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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.
"... I actually would entirely trust my dear uncle with that. It is not his style to use that kind of thing in random anger."
purposeful_glory
"He might be able to get somewhere with just what I could tell him now but it requires a lot of things I don't remember, including metals that are, let's call it poisonous, to be near."
"...that's a thing the Silmarils can do. Poisonous metals, I mean, they were present even in Valinor and Aulë would teach advanced students of geology about them and in the presence of the Silmarils they don't do the thing that makes them poisonous. I don't know what that means for your bombs."
purposeful_glory
"Well, it probably means you can't construct them the way I've read about in the presence of a Silmaril but would be well advised to have one handy in case you had a lab accident. But the Silmarils are behind this fortress which is as yet tragically unleveled."
purposeful_glory
"The smushing-atoms-together kind might, the taking-one-apart kind probably not. Actually, I'm not sure you need any of the poisonous metals for the smushing variety, I could be misremembering, but there's some reason they're harder to invent."
purposeful_glory
"Yeah. I could more readily answer the questions of whether poisonous metals must actively poison in order to serve as this sort of weapon if I remembered all the books I've ever read."
"I'll give it a try. And if we could give people back memories this way that have been tampered with -"
"Yeah, I know. I was planning not to talk to him for a few centuries anyway, when all this started, so somehow I'm sure I'll cope."
purposeful_glory
"I wouldn't have said 'Quendi' if you said you were planning to never speak to him again, but you said 'a few centuries' as an explanation for how you'll cope with the downgrade from twice-weekly updates."
"For a while I wanted to never speak to him again, but it was always fairly obvious that if there's going to be coordination on facing the Enemy some of us are going to have to set grievances aside, and I have the mixed blessing of finding that very easy to do, so I never really thought it'd be 'never'."
And I'd probably have obsessed over news about him. He'd have gotten married for political reasons or something and I'd have silently thrown a tantrum for weeks. ...I was really never going to be very good at it.
purposeful_glory
Apparently the other host is considering some arranged vaguely-political marriages with locals. I objected. Not particularly forcefully, but I objected.
purposeful_glory
No, not really. I'm pretty sure my parents are married because Vanaheim really wanted Odin to go away and leave them alone and it was somehow implied that a pretty husband would make that happen more smoothly.
It should have occurred to me that overexposure can engender concerns as much as underexposure.
Romantic love is a concept we - invented in Valinor is an exaggeration, but certainly the ways we conceived of it in relation to marriage were invented in Valinor. It doesn't surprise me that my cousins are delightedly throwing out every norm at whose roots they can identify a Vala.
Romantic love is a concept we - invented in Valinor is an exaggeration, but certainly the ways we conceived of it in relation to marriage were invented in Valinor. It doesn't surprise me that my cousins are delightedly throwing out every norm at whose roots they can identify a Vala.