked once what your cousins wanted and they wanted to - well, Findekáno, while still on the ice, wanted to - receive and then spurn an apology, which doesn't seem very productive either. Pause. I wonder if anyone would faint if I told them that Fëanor apologized to me once for using my matronymic alone? I don't know if they think he's incapable of it generally or just about more important matters.
What my cousins would want would be for Father to surrender his claim to the Kingship, give them everything that was on the boats, and retreat to a tower in the mountains to invent things while otherwise not involving himself in politics. Even if I could go home I don't see how I'd acquire the political and personal resources to bring that about.
The problem is that my father doesn't do anything insincerely. You'll never get a grudging or formal or political apology from him. And a personal apology you'll get only when it's prompted by personal respect, and when Nolofinwë claimed the title of King of his host the possibility of that rather dissolved. He is flying in tight circles. In addition, there's a significant population in their host who outright just want us dead, and who wanted us dead long before the ships burned.
A grim, tired chuckle. That too. If we make concessions they will likely be used as leverage to demand more concessions, and I don't think anyone is certain what happens at the point where we've made enough concessions that we would no longer stand a chance of imposing any significant costs on them if they then just decided to kill us.
Yes, that. Pardon me while I entertain a highly inappropriate fantasy of learning to teleport, acquiring a small squad of galactic mercenaries with weapons I'd sooner not even begin to describe the mechanism of, killing the Enemy, and then putting everyone who doesn't get along on their own uninhabited planet.
The cousins I am most worried about were very determined to found their own kingdoms in Middle-earth and bring enlightenment and better stewardship to the locals, so I am not inclined to fear they'll settle near my family and keep building friction. I have reservations about their plans, but am utterly powerless to do anything about that.
It might be easier to move your people, or your cousins, because they've only recently moved in themselves. Maybe even by the time I learn to teleport Quendi reckoning will call it 'recent', especially if they don't have any children, who know the place as home from day one. ...Trying to move in and rule over locals without knowing in exquisite detail exactly what you're doing: also historically a bad move.
Mostly that. The particular hypothetical I was entertaining was 'what if Thor had landed on the ice instead of me', and the answer is she would have thought they were very nice and badly wronged and would have been easy to direct into a complete massacre against your family and then she probably would have tried to solo Angband, which Lúthien thinks would not have worked but which Artanis thought sounded great.
Artanis watched her family cut down on the streets of her hometown and it is very understandable to desire that the guilty parties experience the same thing. I expect if it had actually occurred she would regret it, later. But yes, this is related to why we hesitate to make concessions.
It's like a game theory problem on an exam with a sadist for a tutor. 'In one to five thousand words, solve the problems of this entire continent and its well-justified rifts in the underlying social fabric with only illusion magic, healing spells, and the ability to turn people into birds'.
If that worked, I'd just have to convince my father that I'd just conducted an internal coup for him and gotten the entire militarily useful part of the Nolofinweans back under his command and that Findekáno ruled there in name only, and then take down Angband and hope that everyone's favorable impression of the balance of power is either cemented by my success or spurred to improvement by my death.
Loki starts writing this down. It's a good plan, or at least sounds like that to me. Pity I can't fly off and carry it out for you, it hinges on it being you personally a bit. And yes, although it's actually considered an obscure branch of economics and its applications in warfare are usually not laid out so explicitly when we're studying strategy. I just liked economics.
My little brother Moryo all but invented it as a field of study back home, you two should compare notes. Or approaches. And I don't have any advice about how you can win the war, 'persuade X person that Y is in their interest' is as granular as I actually plan, and then I don't have trouble doing it, and I don't know how to teach that as a skill. How do I fly faster?
We don't use it, except for large shipments of raw materials where the usual games of Valinor's reputation economy don't work well. That might have changed here. Nothing was scarce in Valinor except desirable locations and original artwork. I'd expect Moryo's working full time on figuring out what's sensible here.
Well, you know - fuck the Valar. Except don't, I bet they're terrible in bed, says Loki. I wonder if anyone told the locals; Lúthien had to tell her father that she 'wasn't going to have me braiding her hair' and I hadn't even been flirting with her, I've been very good about that.
If Elwë married a Maia then I'm sure Lúthien knows Eru's teachings as much as they're knowable. Though if said Maia married an Elf, perhaps not. I don't think that's a proper romantic relationship either.
She did not accompany us into exile. She'd been trying to get the Valar's permission to let us leave, but they think so slowly and he ran out of patience.
Angle it exactly right against the Trees, use different types of stone which absorb heat differently, and then there'll be a specific point in the day where it has the same appearance as a living person. She could stretch that point out for hours with sufficient cleverness about materials and angles, and rather delighted in doing so.
The marriage ceremony is to speak the name of Ilúvatar and ask him to bind you, and then to lie together. The custom is to have an announced engagement at least a year before the wedding, and to spend that year apart to really be sure that's what you want. But besides Cuivienen we didn't know about Eru and pairs just married by sleeping together, or in some communities by conceiving a child together. So - you don't sleep with anyone, you certainly won't get married. Or if you sleep with another man - or woman, in your case - there is no chance of being married. No one is quite clear on what happens if you sleep together but don't say the name, but maybe think it, or say it blasphemously, or anything else. But I have known people who were unattached one day, left a party with a lover, and the next day announced an engagement that everyone could see in their soul was not in fact an engagement.
I expect you'd be fine; you can't make oaths in the first place, so you probably can't marry, marriage being a specific kind of oath.
I'd better not risk it anyway. Of all the silliest reasons to wish my friend and I had both landed in the same place... Well, he'd probably laugh. Still, I find that approximately as dismaying as everyone else seems to find accidental children. At least in principle if you have an accidental child you can find someone else who might want it. No such luck if you wander off for a little fun and wind up with permanent soul grafts!
My father generally treats the dictates of the Valar with utter contempt, but he takes monogamy very seriously. Only one of my brothers have married, even though it's typical by our age. I'm - appreciative, it'd be harder to explain being the eldest and only unmarried son of Fëanor.
I don't think my father'd judge you. A society that takes such things so lightly would have been much better for his family than the one we ended up in. If anything he'd find it painful to hear that there's a so much less destructive way. It would bother him if we - well, I probably should not pick up several wives, but I think I will manage to restrain the temptation.
What a fucking tragic rendezvous that would be, and your ability to consent is extremely dubious. I know that I prefer it when my partners think I am real and vice-versa but Findekáno knows where you are and if I tell him you're asking for him I think he'll probably get here as fast as his legs can carry him and I don't care to speculate in detail about the afterwards, I'm not a voyeur. If one of you were a girl is the soul graft fakeable too?
I wouldn't, but I suppose I can see if Vár knows if I'm feeling really morbid one day. I don't suppose there's any sort of personal signature to the soul-bond and that it's unspoofable to third parties too? Could I march married couples of your acquaintance past you until it's simply implausible that the Enemy'd have them all on hand?
She arrives a few minutes later. "Sorry, Loki, I knew you were coming today and I didn't want to go too far but we aren't really needed here and it makes the Quendi nervous to have us wandering and I couldn't just sit out while everyone worked, anyway. I explained everything but you should heal them so they'll see the real Melkor's power."
"Okay, I just wanted to make sure they'd gotten the explanation." Taptaptaptaptaptaptap. "I've got a map and some leads on places for you to go; there's some places you could settle just about now if we could get a few people to help with teaching you to fly and you didn't want to bring more supplies than turning into a bird can tuck away -" She reaches the end of the line. "Because osanwë can really shorten the learning curve there." She pulls out her map. "This area's unsettled. It's kind of exposed, but I could hide you with illusions if that would feel safe enough for you. Or, you can wait until I ask the fellow in charge of this city," point, "if you can have that island," point.
"I don't think it would be good for us to live in a place where other orcs will come wandering," she says. "Even if we're invisible, eventually some of them will stumble across some of us and then the fake Melkor will learn about us and be very very angry and send his servants to destroy us all and we'll die."
"If you'd really like to live up where Angband is I don't think anyone will be likely to fight you for it once he's gone, although I haven't asked anyone in particular. And in fifty to a hundred years, if you're interested, I could find you a whole, empty world to spread out in."
Vár is pleading with one on the end. "I don't want to die," he says, "but it's not true! It doesn't make any sense! These are Elves, they're just Elves who're tricking you. And even if they weren't Elves, they'd be the things that kill us, those are the things we're supposed to hate! It wouldn't make any sense to teach us to hate something that looks exactly like these that we'll never see. The stranger just has powerful drugs or something, or maybe does serve a powerful god, but not ours, and that doesn't mean she isn't lying."
"If you tried to get Elf prisoners to swear to Melkor, they'd say no. So we can't do that, have to do something else. You haven't had to try anything else, because you've just got kids and they fall into line. The minute they realize that you're no acolyte of Melkor, that our Melkor is real and yours is just a story, they'll be stuck, they've sworn things that fall apart from each other, and that's as bad as anything we do to Elf prisoners."
"The Valar aren't letting anybody in. Besides, Moringotto was in Valinor at one time making trouble there. I will be delighted to put all the orcs on a separate planet once I can travel to separate planets but I won't be able to do that for at least fifty years and probably more."
"I have been tied here for two days, if I'd come up with one don't you think I'd have shared it? These are Elves. They aren't going to stop being Elves. I hate them and they know it and they tied me up here to see whether you can hoodwink us like children. I don't want to die. We're tortured by the Elf gods forever after we die, everyone knows that. But this is false."
"Well, I don't hate these people and I don't hate you, either," says Loki, "but them, I can convince not to kill you in case there's a better way; and you, I can't get anywhere with because you're trapped under an oath you were forced to make as a child and you're reinforcing it in Moringotto's intent with every sentence you utter. So, hating neither of you, I am nonetheless constrained to take their side; and can't safely release you, and I don't think anybody wants you to just remain tied to this fence indefinitely."
"What would you do?" she wonders softly. "What would you do if you didn't hate anyone, not like that, not enough to want them dead if there were any other way; and some of the people you met would never, ever be able to leave some of the others alone, and letting anyone die was horrible? What would you do with all these choices you think I have?"
"Leave! Stop playing Elven god! Let us go about our lives, and the Elves go about theirs, and contests between us be settled by strength, while you saw the whole world, or raised children, or told stories! If you don't have to kill people, and they're not trying to kill you, you can just go through your whole life not killing, and you're choosing this, instead."
"But if I don't get involved," she says, "people will still die. Little Orc children will still be in constant pain and forced to serve a cause they never really chose; and Quendi on this continent will still be attacked wherever they try to go, by orcs or one another or the Enemy himself; and the people in Valinor will be kept in a gilded cage ruled by arrogant monsters; and the Dwarves will live under a god who put them to sleep until it was convenient for him because their creator defied him; and the Men will get to be age one hundred if they're very lucky and then die for no reason at all; and that is not good enough. I want to live in a better world than that. And I am so sorry that there doesn't seem to be room for you and I wish I could make room for you but in your version the Quendi who took you alive would have just killed you instead. You wouldn't be alive in your version either." She shakes her head and lifts Lævateinn. "Any last requests?"
"You're not a better orc, kid, you're getting manipulated. And - " to Loki - "how do you check who means it? You made it very clear you were going to kill us. I'm not the only one who knows there's no invisible Melkor, I'm just the only one who'd rather say so. The way things are if you don't kill anyone might not be good enough, but you can't kill your way into things being better."
"I've got other projects. This is the one that involves killing people sometimes, once my allies here have taken custody of dangerous prisoners hoping I can render them non-dangerous. I can't read minds. If someone swears falsely, I won't know; and if they can live peacefully here until it's time to set up a colony, I won't notice anything's the matter; and if they go to that colony and then run off, that will be terrible and I can only hope that the ones who swore truly will be able to stop them. I think Vár might be able to tell who's sincere and who isn't; but maybe I can't scale this up, maybe this will have to be the last batch, maybe apart from her and her handful of true believers orcs will have to go extinct lest I shoo you all to a distant planet and then you find a way to chase your rivals between the stars. I don't know. I'm not perfect, I'm just trying."
"In your position I'd be grasping at anything that would get me out of an oath I swore when I was barely capable of stringing sentences together and I would try not to base anything on who I hated because the word 'hate' is in the oath and my emotions wouldn't be my own! I have a friend who's very fond of the Valar and we've agreed not to discuss the subject because if I convinced her it would damage her effectiveness at important things! Being right matters but in your position putting it first is symbolic."
"Like what? It's the words of your first oath that we have to work with. What do you want to do - promise to, to bide your time in peace until somebody figures out a way to give you free will? I don't even know if that's compatible or if you'd collapse of contradictory oaths on the spot."
"I swear," he says, "if I see any convincing evidence that another Melkor exists I will carefully consider to which one of them I consider myself bound, and bind myself to the one more palatable to you if I can countenance that. And in the interests of orcs continuing to exist as a people I will avoid pointing out to all of them that the lies you're feeding them are in fact lies, and since pursing the greatness of orcs is a higher priority of mine than hurting or killing Elves, I'll avoid doing the latter in a way that will invite retaliation or make it likelier that you decide to annihilate my people. How's that?"
"You're still liable to go back to Moringotto and even if you considered it beneficial to the long-term greatness of orcs that he not find out what I'm up to you don't have a choice about whether he rips it out of your head."
"Okay, so you're telling me you can just go live peacefully on an island with highly religious converted orcs and behave yourself there and farm and wait and see what happens." She nibbles her lip. "Prompts the question of whether you're palatable as a guest to these Quendi until I've verified the availability of the island." Any Quendi hovering around listening to this?
"I'll need to talk to Fëanor's family today anyway about something else. Of course, he loses hours of work every time he's interrupted, but for the topic I have in mind he might even refrain from snarking about that; but I think it'd distract from orc-related matters and I'd like to get orc-related matters sewn up. Any of his sons around?"
"It might be wise in future to avoid making it obvious they die if they don't comply," he says, "even though I imagine they'll already suspect it. All right," he says to the orc, "my first responsibility is to my people, and should this desperate effort to preserve yours cost them their lives or their safety in addition to their time and feeling of security in their own homes, I will personally kill you and more importantly, the whole project is off and we're eventually going to have to rebuild the orc population on some planet of Loki's from only the orcs who are gullible. That doesn't seem like orc greatness to me. If you manage not to harm my people, then we can have some people like you among the orcs founding a new world. This applies to harming us by planting the crops badly or salting the fields or other things we might not notice or blame you for right away, too. I am not an idiot. Do we understand each other?"
"We really do call ourselves Quendi," Macalaurë says, "even in private. I am a poet who is for some reason running a war. I bear you no enmity. I would feel less guilt than Loki over killing you. Do we understand each other?"
"Yes, Elf."
"Then we have no objections," Macalaurë says.
"...Well, that's creative. Although I can't actually handle a large growing population of orcs and I'm the only healer available till I learn to teleport, and so except for a few test cases converted orcs aren't going to be having children anyway unless it turns out the chronic pain condition is introduced after birth and not congenital; do you have a replacement deterrent?"
"It might work anyway, if the babies aren't born in pain or they're all patient enough to wait for me to fetch other healers and get some of you learning it yourselves - I may be literally incapable of teaching others how I do my magic and won't know for a long time - but I'd rather not count on it if we can think of something else. Uh... I had to tell you terrifying stories of Melkor's various legendary servants who are not as nice as he is and now you'll never sleep well again? I don't know what you've been telling them or what they'll buy."
"The smoke over Angband was gone, so I scouted it again. Some of the prisoners are kept outdoors, chained to a cliff; only two were alive. I didn't know who they were, but I could get them out, so I did; one - Maitimo identified him to me as Rodyn later but doesn't know where he's from - ran off, whereas Maitimo I hauled a fair ways in this direction before he was willing to have enough of a conversation to express that he'd rather not hallucinate a family reunion. I've taught him to fly; he thinks it would be computationally expensive to simulate a whole continent so he's looking around from the air until the next scheduled rendezvous. I don't think it'll do the trick itself."
"After I left here last time. I did not know who I had, he wouldn't tell me; there are certainly more prisoners inside and many more outside were dead than alive - so I went to the Nolofinwëans to identify the people rather than interrupt the festival for what was more likely to have been a false alarm. He's - he liked flying. I think I had him happy for thirty seconds, learning to fly, before he remembered that I'm supposed to be some Maia servant of the Enemy who's trying to trick him so as to extract information."
"You can't fake technological advancement. There are things it would take me five hundred years to figure out, and if Maitimo learns them he can be confident that five hundred years have passed. He's not technically inclined but I'd expect him to be able to understand them once they're explained to him. It may take a thousand years but, as I said, probably not an age, for him to conclude that the enemy isn't that patient."
"Oh! I could speed that up, you hadn't invented movable type yet - it'll all have to be things building on principles he remembers from before his capture, though, nothing with electricity or obscure physics or based partly on magic he thinks I made up... but I could explain, I don't know, steam engines, I don't think you have those? But this only convinces him that he's not being time-dilated quite as drastically as he could be, not necessarily that there isn't some extremely long game in play."
"By the time we've shown him technology that is obviously sufficient to best Moringotto with," Fëanor says, "it would be surprising to conclude that the war is still proceeding in a manner that would make whatever Moringotto'd originally intended hundreds of years ago when he started this trial valuable."
"I suppose. But this does sound like it might take a long time even if I come up with fifty things on the order of 'steam engine' that I can explain from memory so there's the question of the meanwhile; he's willing to live with people he doesn't know, would find the converted orcs uncomfortable neighbors, I'm going to sound out the Dwarves but think most local Quendi would turn away a rescued prisoner."
Curufinwë shakes his head. "If he's right about what's going on, that's informative about the layout, guard rotations, our behavior -"
"So we build the first outpost - we were planning to anyway, we can speed up the construction a little - and have him there," Tyelcormo says, "nowhere he's seen, if necessary none of us working there directly, he'll be fine, how fast can we build it?"
"Two years," Macalaurë says, "if I drop everything else, and -"
"So do that," says their father, as four people open their mouths at once with comments.
"By drop everything else," Macalaurë says, "I mean everything else, Pityo's going to need to take over scouting rotations and we're going to need to send Moryo with a thousand people to the pass right now and I'm going to have to spend favors left and right to get the permissions we need from the locals. And I have two hundred people on a rotation to watch orcs and if I send them out to the new mining camp they might get results a month faster, trying to do one thing as fast as possible means pulling people off projects at which they're far more valuable -"
"Getting Maitimo back is pretty valuable," Tyelcormo says.
"Not until he's able to help us, which probably won't be for the duration of the war-"
"I may think of a better solution sooner," Fëanor says, "there have to be other things that the enemy can't fake."
Ambarussa shakes his head. "Perhaps we should ask Maitimo if he wants this before we redirect everything towards making it happen?"
"I'll pass on the conversation and see what he says. I should be able to have the orcs on their way soon, if Círdan is as friendly as Lúthien claims and agrees to let them by to use the island," says Loki. "The only other idea that came up as a possibility the Enemy couldn't fake was that someone could marry Maitimo on the grounds that Eru performs unfakeable soul magic, which would have been one thing if he were already married but in the absence of same would simply open the possibility that the Enemy found him a fellow prisoner to mind-control. Can I speed up your outpost at all? It turns out that osanwë means I can teach someone to fly very fast compared to how long I was expecting, you might need fewer scouts if they were willing to be birds for a while each, perhaps it would be useful to have an illusion of a blueprint to build to...? Can the locals' favors be bought with healing, I don't know what their situation is there?"
"I can't build much faster with a blueprint," Carnistir says, "though it's worth a try. The constraint there is moving enough stone, and I don't suppose you have a spell for that."
"Círdan's all right," Tyelcormo says, "when we rode out to Brithombar in the first campaign here he was exceedingly friendly."
And she pulls out those transcripts: about the Valar kicking out the Nolofinwëans. Recommendation to talk econ with Moryo. Strategy report on Enemy capabilities as witnessed up close. I love you, I miss you -
"Asking about enemy capabilities was a good idea," Curufinwë observes. "Ask him also how densely packed Angband is, what would happen if someone besieged it and started a fire, if he knows of entrances or exits -, if he'll expand for our benefit on the things you already know-"
She writes this down. "I have to assume it's pretty fireproof considering that it's supposed to contain Balrogs, but I'll ask. I have my own recon -" She makes a to-scale illusion of the place sitting on the table rotating slowly. "But didn't see much of the inside."
"If he can, he didn't see fit to catch me while I was carrying his prisoners away," Loki says. "I suppose he could have brought the smoke down to entice me there and bet that I'd take away prisoners he was already ready to release in the hopes that this would get one or both, probably Maitimo, past some suspicion that would apply to a self-managed escape, but this supposes such broad powers of predicting his opponents that I'm not sure the best strategy isn't just to assume he can't do that. I do expect someone to notice the illusions I left on the wall at some point but I haven't been able to come to a firm conclusion about whether they'll notice it soon enough that I should just vanish them."
"He might have to be in your actual line of sight," Fëanor says, "which I assumed you might have mentioned. I don't know that he can abstractly sense every person in his territory, though some of the Valar can, and I'd assume that if he'd had a chance to kill you that would have taken priority over orchestrating a more convincing rescue of Maitimo."
"No," Curufinwë says, "we did tests with them. They have better vision than us in darkness but much poorer vision in bright light, and find it painful. I don't know how their vision compares to yours but they can identify symbols an inch tall from about forty paces in daytime; we could do a thousand."
"I expect he'll just be puzzled," Fëanor says, "he's not that smart. I actually imagine he is in a panic - orcs being slaughtered in numbers and a manner not consistent with our abilities, a new host arrived, a prisoner escape - and would throw everything he had at you if he weren't currently very limited in resources."
"He's not that smart?" asks Loki. "Lúthien claims Melian has some hundred times an ordinary attentional capacity and I was assuming the Valar scaled up from that; this can be converted into something resembling intelligence, deployed with even a clumsy wit's desire to succeed under constraints such that brute force doesn't instantly suffice. What not-smart things has he done?"
"About half. The other half is that unless I am very much misunderstanding his objectives he is not good at his goals, given his resources. The Valar are all very circumscribed in their abilities - Manwë, for example, is not capable of understanding defiance, or the desire to act against Eru's will. If you explain it to him he'll come to an understanding of the closest thing you could have said that's compatible with his worldview. As you can imagine he's consistently flabbergasted by actual Quendi behavior."
"I am given to occasional flippancy. I assure you I will seek to avoid my own death for unstrategic reasons as well. I simply am not risk-averse enough to regret mixing myself up in local business instead of living alone somewhere to work on getting home without further ado."
"I am not giving them messages which were personally intended for you, but Findekáno wants news of Maitimo very badly and it was Irissë's idea to ask for information on the Enemy's capabilities in the first place," says Loki. "Should I be withholding something in particular from them?"
"Oh, speaking of paper. I don't need to hoard it the way I thought I did, who wants a piece of my treated paper to see if they can reverse-engineer it?" She pulls out her notebook, slurping back transcripts into it but flipping to a blank page at the end and making to tear it off.
"I have absolutely no idea, but I have the actual stuff and you might be able to get somewhere with it. I don't know if its deterioration would be visible to you after some distressingly short amount of time but it doesn't get far; it's supposed to remain clearly legible and strong enough to handle for at least a few thousand years."
Loki nods, flips through her notes to see if she forgot anything - "Oh, and - I mentioned to Lúthien your interest in an alliance with Elu and she recommended an approach which I assume you are thoroughly disinterested in but may as well mention -" She pulls it out.
Macalaurë chimes in with some specific messages from the local communities.
The workshop is enormous, counters and tables everywhere and shelves above and drawers below. "Melkor took everything from my father's workshop when he killed my grandfather," he says, "we had to rebuild all our instruments. Now that's done, everything is going much faster. Here is the paper that's not satisfactory; we expect it'll degrade and be too fragile for use within fifty to a hundred years." He picks up a sheaf of it. "You wanted to teach us Asgardian technology?"
"Sorry. There are other ways to make electricity but this one requires the least infrastructure and the least filling in gaps in my spotty education. So you get magnets, and you move magnets and wire - copper is good, if you can't get copper others can work - relative to each other -" Visual aids. "And then this will generate the same sort of thing that lightning and static shocks in dry weather are. When you have enough of it and you can control it well enough - I am afraid I am not particularly useful for the intermediate stages here - you can run almost anything that does mechanical work on it, and make lights, although you might not find them particularly called for -" Spinning fan, glowing bulb. "- and you can also run information-processing devices on it -" Basic logic circuit, multiplying upon itself until the illusion no longer shows the individual ones. "Which can then be attached to other devices and cause them to display complex behavior at incredible speed and/or without personal attention."
"Yes. Sort of. Uh, I did a chem lecture for the other host, let me see what I can remember from when I was reconstructing things then - also, general disclaimer, your realm is very strange, suns do not normally appear one day, absolutely anything I say about physics is about the behavior of matter when it is not under the influence of magic or divine intervention and cannot be relied upon in other circumstances -" She recreates her periodic table. "I don't remember all of the elements, if you name something I will be able to tell you if it is an element or not, anyway the difference between elements is that if you have the smallest amount it is possible to have of one of them it is a single blob of absurdly tiny things surrounded by a cloud of even more absurdly tiny things. This diagram," she produces one of hydrogen, "is simplified the way a stick figure is a simplified anatomical diagram of a person, but it has the basics - hydrogen is one proton, and one electron, and they stick to one another in a manner analogous to magnets. Electricity is the motion of electrons - I am again oversimplifying, I know there is more to this but I don't remember the full explanation, I learned this so long ago. Some materials, such as copper, conduct electricity along themselves well - they will tend to also be good conductors of heat, easier to notice. Some resist it - rubber does that; you will want to have protective rubber clothing when you're working with electricity, you may wish to coat your wire in it, it's not perfect but it's better than working barehanded."
"If you want I can just stick these illusions to the paper," she says. "The arguable drawback is that if the paper is altered or destroyed enough that the spell can't recognize the attachment anymore the illusion will stay put wherever it was when that happened."
"What I meant was that they might inconveniently hang around in midair or something until you could ask me to clear them away or attach them elsewhere, not that they wouldn't serve in any case writing would," she says, but she shrinks the table and the stick-figure hydrogen and sticks them to inadequate paper. "The difference between elements is the number of protons and electrons, which match except insofar as the elements are combining in ways that affect that. The table's arranged this way because the electrons form layers, but I don't remember the number of electrons in each, it's something irregular. Anyway, you'll probably want to generate electricity by building something like a water wheel," picture, "on a river, to turn the magnet or wire - which will probably depend on how much wire and how large magnets you can get, so that someone doesn't have to stand around turning a crank all day."
"...Well, simplest would be to touch it but that's a bad idea. I'm not sure. Even a lightbulb requires capturing a non-reactive gas to fill the bulb with... at least I think it does, there may be a more primitive version which doesn't but I don't know. I'm afraid all the little engineering kits I played with had a lot of premade parts. I'm absolutely certain you can get somewhere with this concept but you might have to reinvent most of it yourself; I know half-remembered fundamentals and the opaque results of many millennia of devoted engineering by civilizations with millions or billions of people in them and precious little about the middle."
"I will be suitably impressed if you manage a light with this. And whatever you connect the light to the wire with, you can have it set up so that you can close and open a gap in the line; and then you can turn the light on and off." She flicks at an illusion switch; the lightbulb goes on and off.
So she explains steam engines, and from there tries to focus mostly on things that will make sense to Maitimo: do you have gears, clockwork? Ooh, slugthrowers, they're probably not actually an improvement over the bow for your purposes yet but if you get them to do this and that and this other thing they're a big deal but she doesn't remember anything more complicated than 'explosion goes here, bullet goes here' because they're on the Asgardian No List... She's already explained movable type... have you invented ice skates, carabiners, the following varieties of knots, the hang glider, a loom as complex as her father's, canning, the caster wheel...?
"This may be enough all by itself," he says, "this and the lightning-harnesser once I become sophisticated in it, and slug throwers would be of use to the Enemy much sooner than to us and Maitimo can reasonably presume Moringotto doesn't know of it. Your people are talented." It is said very emphatically, with great weight.
"I'm not sure he'll believe in electricity," she says. "Combine this children's toy with copper wire and produce arbitrary effects with enough doodads I can't explain involved! I'm assuming he'll have to rely on things that work by mechanical principles he can reason out in his own head. I think the other realms are mostly benefiting from an extremely generous head start, the fact that I could pick and choose from the fruits of so many of them when studying and again when relaying them to you, and not unusual average talent. If you have an electric light on Elenya you'll be the toast of any inventor's convention in the galaxy I might fetch you to by the time I have the power to do that."
"It's serving you well in an urgent time," she says. "And makes my culture shock the less here, in that respect. A galaxy is," visual aid! "many, many stars. All the realms I know of are in this one, except possibly here, because here is weird. Each of these points of light is one or many stars - I do not have enough room in my visual field or sharp enough eyes to have ever formed a very good mental image, and have certainly misplaced some things, but this is close enough to look to me like my galaxy. Asgard is here... Midgard here..."
When we learned that, we despaired of departing. Valinor was not a good place for us but that would be an unendurable fate. Then Father set his mind to it - and it was a project the likes of which he hadn't tried before, it nearly killed him, we didn't see him for a decade and he says that he put his soul into the making and I am not sure he speaks metaphorically. He captured the divine light of the Trees, the light of Valinor, in the Silmarils. In their presence decay is halted; it is as if we walked in Valinor again, in terms of strength, and we will endure the ages of the world. The Silmarils are necessary to an independent kingdom of exiles enduring forever outside Valinor. They are our highest priority, higher even than the Enemy himself though obviously currently in his hands, because my father, who claims nothing at all is ever impossible, does not think he could replicate that work."
"How much ground could they cover...? If they fit in a crown they can't be very big. Could they serve a whole continentful? Or does this definitely only affect those who were born in Valinor, so you could all live in some concentrated location and everyone else will be fine?"
"They also refract each others' light in ways that are useful; Father thinks he might be able to cover a much larger radius with all three, and the right arrangement between them. As a constraint it is tolerable to us; we can make a pilgrimage even back to Arda, every few Ages, if that's the way we strike out as free people. We'd feared that the Enemy destroyed the Silmarils; they have combat advantages for him, but were he wise he'd have destroyed them for the permanent harm to us."
"Some things have to be made to such precision that they almost can't be durable and still work at all," shrugs Loki. "I am really curious who in all the Realms is exporting giant light-eating spiders to otherwise uncontacted worlds, it's not something I'd like to see become a trend."
"I'll mention to Lúthien that you might be interested in a pest control expedition. But they might just be inappropriately large arachnids of no relation, in which case I'm not sure what they're eating to sustain such a population but they probably aren't priority one."
"He was happily flying around for thirty seconds, he went back to being intermittently depressing after that. Anyway. His family know that he is safe but not where the rendezvous point is; he's exploring the continent; and Fëanor, characteristically, had an idea for convincing him that he's in base level reality; the good news is I can speed this up beyond the timetable of 'several hundred years' and the bad news is it involves leaking information on how to build a class of weapons - nothing that outclasses a bow in the first few stages of development but from there it can escalate. I'll tell you how to make them too but you will be delayed in taking advantage."
"You're - teaching Maitimo the engineering that will take our world up to speed with yours, to demonstrate to him the truth of your claim to be from a different one?" He smiles broadly. "I think that'd work. And he's not particularly skilled in engineering, it's not as if he'll take advantage himself and while he's still unsure he won't be taking the ideas straight to Fëanor for prototypes."
He nods. "We did decide to stay here for a few months, let everyone recuperate from the Ice. Traveling through the next mountain range puts us closer to them and we'd rather not rush that, and anyway we are momentarily safe. Father deliberated on the question you asked him and has a formal request for Elwë, if you'd like to take a copy of it."
"I think we may have progressed to the point where he thinks I may be a perfectly nice deceitful hallucinatory Maia under insurmountable coercion who slacks off at work for his benefit. And - I don't know, what he wants, really. He does have some reason not to tell me." Pause. "Look, were you an item or was he just allowing it to sound that way for some reason?"
He nods. "Yeah. That he's explained to me before. We tried too, for a while, because Fëanor was supposed to be our King and if there were really a personal sacrifice of ours that could make him a functional one - he could have said 'we're not coming back'. I'd have hated him, but I'd still have believed everything else he said to me."
If she just attempts to swear him to secrecy right now he'll guess, won't he? She flips through what else she has. Angband tactical report; he can have that stuck to some disintegrating paper to keep. Copies of her science lecture to Curufinwë likewise.
She writes that down. "He rules Brithombar, by all accounts he's very friendly, I'm going to ask him if the orcs can go through his region to the uninhabited island. Can you keep a secret?" And if you guess it before saying you can and you will Loki is going to laugh at you and tell you she keeps wanting to flirt with Lúthien.
Loki laughs. "Well, I don't want you to draw excess conclusions, because in other realms people do not get married by accident or by any mechanism at all other than deciding to do so, then having a party about and some formal record of that decision! And we were neither of us full of particularly romantic feelings, nor monogamous, nor making plans for the future. But we are friends, and Asgard has surpassed its accidental children problem and we took advantage of that, yes."
"And perhaps eventually I'll locate them and see if they have any unique associated obstacles. I would have had a rough time with the locals on Midgard; I had not yet discovered the appeal of boys when I was last there, mercifully, or I would have been trying to piece together from filthy tavern songs what exactly they do with their soul animals and how to compensate for my lack of such a thing. This is not most of the reason why I was bringing Sigyn but it factored in."
"Maybe you wouldn't. And there's variance in Asgard, too; I do actually think I would have settled out at a lower - although still locally bewildering - level of fascination if it weren't for the fact that this was the first thing that was considered a perfectly expected, natural, healthy activity for a girl my age in which I had any innate interest. I had to cultivate an aptitude for combat; I was simultaneously expected to show up to lessons on statecraft and history and science and whatnot and expected to find them boring and want to go run around outside instead until I became considerably older than I am now; and I find hunting merely practical, drinking to excess actively unpleasant, etcetera, etcetera."
"Well, and I survived until I managed to fix up my spell, but if I'd never had a spell with no Tesseract to teach me? If I'd wobbled around for Ages? I might not have had a fatal accident but it would certainly have concerned me, and anyway I am capable of upset on others' behalves."
"I am giving you different subsets of information. I don't think you need the personal regards he sent his father and brothers. You're getting all the Angband stuff and so on. I suppose I'd have to make a judgment call if for some reason he finds something of potential strategic interest out East and thought I shouldn't tell you, but presumably he'd have some sort of reason I shouldn't just go verify its existence myself and pass it on."
"To the extent I can verify the information. Quendi seem to take lying much more seriously than Asgardians do, as a group, but I've preferred to avoid lying outright my whole life, even when fewer people would assume I was forever without honor if they caught me in one fib."
"Well, yes. The motive here just happens to be really obvious. Maitimo wanted us to trust him so he could try to fix relations between the hosts, he wanted me to care about him so I'd tell him everything and do whatever he asked, and when he decided relations weren't fixable he wanted our trust so he could extricate all his people and be halfway across the sea before it occurred to us to doubt them. And now - now he presumably wants us to forgive him and trust him again, though I can't imagine how he'd pull that off. I don't just reflexively assume everything he says was a lie, I assume everything he said, ever, first and foremost served his ends."
"I don't think he does want you to forgive him and trust him again; I think in fact that he does not. This is me inserting my opinion that the entire thing is tragic and ought to stop being so tragic into the proceedings. My point is that you would have noticed if he were an actual pathological liar, noticed very, very early; and that I think your general emotional complication is applying itself to your own memories with a will."
"It's not exactly that I think you're being too generous now, in action of any kind, as that I think I see the - remnants of a pattern of withholding nothing, whatsoever. Maybe you never needed to, maybe this was not as desperately unhealthy as it would be in relationships of my acquaintance because he simply never asked too much, but you seem like - like even your shadow remembers falling where he asked it to fall without wondering if that was appropriate to ask."
"I wish you had. We were happy. Not just the two of us, everyone was happy. Turvo'd just gotten married and was happier than I'd ever seen him and there were new things being invented all the time and it really felt like sometime our fathers would have enough grandchildren running around to give them some perspective on their stupid old hurts."
"You can cross an ocean in a canoe if you really want to but it's admittedly not ideal. But you only needed to go one way and only, what was it, a hundred fifty miles? You don't need a very high standard of construction to hold up that long, I've been sailing, I could have gone and stared at the boats and brought back illusions - boat-related information. All this for the lack of how to build a ship."
It's more like eight hundred miles across from Alqualondë, though. In Araman, where we eventually crossed, two hundred miles, because that's the shortest distance between the two landmasses, and you could hug the shoreline heading north to get there. And not all this for the lack of how to build a ship, all this for Fëanor's bad judgment, and mine."
"I'm not sure. I've made a raft before but not an actual ship. My information there is as spotty as anything else. The first thing I tried would probably have been offering the boat-hoarders information they might want in exchange for what I remembered. Curufinwë thinks he'll have a lightbulb in three days, though, based on the most pathetic disparagement of my tutors' ability to get information to stick that I could possibly have produced without complete silence, and boats are generally invented first out of more familiar materials."
"Well, until very shortly before I came here I couldn't tell anyone about what I was doing with most of my spare time. Except Sigyn, after he was injured with no witnesses and kept his silence when I saved his life; and I explained that my arrangement with him is not romantic in nature. So I don't have a history of particularly intimate relationships and I doubt you would have felt suited to an arrangement like the one Sigyn and I have."
"It's certainly an example. I mean, I think Sigyn would probably romance me if I wanted him to; but he wouldn't stop sleeping with anything that moves even if I really really wanted him to. He requires one of these things to be properly Sigyn in a way he does not require the other."
"So, putting aside the 'left us to die' complication - if two people in your world want to be involved, and one of them wants a specific kind of relationship, and the other person wouldn't innately feel good about that but can be persuaded - not just persuaded to agree, persuaded to feel genuinely happy - you shouldn't do that?"
"You shouldn't - covertly do that," Loki says at length. "It should not happen without being acknowledged. Because if it does then at some point someone is going from not being in and not wanting such a relationship to being in one without having actually been... awake, for all the transition steps."
"I mentioned to my brother that you could make cities invisible, and he was very tempted. He wants a safe place to rebuild, away from the fighting, a place people can retreat to when the war starts to grind down their souls, a place where children might be born to our new world, and that might be the way to achieve it."
"'Make cities invisible' exaggerates, a little. I can make things look how I like; I can make the seeming follow the thing; but I assume people would find it inconvenient to consistently be invisible along with all their possessions and have to come to me every time they had a child or something broke enough to lose its spell. And the illusion equivalent of one-way glass over a settlement would still leave it looking a little different from the surroundings to an observer. If I wanted to hide a city I'd probably make it seem to have impassable obstacles all around it approached from the ground as the first line."
"Yes," he says. "I don't want our civilian population in a fortress that's placed for war. I want to find somewhere as defensible as I can and build a Noldorin city there, in the style of Tirion where we came from, somewhere Itarillë can grow up safely and our numbers can increase and where everyone can fall back, if they fail as we're Doomed to."
"Oh, if you're in the mountains it'd be much easier to cover you over with something that makes it look like you're not there -" She makes a little illusion of a mountain valley. "This is nowhere in particular, I haven't been scouting for suitable mountain locations, but if you're in a dip -" She puts a little town in the dip, then roofs it in a shallower valley floor. "Like so. Does that suit what you had in mind?"
"Also, the illusion cannot react to the environment very much - I did get them so they'll catch reflected colors off neighboring things and their shadows will work right, so the grass in your fake valley will look like the sun is where it is and dim under clouds. It will not get soggy in the rain, frost in the winter, react correctly to the prevailing wind - I can make it ripple in a programmed way but not actually interact with the air like that - or accumulate snow. A more barren fake valley solves some but not all of these problems."
"More noticeable to anyone who's familiar with the skyline of the mountains, but -" She replaces the valley with a peak. "Yes, if you settle somewhere that's how the mountains tend. But clouds that go around mountains will go through an illusory one, and most mountains that are high enough to be always snow-capped are high enough for low clouds to approach them sometimes."
He nods. "Thank you. I can plan around that and determine the setup that makes the most sense for us. If you expect he'd answer honestly - perhaps you can suggest that the question comes from one of his people - you could ask Nelyafinwë how far the Enemy's scouted, and what means he has to learn the lay of the land."
"Nely-? Oh, right. Too many names... I'll put that in the list of similar questions." She pulls it out of her notes and tacks it on and puts it back. "The things I bring as news do filter around appropriately, right? I can't tell when Quendi are or aren't in earshot so I just tell whoever I'm talking to and assume that if someone who needed to hear it wasn't paying attention they'll get it later."
As I think my brother observed, the Feanorians operate by keeping things from each other for their own good and we're trying not doing that."
"You'd really have hit it off with Elenwë. It'd be the - the approach to people, hers was shockingly compassionate. She was one of Valinor's best mathematicians but was technically an amateur at that, she did law for a living. Mediation of disagreements, helping people who'd given their word badly, things like that. It was a gift for looking at someone and seeing everything good about them and then moving the whole world into place so they could go use it, and then moving on to do that for the next person, as natural as breathing. She wanted a big family. We both wanted a big family. She wanted so many things, and she will never again have the chance to see us, or achieve any of them that require a playing field bigger than Valinor."
"They haven't apologized. Not that everything would have been all right, if they had, but I think about how to teach Itarillë about the world we live in - when you wrong someone, you say "I'm sorry", when you hurt someone you try to make it right - with a big glaring exception for the unrepentant house of Fëanor. He's flying. He's happy. I'm sorry if I-"
"Well, I can't know for sure because no one has listed the colors featuring in a visual sending before offering it up. I have never been startled by the variety of color in such a sending, though, and I can't imagine that it's being purposefully left out for artistic reasons."
"I could make a spell to do those - I'm very tempted, even - but it will take a long time to invent and my priority at the moment is teleportation spell development. When I manage to get a moment to spare in between all my flying around doing this and that, but I'm expecting that to calm down when I've been here longer than a few weeks."
"I first heard of the city of Brithombar from Lúthien, princess of Doriath," she says. "I travel fast and have ongoing interests in various far-flung things and often find myself playing messenger bird. I am in a sense a newcomer but I arrived in an inter-realm transit accident while I was trying to get somewhere you've never heard of from somewhere else you've never heard of; I happened to land among one host of the newcomers and introduced myself to the others later."
So I'm glad to hear Olwë's grandchildren are among the newcomers, I mean."
"Well, Ulmo's keeping us alive. With nothing but lobsters, and didn't do anything about the orcs, but still. If one of his messengers came by, I wouldn't talk about how badly the Valar are falling down on the job here, you know? And I wouldn't say it to Elu 'cause he has his girl. But you aren't serving an Ainu or married to one, I take it."
"We eat a lot of meat, and some grain and vegetables and fruits, which are grown by farmers. My mother's in charge, I got in enough trouble for a very little common sense that I got temporarily banished while she thinks over what's to become of me and that's why I was in transit to have a transit accident, we are technically at permanent war with the frost giants but the battles are often hundreds of years apart, there are children."
"Hello," Loki says. "I'm Loki Odinsdottir. I have messages from Fëanor and his crowd -" She pulls them out of her notebook, remembers at the last moment that literacy is not universal, and reads them aloud instead of turning the illusion around midair. "The other host of newcomers says -" She reads that one too. "They'd both appreciate, also, your opinion on the value of declaring fealty to Elu."
Cīrdan looks thoughtful. "A pleasure to become acquainted, Loki Odinsdottir. Please tell our new friends that would simplify a great deal, but I'm loath to try to persuade them, should they be opposed, because I can imagine it might be the sort of decision they'd come to regret. I will discuss it with Elu, if there are concerns they think such a conversation would alleviate. I appreciate the news that so many of our northern kin survived the war and subsequent disturbances, and commend the newcomers for dealing justly with everyone they have encountered. We should sit down, I'd appreciate a night to think about the rest of my response. Is there anything else?"
"I think you'd find them potentially amenable but I'm concerned you'd object to the nature of the settlers. I - and Fëanor, he had a key insight - figured out a way to convert orcs into approximate harmlessness. They're accumulating in Fëanor's camp and need somewhere else to go."
"Yes. So, the thing with orcs is that they're all made to swear to serve," which excess name did Meril call him, "Morgoth, along with a number of other specifics, I have the text of -" She produces the transcript of the oath as she last heard it repurposed. "But they are made to do this very young, barely old enough to speak - so they don't have a very firm understanding of what they're supposed to mean by it at the time. I can cure their chronic pain conditions and this tends to make them pretty receptive to talking, although like any group of people they vary. If they can in this mood be convinced of certain redefinitions, in particular that 'Melkor' is actually a benign noninterventionist deity I'm familiar with from home and that all the people of your species on this continent are 'Quendi' and not 'Elves', they can re-swear the same words with the revised meanings and they've been getting along all right with the Fëanorians so far in a way that would be wholly implausible for unaffected orcs. Although they do still make their Quendi neighbors nervous to the point where they're expending a fair amount of labor on keeping an eye on them, and I'd like to get them settled somewhere else."
"I don't expect to save them all. I would never ask someone to risk their own or their friends' lives more than they already do by engaging orcs to take some alive. And I couldn't heal that many in any reasonable amount of time, and while I was very lucky that the first orc I spoke to turned out to be an effective and committed missionary we have not turned up more of the same, so that's another bottleneck. But I would like to save some, and I would like them to have a place to be when they've been saved."
"I was actually considering transporting them all by air, but it would be less convenient in some ways - it would require more of my personal attention, on a per-orc basis, and it'd mean they wouldn't have much cargo allowance. And if Ulmo disapproved of them I suppose living on an island would be a bad idea anyway..."
"If you can suggest other settlement locations that don't require waiting for a Vala to reply to a question I'm delighted to hear them. I am a poor judge of how willing Quendi may be to have orcs, even friendly ones, as neighbors, but it's certainly not the orcs who'd mind."
"She starved, we think. She eats light, and she was so utterly surrounded by the magical darkness of her own making she couldn't reach any - and it was dark anyway, this was before the Sun and Moon. Anyway, the whole earth shook and the darkness swelled up and then just wasn't. You could hear a sort of osanwë scream. This was shortly before the orcs came pouring out of Angband."
"I wouldn't say all of them, I haven't even met any Men yet, but yes, I'm very busy and part of the reason I'm trying to settle the orcs is that then they'll need less regular attention from me. ...Speaking of people who may be awkward to settle. I assume you have a policy about escaped prisoners from Angband."
"They are our kin, however distant. The impulse to change things and protect them and figure out the details later is a good one, not one to be ashamed of. I'd protect escaped prisoners, too, but it can't be done save by holding them again prisoner, and they find that - miserable. Most of them asked me to kill them within a week."
"A small number of them are going to try having children once they're settled. The children, if they're born in pain instead of that turning out to be some subsequent intervention on the Enemy's part, will be healed promptly and will not swear any oaths, so we'll see."
"They really, really want to. I convinced them to make it a small experiment because I can't keep up with a large, growing population if I have to heal every single one, but if the babies are born just fine and don't need me personally to grow up pain-free..."
"...In most realms it is possible to conceive children as a purely mechanical process, unintentionally. The orcs seem to have that design drawback, to the extent I am sure Vár understood what I was asking. It's possible future generations will recover the Quendi advantage."
"In order to avoid having children they will need to avoid" er "marrying, at all, at least until I can go to another realm and bring back technological conveniences that separate the processes. It's a substantial sacrifice on their part and I do not yet know how long they will need to make it for the sake of not burying me in agonized baby orcs."
"Doriath seems safe, and contains Lúthien, who assigned herself my friendship more or less instantly on meeting me and is well worth the title. I'm friendly with some of the newcomers as well, and I've enjoyed the company of everyone I've met here in your city so far. I find having so much to do very fulfilling and a welcome change of pace from home."
"Well, she decided I was interesting enough to let in even though the first time I tried to go in they didn't like how I did it and tried to shoot me and even though they otherwise have a policy about persons with free will. They do place some restrictions on me during my visits, regardless."
"I expect to be here longer," she says. "The original trip was supposed to be short; but it wasn't supposed to be here, and I would have expected to have already been fetched or visited if that were feasible from their end. As such I think they're having serious technical difficulties and am planning on being in this realm continuously until I finish my teleportation spell and can go wherever I like."
"It's good to meet you too! A bird, everyone's saying, another messenger of Ulmo, and I'm thinking, do we need more messengers of Ulmo? I think we got the message. I'm Meril's sister-in-law, by the way, and we're good friends. She didn't mention about the sister-in-law because my husband died and so now everyone lacks all vocabulary to talk about the fact he existed at all, and she didn't mention we're friends because then I'd have an opening to demand she show up once in a blue moon to talk something other than business."
"I'd want to be a really scary tiger so no one could hurt me."
"I'd want to be an orc so I could sneak to Angband and stab Morgoth," says the youngest.
"You'd die," one of her sisters corrects her.
Island shakes her head at them. "Anyway, come in, we have a bed, we have tea, we have lobster."
"Mm, lobster." In she comes. She drinks tea and eats lobster and does not ruffle the hair of the adorable children, but she does have a miniature tiger illusion prowl up to the lobster plate of the would-be tiger child and a dolphin swim through the air at the would-be dolphin child.
"I wasn't actually listening to your conversation with her, sorry." She gestures at the back room. "Mouths to feed, minds to nourish. Our people consider parenting as properly a full-time occupation for both parents for the duration of the children's youth, with the exception of hobbies that are good for the wellbeing of the parents. Now, I feel spread a little thin."
"I have yet to see the Nolofinwëan host at their best advantage in either domain but suspect they'll do respectably at both when they're recovered from their journey. The Fëanorians are, let's say more competent than kind, which I mean mostly as praise for their competence."
"We farm oysters. Aboveground - before the new lights everyone had to travel a great deal a day to gather enough food, it'd be cruel to animals to keep them penned up and I'm not sure we could have gathered enough for them anyway. I suppose that's changed, now, but we don't know which'd be suited or what they would need."
"I was actually thinking in your case about aquaculture. You can pen up fish off the coast, I don't know what kinds of fish you have here or what they normally eat but some of them would probably take some lobsters off your hands. Most other readily farmed food animals need some plant food, although there are egg-laying birds you could keep that can get a lot of their nutrition from insects, if they exist here - chickens? I know the continent has turkeys but I haven't seen chickens."
"Orcs he might attack, because they're orcs and sworn to Melkor and I know you think you've succeeded at rerouting that but I'm not sure the Valar'd agree. If we started a fish farm and that was a bad idea he'd probably heed the fishes' requests to not be on the fish farm, if they preferred that, and then we'd have no fish."
"Except when I asked who you'd name to the job, you've claimed no Kingship; but if people were penning up others, and the others wanted out, wouldn't you let them go without regard to what authority this implied you had? And if you saw orcs traveling - not your orcs, just ordinary ones - toward a strategic position, wouldn't you stop them?"
"Yes, but I do not equate the preferences of fish with the preferences of people, and if I saw the orcs were escorted by someone not conventionally understood to be on the side of ordinary unconverted orcs I might trouble to ask them where they were going and why before I attacked. I suppose it's possible animals are just smarter here than I'm accustomed to, but that prompts the question of whether everyone shouldn't be scrambling to eat exclusively plants and maybe eggs and milk as quickly as possible."
"I have a pretty good all-purpose visual and audio illusion spell," Loki says. "Useful for notetaking, although it doesn't dovetail especially well with shapeshifting or turning invisible. And unfortunately, it's less useful here than it would be some places because I can't compose an illusion with colors I can't see, and you have a broader spectrum of them than I do. So nothing I make is going to be quite perfectly convincing to a Quendi."
"Oh, writing. That I can't claim credit for, my people have had it since long before I was born. The newcomers use it; most realms invent it eventually. I'd offer to teach you but I don't actually know your language, I'm only using translation magic - also not one of my own creations."
"Okay... imagine you meet someone who's very hungry. Too hungry to pull a bow without shaking. And imagine that you were short on even lobsters, so you can't just give out food whenever someone wanders by, you have children to feed. But, it turns out she's a hunter; and if you give her some of your food, even though you might not be able to afford to give it out as charity to everyone who comes by, she promises that once she's perked up she'll go bag a deer and give you half, which is much less food than it takes to get her in hunting condition. Sensibly managed debt is like that - it gives you more ability to get the sort of resources you're indebted in in the first place, or something you can convert into those resources, or something you want more. It doesn't always work like that, which is why the debtors owe the creditors more than they borrowed - to cover for the people who metaphorically go out and don't find any deer, in the long run."
She shrugs. "Melian says - and I assume so do the other Valar - that our fates are tied to the universe, but Melian doesn't understand how to walk and talk at the same time so it's possible that despite their wisdom the Valar are missing some things about how we work. I've given my word twice in my life, and not regretted it; it's a powerful weapon, and shouldn't be wielded lightly, but it means much that trust can be so bought when otherwise it might not be achievable."
"I don't deny that it's a powerful tool, but I have an account of the consequences of trying to deviate from the sworn word and I'd have to be superbly certain of my wording, and my circumstances, and the import of what I was trying to do, to make that bet. I'm not sure I've ever been that confident of such a thing in my life. And since functional oaths can be coerced I'm on the whole glad not to come packaged with the vulnerability."
"Young enough that they barely know what the words mean, which is why if they can be caught in a cooperative frame of mind they can use the same wording to swear something totally different and more neighborly and go from there, but it's still no small constraint even then."
"Hundreds of thousands, probably, and more all the time. Melian wasn't that concerned. All I got out of her and Elu was gracious permission to continue doing what I was doing. Permission to ask Círdan if I could settle the ones I've converted near his city."
"Well, it took me a couple instances of 'have you considered not flying directly into the middle of your destination' before I really got the hang of knocking, but all I did was land, be invisible, and look around and say hello. I think they may consider 'able to turn into a bird and be invisible' 'armed'. Fortunately I said 'hello' at a considerable distance from where I actually was and did not become riddled with arrows."
"Yes. For all my criticisms I'm glad of that. Anyway, after they realized they weren't going to shoot me they told me which way the border was and I attempted to discuss sorcery with Melian through an intermediary before she decided I was all right in spite of my bad first impression and free will."
"I could hear my husband anywhere, though I can't hear him now in Mandos. I have a few friends in Doriath I can communicate with if we're both concentrating; I knew them all for centuries, but everyone I know at all I've known for centuries. I can hear the kids anywhere but they've never been more than forty miles from me."
"The room right behind me. The kids have been having nightmares since their dad died, so they share a room now and I moved into the one that used to be my son's. We built the house together, and our old bedroom feels - well, too big. I'll sort it out once the kids stop wanting to all be close and start demanding their own space again."
Yes, that's pretty much the scenario that worries me. I wouldn't miss a spoken language, but if the turkey I hunted down the other day were just too scared to talk or using a form of telepathy I couldn't hear at all or has abstract thought without the communicative focus common to people I've met...
And maybe she would, but maybe we have different thresholds of discomfort, or she isn't bringing it up because no one in her kingdom is eating meat except these already-dead lobsters anyway and she has time to think of a way to present the restriction, or she thinks it's like the orcs and they may as well die because there's a plan for them later which doesn't hinge on their living out their lives unmolested...
"I may be able to linger in one place for longer periods in a few weeks or months - Círdan doesn't mind the converted orcs settling near him and another project I was making regular visits for may wrap up soon. It'll help if I get to the point where I can hear the newcomers I've been talking to from here; they're the ones who've been receiving the most regular attention and this is a fairly central and comfortable location. Which is kind of awkward to approach and therefore most efficiently enjoyed at long stretches."
"Very. I've been to Brithombar and found it as described, and made some little progress in my spell. Although before getting deeply technical I wanted to ask what you can tell me about the spiders in the neighboring forest? I haven't seen any, since I fly here, but they sound concerning."
"I might go pick a fight with a spider or two to have an idea of their threat level - some of the newcomers may want to try their hand at pest control and I'd like to have information for them when I'm next there. Anything I should know besides that they are spiders of thus and such a size? If I try baiting them with illusion light what precautions would you advise?"
"I gather that it's your desire to learn how to oppose other magic?"
"I'd expect he'd try if you attempted to silence Angband as you mentioned considering. For me, this is done with attention, but I have more attention than you and would win a contest of that type. I'd expect you'll want to find a different angle to take. Do you have a sense of what you did, when we contested wills in my forest?"
"Hmm. In general, specific abilities can work around general ones, still abilities are advantaged against moving ones, and deeply connected abilities do better than ones that are discrete and entirely separate from the space around them. Are any of those observations helpful for you in how you could craft an illusion against opposition?"
"...Maybe. Mostly it's making me think how I could have designed the spell better for this application. It's a very general illusion spell. By still over moving do you mean literally traversing space - if I turn something invisible, will it be harder to keep it that way if I throw it across the room? - or static versus changing - if I make a frozen picture will it hold up better than one that animates? And my visual illusions can pick up changing light conditions around them, if they are of things that would respond to that as opposed to 'darkness' or 'nothing'."
"Silence would be static. And technically I had silence and invisibility before I had anything that would let me appear sights and sounds that weren't there, so it may be a more 'specific' ability than creating, say, music. But it would not respond at all to the environment."
"I'm without the library I usually go to when I need to tailor a spell to the underlying nature of things," Loki says, spreading her hands. "Even if I could effortlessly silence Angband as I once imagined likely it would not solve the problem; it would only force the Enemy to teach orcs sign language, or oblige him to move the oathtaking elsewhere because I'm hardly going to silence the whole continent, or cause him to rely on another form of ensuring his armies' loyalty. The most decisive advantage I can offer is access to other realms. I am certain I can invent teleportation but I need to know about what forces of space I am playing with, as I needed to learn about birds, and light, and how the body works. You seem a likely reference and you may be interested in the problem from a technical standpoint, and it is especially important because I am not sure things behave here as I'm accustomed - in particular, it is not typical for a sun to come to exist after its planet."
"...This bears a lot of resemblance to the sort of thing some races tell themselves about their suns before they can look at them more closely, pardon me my amusement, but under the circumstances I must assume it's literally true. The Void across which Ungoliant came, what can you tell me about that? The stars, what are they?"
She projects, rather than speaking, the music of the creation of the world. There was the Void, and Eru who desired that something else would come to be, and then it did, rapidly, in forms unrecognizable and miraculous and beautiful but swift-changing and incompatible with life, cooling as it came into contact with the Void, pushing the Void outwards.
"One of two things is going on unless I am very much mistaken," says Loki, and she makes parallel illusions. "One, this place is... perhaps in intergalactic space," two galaxies, a highlighted spot in the blackness between them, "and/or shrouded by something no one can see through, some sort of leftover or ambient magical effect or sufficiently exotic matter. So that you could not see the neighboring galaxies, which even the unaided Asgardian eye can do galaxy to galaxy on a moonless night if we know where to look. Two, this is an alternate reality entirely, parallel but not spatially concatenated, and the Bifrost which brought me here is well outside its standard operating parameters. The second implies a harder technical problem for me but better explains both what it seemed like to Eru and the Valar and you when the world was new, and why no one has come to fetch me; the first implies an imperfection in the senses of Eru et al but makes it much easier to explain how Ungoliant could have gotten here. It is much easier to travel through space, even a great deal of it, than to alternate dimensions."
"Well, worlds aren't supposed to be this shape, it's actually not the one that makes them hang together best, but by the time we realized that we had everything falling in the right direction and the stars up in the sky and didn't want to crush it all and start over, and we had too much material and would have had to somehow get rid of it. Also when we introduced oxygen there was a mass extinction event. There were actually several of them."
"Oh. Yes, that would be... unconventional. And may affect my teleportation spell if I don't want to land upside-down and can't assume that 'down' means 'towards center of sphere'. How thick is it? Are there things on both sides? What shape of - flatness, is it?"
"Since it's the existence of a large mass that creates the downwards force, on the edges the force is highly irregular and pulls you what feels like sideways. We tried using magic to correct this and now it just kind of shunts you to the nearest place where the pull is downward. It also warns us, so we could rescue anyone who tried and got in trouble."
"Okay, so you wouldn't have necessarily expected to recognize any given one. So this is an interesting revision to my 'Ungoliant was from another planet' theory... what I'm not clear on is how the Enemy would have gotten in touch with her and fetched her over."
"So the way we'd done all this turned out not to create the sort of atmosphere you'd want to see the stars, but the Elves were supposed to awaken to starlight, so Varda went ahead and made some stars look the way they should. The universe has the things you're thinking of, but they're not in the positions suggested by the night sky, because of all the alterations. None of those extend more than a few thousand miles out."
"His attention is as far beyond mine as mine is beyond yours, but I don't think that's how it works. He communicates his disappointment to us sometimes as much as days after the decision that disappointed him, so he is not continuously aware of all on earth. Marriage is an oath taken in his name; just as you could take an oath in my name without my personal knowledge."
"I have two basic casting methods, designed one or the other into each spell. All except the illusions require touch range, or close to it - through clothes, yes, from inches away, no, I always count as touching myself however I'm positioned. I perform a very quick mental action to activate the spell and specify which of the possible targets I'm aiming at - so I can turn someone else into a bird without changing myself. Then it takes place instantaneously. The illusions are more complicated; I don't have a strict range limit but must have a clear mental understanding of what I mean to wind up with. I - do Maiar or for that matter Quendi have the thing where if they look at a thing and don't put a great deal of effort into memorizing it, they can call to mind an image that feels crisp and perfect and then find they can't count the freckles on the face, the leaves on the flower, whatever, it is only crisp in feel and not in content?"
"Well, it's a thing for me. So if I had to compose all my illusions based on mental images they'd come out bizarrely indistinct; and an actual visual experience can't carry the sensation of being complete when it isn't. What I get instead is an image that would leave the mental impression I have. It may be inexact if I'm not looking right at whatever I'm trying to copy. An illusion of my sister will not have exactly the right number of strands of hair. But if she looked like my illusion, my mind would produce the same thought when I tried to picture her as in fact it does. Same with sounds."
"Yes. It's more exact than trying to do something I'm not looking straight at, because even my vague mental image can notice if something looks like it changes and the illusion avoids that; and then I can peel off or copy or shrink or expand the illusion from there."
"Not - naively. That's not a limit of the spell, it's a limit of my attention and hearing. I can amplify something I can hear at all - that's how I had a conversation with your archers from far away when I first landed in Doriath - but if I have no subjective impression of hearing it I can't work with it as a template; no mental image."
"Some, yes. I had not known the world was flat." Loki does not stare at the hair braiding, however intellectually interesting the challenge of braiding hair that long. "It will save me some unfortunate tests of early versions of my teleportation spell to have that information. She also thinks I'm actually in a parallel reality from home, not just spatially distant."
"I care more about informational privacy than visual privacy, I was mostly just surprised that you wouldn't have me stand outside the door," Loki says. "When there are doors available they are usually interposed between situations involving nudity and non-participants in those situations. Absent doors the rules are looser."
"Then you'd have to hope for one who did have those. A sister might not be very much like you at all. Perhaps she'd develop her magic to sneak out and be very irresponsible, or she'd elope with some boy, or she'd strike your parents as even less capable and be penned up tighter than you are."
"I don't see why you couldn't spend Ages doing things a little faster! Would you run out of things? It hardly seems likely. Your mother thinks there could be lots of other planets, even if you grew bored of this one, and it's possible to travel between the stars - the real ones, not the visible ones - even without magic."
You didn't say what the silliest thing that's tempted you has been."
"After a fashion; something about swearing by Eru and then, the words the fellow explaining it to me used were 'lying together'? I would certainly be paranoid enough to avoid doing those things but that doesn't mean I wouldn't describe some sequences of events resulting in those criteria being met as 'accidents'."
"No, I mean, no one got accidentally married by Cuivienen, even though it does just require a certain kind of intent and then ~do you think anyone's told me~, because they did not believe that this could get you married. It's true in a sense only if it's on your radar as a possibility so the Valar should have told them it was impossible and then it actually would have been."
"I think they bring most people joy. Also maybe it wouldn't be possible to have the strength to nourish a child if you couldn't draw on the souls of both parents? But you could still say you can't conceive children without a marriage, and have marriage itself not be something that could happen accidentally."
"...I doubt, somehow, that it is common for Quendi to take a hundred times as long to ~no I don't think anyone's told you~ as other people take, and the preliminaries can be very cut down if the subject of your ignorance is presented completely a la carte."
"I like being happy; I don't like it being imposed by mind-affecting forces. I'm probably an outlier but I still wouldn't expect it to be too popular. It's the sort of thing that to a warlike culture seems very much like 'an enemy is lulling me into a false sense of security', you see?"
"I was actually going to ask the Dwarves if they'd take one, since I don't anticipate congenial conditions of reception from Quendi, the escapee I'm in touch with is uncomfortable around orcs and doesn't want to go hang out in the converted colony, and he doesn't want to go back to his family because he thinks I'm a malicious hallucination seeking information about them. I can't just keep visiting him myself forever."
"It was faster than I was expecting. Osanwë helped a lot, it took me weeks and him less than a day. But you couldn't change back and forth yourself, I'm not supposed to do spells affecting living things in Doriath, and the process, however abbreviated, is kind of undignified. It involves being flung into the air and crashing repeatedly."
"Unfortunately, in his time with the Enemy he's been subject to a lot of hallucinations. He still thinks he's in one. When he's not making overt the background assumption that I'm some servant of the Enemy's orchestrating the entire world to get information out of him, or being just generally depressing through no real fault of his own, he's not a bad conversationalist."
"I haven't seen him in a context where he was working or issuing judgments... He does learn quickly and think of ideas; he's extremely popular among his own people, who would have him back, but he doesn't want to go anywhere he's familiar with in case it's a hallucination and his expectations give something away. He's very conscientious about that part. I think he'd consider it entirely reasonable that if he moved in with Dwarves he would help them with their work; his skillset is a Quendi one and not a Dwarven one but I imagine there could be something for him to do."
"If you do it from here, you have the advantage that if several hundred of them rush you you can retreat into Doriath and we can shoot them, but we're not going to be amused and if anyone gets hurt because of a fight you provoked we're going to ask you not to come back. I'd find somewhere on the edge of the forest where if they all come at you you can get away quickly."
There may be thousands of these, and she doesn't trust them to get bored as quickly as her. She turns the spider corpses transparent so they don't impair her visibility but she can still tell where they are, and carries on with the scythe; after a few more spiders die on it she turns it double-headed until it's like a sharp pickaxe in profile. When she moves, she moves back the direction she came; when she has a moment to take a breath, she replaces her dots of light with dots of unilluminated color.
She gets herself a nice heap of spider corpses by her canopy hole and climbs it and leaps out into the air, turning into a quiet, quiet bird and heading out.
"Yes, but Allspeak renders itself as the native language by default and I didn't know to set it differently. Lúthien would have heard her language, but it would sound different to someone with a different native one. I could give a speech to a linguistically mixed crowd and they'd all understand me."
Not everything, to capture everything you need a sound recording and those are unpopular on Asgard because they can't be made to seem low-tech, but it'll do notes and rhythm and tempo and dynamics with other marks here and there about what else should be kept in mind while performing it.
It's in the throne room. The floor no longer has flowers and is a springy meadow; the lighting is dimmer. Thingol and Melian are standing in the middle of the room, utterly lost in each other; it would be very awkward if they weren't such striking figures, and if everyone weren't giving them a respectful space. Lúthien teaches Loki some dances.
I didn't reach Cuivienen, but there are civilizations of what must be Men over the mountain range. They are very primitive. I considered speaking to them and telling them, you know, to love their fellow man and never harm children and try planting the plants that produce the most, but I decided not to play Oromë-meeting-the-Quendi impulsively or on the first possible occasion.
I'm sure they'll appreciate your restraint. I'd love to know where they are so I can completely ignore your good example. I've added to my map a Dwarven location, more Easterly than anything Lúthien had been able to tell me about. The Dwarf I talked to thinks they'll consider hosting you, by the way, but it's a hike so even if your father's idea for how to convince you this is reality doesn't pan out I'd want a little buy-in on 'live with Dwarves' before making it a priority to go check it out.
"So your father's idea boils down to, I can explain technological inventions sufficient to convince you that you are not being time-dilated - or at least not in the more worrying direction - he was talking about inventing a few hundred years' worth of things, but, you know, I'm from another more advanced planet so I can skip ahead a little. Transcript or tech first?"
"...Which conclusion I suppose is not airtight, since the Enemy is known to recruit otherworldly help, but should at least contribute to the overall plausibility of my story. Five years, wow, if that's a real estimate he'd better have a lightbulb. Why would they even be trying to invent caster wheels with a war on, seriously?"
"Caster wheels are for carts. Which don't have to move very fast or on uneven surfaces or under heavy loads or generally behave in any way suited to mass producing anything. One puts them on library carts and rolling chairs. Yeah, I was too optimistic about this plan. I think I could manage if I had access to my planet but that's a ways off."
And, if you're telling the truth, things are stable and my father feels guilty and will make amends with the other host and there's no particular need for me. The upside of assuming things are real is morale, nothing else."
"Dwarves in the meanwhile if I double-check with the non-Doriath ones and they say they'll have you? It'd mean fewer visits, since they're far away, but you'd have Dwarves to talk to once you picked up their language and I could write you a basic glossary or something."
"Okay. On the to-do list with that, then." She rearranges notes. "And a Findekáno transcript. I was this close to telling him the thing but apparently swearing him to secrecy is a tall order. I was half expecting to have to produce a secret, I would've had to tell him about Lúthien or something."
She pulls out the transcript. "Desire's a strong word, and I lean so heavily towards boys that there's basically no chance I'll retain interest after I get anywhere! That's what happens with me and girls, I pick them up and then I put them down. I like her, like, as a person, not just as a decoration, and some people get complicated about being put down, so it's better not to start. But it would have made a good relatively harmless secret if he'd been starting to guess things I didn't want him to guess about why I asked the question."
"Iffy. As I reconstruct a model of it based on what I know, which doesn't involve having ever actually seen you together. I don't think the fault was all yours or that if you one day go 'wait a minute, this is actually reality' and go fall into his arms you couldn't salvage something properly sweet and constructive out of it. But I did notice it and you may have detected that I'm a busybody."
"None of the ones which you might agree to really apply if all this is a lie. Overconfident, too spontaneous, don't take risk very seriously- you flew into Angband, saw a couple people, and immediately decided to rescue them on the spot, without considering whether this was a trap, or what it would reveal to the enemy of your capabilities, or if it'd prompt them to change their prisoner security - all considerations which should have vastly outweighed the suffering of two people."
"If he just ran off in a confused panic he could have been caught again right away. Also, state of the art ex-prisoner rehabilitation procedures sound like they all boil down to 'reimprison, more gently' - if you want to go live in Brithombar you can do that, just, that's the conditions they've got to offer, too dangerous to do anything else. The Dwarves will probably make fun of you a lot but according to the one I talked to it didn't sound like they have that as a requirement. Maybe they're less paranoid because they're built to better defensive design specs."
"Yeah, it didn't sound like it tended to work out very well. So, Dwarves while your family builds an outpost, assuming the actual kingdom is as amenable as Nýi implied after I go talk to them - they'll want you to earn your keep, sounded like, but it didn't sound like they'd stop you from walking out. Outpost in a few years."
"Hmm, all right." He starts tracing. "Past the forest of giant spiders there's a great deal of unoccupied territory. It's very nice - there's a river here - so I doubt it was always that way. I think the Enemy must have gotten there before anyone could come to the aid of the locals. Then another mountain range, north to south, I only saw one pass but the snow's melting now that we've got all the light in the sky, and then the rain shadow of that mountain range - a desert stretching a few hundred miles - and then the Men."
"Did you go visit the spiders? They're not very friendly. I went and revisited my adolescence, I think I got about a hundred of them. Turns out they hunt by sound, but they're not blind - they pounced on illusion light, ate it right up. Didn't care to comment on its nutritional value or anything else." She adds symbols as he traces.
"I was a bird, it didn't seem particularly wise. I watched for long enough to determine that they were numerous and not organized and confounded by the blurry border of what must be Doriath, then headed onwards. You should tell my father - but not the Nolofinweans - that we should take the eastern corridor and give them the western one. The west is far more defensible, it has a mountain range between you and the enemy, and things'll grow better in it, and there's a better avenue of escape south."
"You're welcome. I will go visit your family, tell them to send the orcs south, give them this conversation, see if Curufinwë has managed a lightbulb, and then book it Dwarfwards and mean to be back here in three days; sound good? Anything else to discuss? Do you want to spend these days this shape or that?"
"Um, I would, but you've got all kinds of fancy Quendi features and maybe you'll be fine. ...Did I forget to tell you what swifts eat? I forgot to tell you what swifts eat. It's bugs, flying bugs. I have not noticed anyone in your culture considering them a delicacy so this may be hard to get used to. And they drink by skimming low over water or catching raindrops. They're such a stupid perpetually airborne species, very committed to the bit."
"Um, oh. Yikes. Okay, so, I don't know how long it will take a Quendi-swift to have trouble with maneuvering from hunger or thirst; I can apply another batch of healing spells but on those fronts all it can do is get you to 'not starving or dying of thirst right now' and that's below the level my species at least finds hunger impairing. Did you get noticeably hungry or sluggish or anything the last three days?"
Snort. "Well, I have no such fallback assumption, so I honestly don't know if you'll faint mid-flight if you don't eat anything, but if you didn't notice any deterioration over these three days another three days probably isn't going to be the fatal tipping point. Maybe don't fly over the forest with the giant spiders. But if you prefer to be a bird I'll turn you back into a bird."
"Oh," he says, looking up, "that. I wanted to show you the electricity first. We're practically cheating with this one - it's not really producing light, just getting metal so hot that it glows. I have ideas for how to do better than that, but we thought first we'd build a continual power source - you can stop cranking that, Moryo, I want the wires to give this a try - and the obvious continual power source is the rivers that feed Lake Mithrim, but the electricity dissipates if you try to generate it there and then, say, light one of the greenhouses with plants from Valinor which would benefit from continual light - we think if we cover the wires, that won't happen, but the things we've tried so far aren't helping..."
"It's... plant-derived in its nonsynthetic form but I couldn't begin to tell you what the tree looks like or how one turns the relevant tree into rubber. Likewise I don't know how to synthesize it. But it's like -" Osanwë is really so useful, she can just wad up sense impressions of "this is how rubber" and lob them at people.
Tyelcormo tells me he could have killed anyone in our camp with that bow, from that position."
"Okay. I didn't know anything about this and would have called whoever suggested it an idiot - possibly in gentler terms - if I had. My interests lie in your hosts not fighting and I think I can best accomplish that by adopting a consistent position of opposing whoever aggresses first but my version of 'opposing' with people I'm hoping to work with in the long run is probably more conciliatory than most people's. She didn't fire any arrows into the camp?"
"My instinct here is that you should confiscate her bow and send her home - I'll get there first and will be able to ask, although possibly not be answered, if she was sent or what - and if she wasn't just a lone moron acting unauthorized, then somebody of yours gets to learn to fly and improve your scouting and archer-finding efficacy, the Nolofinwëans get to know that this is something I felt I had to do because they couldn't keep their eight foot tall bows to themselves, and then I trust you not to be irresponsible with your bird-scout. If she was a lone moron acting unauthorized then her own people should be suitably horrified and keep her away from the giant bows in the future."
"They kidnapped one of our scouts? She was certainly just scouting, why would I provoke my unstable lunatic brother? She was using that bow for - I don't know the reason but I am sure they'll have one - and doesn't deserve this harassment, let's figure out how to convince my unstable lunatic brother to send her home unharmed."
"And nobody thought, 'hey, let's send the people with the really threatening-looking bows not in the direction of our cousins' camp, somebody could take that the wrong way'. Nobody thought, 'hey, we need scouts, I wonder if we can get in on that "turning into a bird" deal if we ask nicely'. Nobody thought, 'hey, Loki said the stolen things were going to be coming back, since we're so strapped for ranged weapons maybe we can get some of those sooner rather than later'. Nobody, in a word, thought?"
"It's an eight-foot-tall bow. I might find an eight-foot-tall bow threatening and yesterday just for fun and educational purposes I killed a hundred something giant spiders. But if it makes you feel better, osanwë me where you were and I'll ask someone to demonstrate that they can hit it or get close from here."
"Depends on how I wind up making up my mind. I'll ask to see the spot, I'll ask to see a shot made from or to there with an eight-fucking-foot-tall bow, I'll go talk to your people, and if they don't have anything revelatory to say I'll ask the Fëanorians to send you home in exchange for me teaching one of their scouts to fly."
"Then I suppose I might run into a problem at the point where I explain all of this to your king and tell him what I think of as a reasonable precautionary measure for people who think he's sending assassins after them. But I don't think the Fëanorians being unwilling in principle to release you will be the bottleneck."
"What everyone says of Men," Carnistir says, "is that all of them are Kinslayers a dozen times over, that they kill each other while still children, that they kill their own children, that they multiply so rapidly they'll eventually crowd out anyone on earth and then rip it apart devising weapons to kill each other more effectively. And by 'everyone' I mean "Moringotto, though the others didn't deny it", and as for everything else it seems like we're not doing too much better."
"I'm pattern-matching Men to Midgardians-but-without-the-soul-animals,
Tyelcormo smiles. "If they won't, it's only four years. That's the schedule we settled on. Well, unless Father decides to move us across the continent after all, but reading between the lines I think Maitimo wants us to do that as an apology - we'll take higher casualties in any subsequent battles, we'll go hungrier, we'll be colder, it's a nice symmetric way of making things right - and it's hard to be in the mood for costly sacrifices on their behalf right now. I hate wearing armor."
"Yeah, I wasn't sure that suggestion would get much traction. Let's see, other matters. Círdan says the orcs may wait in Arviernen for Ulmo's verdict on whether they're welcome to travel to the uninhabited island, by the way, and if Ulmo says no Arviernen itself is theirs. He's very nice. Milan cannot pronounce your name," she points at Tyelcormo, "and called you blond-with-dog for an entire conversation."
"Which I like," Carnistir says. "And Father might actually agree to relocate. If you think it's a good idea, it's worth discussing with him. Back - back before the burning of the ships, if Maitimo said mildly that we should consider something like that it meant to just do it and enjoy, along the way, trying to guess his endgame before it all fell together. Now I'm less sure."
Loki writes down the Thindarin correspondences. "I haven't caught anyone putting a consonant after my name, which I don't think Allspeak ought to be covering up. I have no strong opinion on the strategic suggestion, although if maybe-lost maybe-threatening scouts are a problem it might really make sense for you to be farther apart and you might be the more movable of the set."
"I do think it would be most responsible of me for someone who can shoot - and see as well as you can; I can shoot but only with my own eyesight for aim - to demonstrate the viability of archery from there to here. Or back, if it's close enough that the same distance can be covered uphill."
"No rush, just before I leave. Lúthien proposed this revision of the alliance request, which I think needs at least one more iteration...?" She pulls that out: Finwë is the only King of our people, and he remains our King even as we join your kingdom, but it'd be our great honor to demonstrate our commitment to serving your people with the gifts of ours, or something like that.
They look at each other. "The diplomats in the family are all either currently-birds or currently-trying-to-talk-to-the-local-po
"Okay, cool, next time I'm there I'll pass it along, pick out some loot or list some options if you want to let him pick a thing. What's your preference for showing me the supposed assassin's vantage point first versus me telling the orcs they have somewhere to go first?"
"I wasn't doing my paper-conserving notetaking then, so I don't remember the exact words, but my understanding was that I was more or less buying the things off you on their behalf, with healing for your father. The fact that tensions complicate the matter of delivery was left to be figured out later. The orcs are what we figured out, and they are still available. I'm not saying you have to send everything right now before I go tell them off about scouts with either no sense of direction or no sense of having a nonthreatening posture. I'm pointing out that if you don't send the things with the orcs - who are going to leave soon - then you have to think of another way to do it. It's not trivial, unless you just all move east and don't bring anything of theirs and let them have your camp; which is itself not trivial but I suppose simplifies the delivery part considerably."
"Well, I wouldn't have been pleased about it but I'm trying to juggle a lot of different people's goodwill here. He didn't seem to be dying quickly enough that I had to decide before getting a second opinion, and if I remember right it was Macalaurë's idea to return your cousins' belongings if I'd do it; 'planning' is an unflattering exaggeration."
"I remember a lot about the background noise, actually. But I wouldn't have been able to pick out any of the voices even if I'd been attending to that and only that. We're getting sidetracked," she said, shaking her head. "Your cousins weren't thrilled about the idea of your father's survival. I valued it for its own sake but couldn't discount their prophecies of outcomes I disvalued for their own sake. The balance was tipped by keeping his oath in force and being able to soothe them with the return of their belongings, plus my general bias towards healing and the very real possibility that this war has to be won with innovation and not with going up and hitting a Vala with swords in sufficient legions of individual warriors."
"Understood," he says. "Now my cousins' desire for the return of their belongings will have to be tempered by their understanding that we want a promise of no more assassination attempts, or else them to be far away from us, before we give them horses and the means to build a better method of achieving our deaths."
"I'm undecided on whether it was a murder attempt but it sure seems they did something stupid; I'm not sure that Irissë did something stupid but there are probably no options that don't involve collective punishment of some kind. All right. Fallback plan if they don't have a very impressive explanation ready in time for the orcs is Irissë picking up horses a few at a time with a couple people, inconvenient but effective."
"Loki," Vár says gratefully. "Is everything okay? It's not, but the Quendi are pretending it is, so people got scared that maybe they were Elves after all or were getting orders from the Elves and they wanted to run away before they could kill us all but I thought that'd be a disaster so I told everyone to just come in here and I'm really glad you're here."
"Oh, no, no, it's all fine," Loki says. "They're jumpy because there's some other Quendi who don't get along with these ones and the others did a stupid thing that made it look like they were trying to start a fight. You did right. But you don't have to stay here any longer; the ruler of a city south of here says you can stay -" She pulls out her map. "We're here. You can stay here, while they ask one of the more attentive Valar if he'll make trouble for you if you cross the ocean to this island, here, and if he says he'll stay out of the way the island's all yours, and if he decides he's going to be uncooperative you can just stay here." Point, point, point. "The Quendi in this city are very nice and very sensible; they'll be nervous of you but you won't be right on top of them so they'll have a chance to calm down without making a fuss about it."
"That's a good idea. I could also make you not look like orcs until you get there, if that seems like it would make it easier to avoid fights, but you probably still shouldn't talk to random Quendi you meet because you won't be fluent in each other's languages."
Tyelcormo knocks on the door while they're checking out their new appearances in the mirror. He's holding a very tall longbow. "It occurred to me we should offer to send a team south with them - not enough people to fight off any real threats, but enough to navigate interactions with other Elves, and they can say hello to Círdan and bring the first crates of food. Will they be comfortable with that?"
Tyelcormo lists ten names, leaning against the doorframe absently. "You're making a run along the Sirion to Círdan's, all right? Take as much food as we can spare, as I recall they're not at risk of death except from boredom, but it'll cement the advantages of having allies upriver and they're a thoroughly capable sort, and remember me as 'blond-with-dog' which is one of the better ways to be remembered. I think the orcs want to leave now."
You'd think it'd be harder to kill the thing rushing at you if you understood them. But it haunted me, that I didn't."
"I actually wanted to talk to you about the animals thing. It's recently occurred to me to be uncertain that animals here are as... in a word, stupid... as animals I'm normally comfortable killing for food. I'm not sure I should be giving a Vala's hypothetical concern for the plight of farmed fish much weight, but... You seem like you'd probably know if anyone would."
"I don't know anything about what you're comfortable with. Basically everything feels an injury exactly like you do, so kill them cleanly. If you talk to someone for long enough they'll start - aligning their thoughts more the way that we do, so it makes more sense to ask questions like 'do you want to live'? or 'what's your favorite thing about yourself', but I don't know if the way they are naturally, where those questions don't make sense, they're less clever. Just less of their cleverness overlaps with ours."
"More sophisticated thoughts, along with memories, finding ways of comparing concepts I have to concepts they have - like, 'wait', that's something I often want someone to do, and that demands finding a delayed reward that's familiar to them, finding several, introducing them as a sort of category - delayed reward events, that's a thing you and I understand together - and then asking it of them. People who train animals are doing the same thing, just a bit blindly; do you think that training animals makes them more the sort of thing it's wrong to kill?"
"Not in the right sense, although I would generally refrain from eating an animal that was somebody's pet or transportation for other reasons. Training does sometimes reveal intelligence differences between individuals of a species but not generally to a degree I find worrisome in anything I also find appetizing."
Tyelcormo's selected people show up at this point. He stops leaning on the doorframe. "Hey! Orcs! These people are here to make sure your trip goes smoothly, please don't bother them or make them nervous! They probably won't travel in line with you but they'll be within the range of our hearing, making sure you're clear of anyone who might not know who you are. They also have gifts for the Quendi who've generously agreed to be your new neighbors." And then he raises an eyebrow at Loki. "Shall we do some forensic archery?"
"We made up words for, I think, nearly three hundred different subfields of study in the immediate aftermath of the spread of literacy. It was a subject of great enthusiasm: forensic archery: contests of archery in order to establish what occurred at the scene of a crime. Even the Noldor couldn't invent that."
There's a hollow carved out in the brush, large enough to conceal someone. There's a rock placed to give them something to stand on - "because, you see, you can't actually fire this thing standing flat on the ground."
She flies back to Tyelcormo. "Forensic archery supports your story; I imagine I'm going to be told that you're an exceptional shot but I don't have a good way to evaluate how good she is without a major conflict of interest and this is the place she told me she was when you grabbed her. Thanks for the demonstration."
"Might make sense to relocate orc-catching efforts closer to where they're going to be, especially since there's only one of Vár and I'm starting to acquire more far-flung places to be and may want to scale back my scheduling here. If you do happen to find it convenient to catch orcs I'll certainly heal them and give them the spiel whenever I happen to be by but maybe don't set out specifically to do it, at least until they're done traveling and Vár could maybe come back to be a full-time missionary."
"I'm not sure I'm likely to permanently settle anywhere for the foreseeable future, although I might get to the point where I can park in Doriath for a month amusing children with illusions and working on my spell, especially if I did have a palantir. Is there anybody who already should have one? Círdan comes to mind."
"I'll send it south when we have a real shipment of food and accordingly greater numbers. Don't want to give the Enemy reason to notice your friends, and I expect he's paying close attention to those. Nolofinwë should obviously have one once they've built themselves some walls, so we don't have to mediate things either with confrontations or with you. Should Elwë?"
"I was thinking that sometime I'm planning a straight shot from here to a proposed palantir destination - that is, not today - I could just carry it; it won't even be stealable while I'm a bird, any more than you could take my shoes off like that. If Elwë had one it would make it more convenient for him to consider himself actively managing you. If you wanted to try it out and see if it's annoying, you could 'give me one' but ask me to store it in Doriath for safekeeping while I'm zipping around, and I could let him 'borrow' it while I'm doing that?"
"Yes, one was caught within eight-foot-bow-range of the place; Tyelcormo demonstrated the shot. Spooked the Fëanorians, which spooked the orcs, so the orcs are heading to their new home now and it's going to be more inconvenient to collect horses et cetera and they're not thrilled about following through on that at all."
"Sarpalarë. She says she was lost, which doesn't seem a virtue in a scout; and that you didn't have enough selection of ranged weapons that she could take anything less poorly suited to scouting than a bow that can't be fired while standing on flat ground; and that she couldn't have made the shot, which I can't verify, but even if she was just standing there without a ranged weapon in hand it makes her look a bit like a spy."
"She's fine; I spoke to her to make sure they weren't spoofing where it was they found her and she didn't have some really good explanation but she and they agreed on the place. I'm not sure what he wants, but he expects to be unimpressed; I'm hoping you'll surprise me."
"If you don't have a good explanation for what she was doing there, I will trade for her safe return anyway by teaching one of them to fly so they have a bird scout and can feel sure that at any given time they aren't being menaced by oversized bows. I don't think they're going to go to war with you over it in light of that being the baseline option."
He looks at her intently. "Thank you for that. I appreciate it tremendously. We do not send scouts out with weapons like that; we also don't send scouts in their direction at all. The group Sarpalaurë was assigned to was headed out to the coast, and has not come back to tell me they lost one of their number; I'll send people after them now, unless you can think of a reason I shouldn't."
"Based on your story plus the facts I can verify she left camp without a giant bow, acquired one and split off from her group in some order of operations, circled around you unnoticed, and then was found in a spot that demonstrably allows shots into the camp with Quendi vision. I think it is pretty reasonable to conclude that everyone, including Sarpalarë, is very lucky that Fëanor did not happen to go outdoors before she was noticed."
"Or after she left them someone met her; we haven't been watching comings and goings all that closely, and people leave to hunt. Though not with a weapon like that. Her scouting group, if they haven't met some calamity, are in any event suspect for not immediately returning and reporting that they'd lost someone." He shakes his head. "You're welcome to stay for the trial. And I suppose to tell Fëanor he can send some people, though he'd better choose them well."
I'm not sure my brother won't take that as itself a provocation. As you'll recall he was sentenced to exile for drawing his sword on me, and was vocally of the opinion this was much too harsh. I'm not sure what they'd be most reassured to see from us, or how best to balance that against preventing such excursions again. And she was working with people, and I don't know who they are."
"I don't know who her accomplice or accomplices may have been either, nor do I have any particular advantage at finding out. I can ask what they'd like to see done, though; you will know better than I or they what your people will consider an effective deterrent." Looks like she's not liable to get to the Dwarves this half-week.
"All right. I'll go give them a bird and ask what they want and optionally tell Sarpalarë that she's an idiot again. Anything about this conversation which should not be disclosed in full to them, is it just that you don't want to alarm your own before finding everyone you need to find?"
"He could have; I'm not sure how much epistemic diligence the oath demands but it doesn't seem like a stretch. So, whether Sarpalarë is an idiot in particular or not she certainly is not in display of good character traits. Maybe she wasn't after him at all, maybe she has a grievance with you."
"Asgard is not in such a situation of multiple internal political factions; there's only one queen on the whole planet. If some people ruling subsections of it in her name got into a situation like this they'd have to forward it up to her. If we had something like this with, oh, Vanaheim, there would already be an extradition treaty in place, extradition being the thing where you claim the right to try your own suspect instead of letting them do it - I think ours with Vanaheim in particular is very friendly, mostly because my father's from there and the circumstances of my parents' marriage were treaty-related. If it was with someone we've never had diplomatic contact with before, they'd hammer out an extradition arrangement. Or not bother, maybe - if someone from a backwater like Midgard managed to get off the rock and cause trouble on Asgard they'd have no government we'd consider worth treating with on an official level, they'd just never be heard from at home again unless it was Odin's pleasure to let them go."
"I had actually tentatively bought Sarpalarë's story as far as 'poor selection of bows, went scouting with this one', although I was much more dubious that she, quote, 'served her king' in being where she was. I didn't know she would have been with a group or sent with some less ridiculous weapon, which is more concerning. I was going to swap her for a bird and let you handle her; do you mean what would I do if I were you?"
"Well, if I were you I'd know her and the rest of my people better than I, pretending to be you, in fact do. Options I'd consider if they seemed to dovetail well with that information do range as far up as execution and also include things like 'invite the Fëanorians to try and sentence her themselves with a full complement of evidence available from my end' - as though a very conciliatory extradition arrangement were in place. But honestly I would have tried to think of a non-alien-visitor-bird-dependent way to have nonthreatening diplomatic contact as soon as I got off the ice. They're thinking of giving you a palantir, incidentally, once they think you could prevent it from being stolen."
"I'd definitely advise the contact be between people relatively newly authorized to make major decisions. Who aren't related to each other. There's got to be somebody in your host and theirs who can acknowledge that at least none of the grievances are one another's individual fault and do not have family drama exacerbating the tensions. ...Some places get interesting results by encouraging their small children to play together without close adult supervision but you may not have any good way to do that safely."
"That's what I was going to visit the Dwarves about; they may be willing to harbor him as unfamiliar faces without keeping him a prisoner the way Círdan et al would have to. He saw a lot of continent in a few days in the air. Have an updated map -" She puts one on a piece of paper. "And a little extra tactical data -" She puts a transcript on another sheet. "He also found some Men, who I'm going to go bother as soon as I have a few days to spare."
"Not on his part, but hers; it looks like that to him even more than it did to me before I spoke to him. And he thinks she would have needed an accomplice, who he's trying to track down. If I can have another look at the bow to bring back a carefully matched illusion that might be helpful."
"I'm going to toss you quite high, transform while you're on your way up, and osanwë you what I'm doing while I do it. It should go without saying that this will give you plenty of affordances to give other people a head start but if I turn someone into a bird and I'm not expecting them to know how to fly and they do I'll be annoyed."
Fling. Change. Osanwë.
Sounds like a plan. Now I have to decide whether to try to make it to the Dwarves and back in time to make my appointment with your brother or hang around hereabouts until the trial's sewn up. How long will it take the prisoner and escorts to even get there?
Loki starts experimenting with doing little bits of spellwork while she's flying. It slows her down but not by much, and it'll make it less tempting to fall asleep and slow way down. She wants to make good time before she has to close her eyes. It's not ideal on the spell progress front either, but she gets a couple "words" spelled.
"Partly, I am just trying to become acquainted with more of the peoples of the continent. The reason I am here today and not in some weeks' time is that Nýi, who I spoke to in Menegroth, said that you might be willing to harbor an Elf that I rescued from the Enemy. His family are new to the continent and have never had contact with Dwarves before; and he believes that he may still be being shown falsehoods by the Enemy's mind control and accordingly does not want to go among anyone familiar lest he reveal to the Enemy his expectations about his loved ones."
"I do not know what you may have need of. I shared some of my realm's knowledge of metallurgy with the Menegroth Dwarves, and they were pleased, but may have already sent word here in which case it would be redundant; other people have appreciated my ability to carry messages at great speed in flight and my healing magic. Certainly if you accepted my rescuee as a guest he would be willing to work for his keep as long as he was here, provided it was not in such a way as to hypothetically reveal anything new to the Enemy if as he imagines you were all figments of a hallucination."
"Unfortunately, I didn't have a time to study anything in preparation for my trip to this realm, which was accidental. What I have is what I happen to remember and I have not focused strongly on metallurgy; but my culture is older than the ones here, and has had a lot of time to experiment and learn. So I remember fragments of this and that which may be new to you but incomplete, most of it as applied to creating weapons. Some of it seemed novel to the Menegroth Dwarves, and I have written down what I told them and which things those were."
"It's very, very far away, so it's not operating on the timeline of creation here. My current hypothesis is that the realms I knew before I came here are all in a parallel reality entirely, that no matter how far you traveled through the Void you'd never be able to get there."
This, surprisingly, cheers him tremendously. "That's the most interesting accident I have ever heard of. Well, we'd love to learn how realms with malfunctioning or sabotaged cross-continent transportation devices do metallurgy, and if you're willing to pay for your friend we're not particularly frightened of Elves, so by all means let's discuss this."
In she goes, pulling out and organizing her metallurgy notes as she walks.
"We typically admire people for technical achievements, for thinking of new things or doing things with exceptional care and diligence. There is nothing wrong with a person who does exactly as much labor as is necessary to lead their preferred lifestyle. It would be wrong to critique such a person. But we would find them uninteresting. Elves are entirely uninteresting. They like leading a lifestyle that requires very little effort, so they do very little effort, and so they do, to us, very little relatable or commendable or of interest."
"You might admire my rescuee's father if you met him. He's an exceptional engineer, moves much more quickly than most others of the species in figuring out and deploying new ideas. Some of his children inherited the drive, although not the particular one the Enemy captured; his talents are I think mostly diplomatic in nature."
"I'd rather meet engineers than diplomats, to be sure, but I'll meet either if they're trading something. May I see the notes, in exchange for which I'll introduce you to everyone here who I think would benefit from trade with you? I don't know if this is a fair offer, it's hard to assess the value of metallurgy notes until I've read them."
"It's often pretty difficult to assess trade fairness in situations like this. Just to clarify, does making this trade make it harder for me to get a place for my rescuee - his name's Nelyafinwë Maitimo, or possibly the other way around, I forget - to stay?"
"Oh! I didn't realize that you had internal, mm, intellectual property; when I've shared things with a population of Elves I've tended to assume that they can not only all hear me in the first place - I don't hear as well as they do and sort of assume that if I'm within a hundred miles they can eavesdrop - but that if some of them weren't paying attention they'll be able to get it from the others."
He reads through them. "These are very valuable. I expect that anyone and everyone would be interested in meeting you, out of the desire to interact with someone familiar with an independently arrived-at weapons tradition if no other, and also honored to host our first visitor from another realm. I also expect most of them would happily host your friend. Who would you like to meet?"
"I don't think he's equipped to do very much diplomacy while he thinks everything is a hallucination, but meeting the ruling council seems like a reasonable default. My priorities in general are defeating the Enemy, likely through the expedient of developing a spell to go back to familiar realms and import various contrivances and persons therefrom, and making sure that as many people who are alive today survive to that time as possible. I am actually quite comfortable with giving away things of value which, so distributed, advance these goals - including this information and healing magic for anyone in need of it - for abstract goodwill of a redeemable value to be determined. It's just that my rescuee ought to have a place to go and I'm short on other places to ask; that's the only concrete thing I needed here."
As he says this, the room lightens considerably.