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Tumunzahar makes Menegroth look like a contract project. Which, the Dwarves assure her, it was. The stonework is astonishingly careful and beautiful, silky to the touch up close while from a distance it gives the impression of stretching on forever above, a sky of stone with crystals for stars. Vast natural cave systems are connected by dozens of perfectly smooth, gently sloped broad stone pathways from which the fall, if she fell, would be several miles down. There are handrails. "We use those to move materials carts," someone explains to her, "we're not going to be reckless."
There's an amphitheater, a place where a hundred of the stone walkways twine around to create space for a hundred thousand people to sit in close proximity, and someone is giving a lecture or a demonstration at the base of it, the seats closest to him filled with eager, tiny, bearded Dwarf-children.
And they spiral down, and down, and down, past waterfalls and egg-sized gemstones left half in the rock and halls of crystal. Everything grows gradually more ornate and more perfectly maintained and the clang of hammers fades behind them. "People say," her guide says, "that we only have a council instead of a single King because there were nine winners of the competition to design the throne so we couldn't just select one person to sit it." And they push open the doors to reveal, indeed, nine thrones so elaborate it would be hard to choose between them, and nine squat bearded people sitting them.
purposeful_glory
"As with everything I will be more generally disseminating these things, but sure. What's with the snowflake thing?"
"I'm not sure how I feel about everyone having copies. I don't know what the Enemy could do with this, but probably not nothing. This style of magic is common among the Eldar and I'm certain that everyone already has access to it in the form with more drawbacks but fewer unknowns.
They all have associated physical effects, either chosen because they seemed thematically appropriate to me or because it was hard to design the song without them. Or some of them it's the point, like a song to knock people away from you."
They all have associated physical effects, either chosen because they seemed thematically appropriate to me or because it was hard to design the song without them. Or some of them it's the point, like a song to knock people away from you."
purposeful_glory
"In particular I feel very awkward about giving you a skip-a-night-of-sleep-room and a speed-up-perception-room and not offering commensurate benefits to your cousins. I feel awkward about it anyway because your host is so much better able to leverage basically anything I offer, but still. I can dismiss illusions from existence remotely even though I can't usefully create them that way, anyway, if another Balrog gets dropped on their camp and commandeers their spell rooms as soon as I find out the room will cease to have special properties."
"You have a skip-a-night-of-sleep song and a speed-up-perception song because I sang them for you. As I recall when we had need of your magic you asked quite a price for it. Can you carry an illusion of the contents of the room with you, so you can observe whether it's been commandeered?"
purposeful_glory
"No, it's working off mental images and persisting from there, I can't turn it into a video camera. I don't doubt that you're a particularly good source of magic songs and I really appreciate it and I wish I could just go around dispensing gifts to everyone indiscriminately but I am dealing with an awkward détente here. If my sister plummets out of the sky, finds out I'm a frost giant, and despises me for it, you may feel free to carefully equalize your distribution of things between the two of us, I won't be offended."
"Understood." He stands. "Should I find an appropriate room for the perception-heightening and sleep-skipping?"
purposeful_glory
"Should probably be different rooms, people might want to hang out in the one and just visit the other."
There's a point at which it stops working, but nothing obvious about that point - it's not the place where the notes stop being distinct.
purposeful_glory
She backs it off from there. Makes sure she can split it up into bits for separate storage still. Puts it back together.
And spellcrafts.
And spellcrafts.
Quite a bit of subjective time later, someone knocks on the door to tell her that buildings have been selected for this purpose and she can set them up at her convenience.
purposeful_glory
She disassembles and baffles the spell, puts away her work, and goes to make the installations.
The person supervising the installation explains that Macalaurë asked them to spend the next while in subjective time and see if this had any negative effects - "which we'll tell you about as soon as we know about them."
purposeful_glory
Does anybody have more songs for her? Or should she use her sleepless night to go tell a presumably also not sleeping Findekáno about the hack?
"I don't have anything else I'm comfortable sharing," Macalaurë says bluntly, "which isn't distrust in you but a reluctance to trust everyone you trust and everyone they trust. Healing we can get you, if you'd like."
So he finds someone who does healing, and she plays a song - "most people do this with instruments, Lord Canafinwë was unusually determined to have his hands free -" and observes that range can be amplified and it should affect everyone in the range on either side - "It's not really meant for use on a battlefield" - and that Elven healing can't for example regrow limbs, though it can do a fair bit for wounds to the mind and soul.
purposeful_glory
"My primary use case is keeping somebody alive until I can get to touch range, so not being able to regrow limbs isn't a prohibitive drawback," Loki says.