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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.
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purposeful_glory
"Thank you! Wow, is that a tapestry? That is an amazing tapestry."
"My grandmother had a gift for it. She died before I was born, sadly. Most of her work was destroyed in the sack of Formenos the day my grandfather died. We have three of these left, and dresses for a daughter's wedding day if anyone in this family ever successfully has a daughter."
purposeful_glory
"If I couldn't see how it was attached to the wall and didn't know the weather I'd think it was a window - if I didn't know your tech level I'd think it was a screen - can you make out the stitches?"
"Yes, but only if I'm looking very hard. It's magic, obviously. She did every stitch in the piece but she had some way of making them so small." He's smiling. "I'm glad you like it."
purposeful_glory
"Who should I be quizzing about local magic? It doesn't seem to be in use everywhere, so I assume it has some kind of serious limitation..."
"Its limitation being that its wielders grew up in Valinor, and thought on Valinor's terms. Our magic is almost entirely very very slow to work - it can take hours, for some projects years - works in artifacts - I can do it with music, but that's far more flexible than most of it - and is almost entirely a specific ability to craft something in a way that makes it more its fundamental nature. The actual process is highly technical and we have a sophisticated mathematical language for describing what we're trying to do and designing the artifacts to actually do it. Most people would need a decade to work out a complicated project in the relevant technical level of detail.
We can do magic swords that are deadly and magic armor that is protective, but other than that this is surprisingly hard to apply to leveling Angband."
We can do magic swords that are deadly and magic armor that is protective, but other than that this is surprisingly hard to apply to leveling Angband."
purposeful_glory
"Maybe you need magic artillery for that. Do locals not practice it...?"
"They typically protect their dwellings with what seems like a similar form, though they can't do the calculations and either go with a lot less precision, a lot shorter effect length, or using music to make the universe do the needed computation - it's said Creation was a song, and music is very powerful in these things."
"Is that your magic? Which instruments are those?"
purposeful_glory
"That's me doing an auditory illusion, yes, and those are mostly fiddles." She lifts a hand, illusions one into place on her chin, pretends to play it. "I don't really know how to play, but... Mostly I'm wondering if I can make the universe do a lot of computation without having to gather a choir."
His eyes light up.
"All right. So consider a project Curufinwë and I have been tossing ideas back and forth over - a spell for true seeing, that lets you see invisible people, lets you see everyone present in their real form, lets you see through illusions and possibly through hallucinations but we don't know how Moringotto does that so we won't be able to convince Maitimo that's happened anyway.
If he does it, it'd be in the form of a magical ring or necklace, and what the ring or necklace would do is have to - hmm, look at the raw material of creation, and decompile a second version of the raw material of creation from what the wearer is actually experiencing, and compare those, and find the differences, and stitch the 'truth' in for the lies in the wearers' experience. Curufinwë would need to do a great deal of difficult theoretical work to describe that last sentence sufficiently technically that a ring could be forged that would do it, and then the ring would work only with delays of hours and he would need an exhausting process of testing that involved simplifying the magic so it did only the needed parts of its work and did them faster and turned up less bizarre false positives.
If I did it, I would ask to hear the raw material of creation, and hear the world in front of me, and I'd sing a spell whose job it was to harmonize them and let the truth triumph. It would still take weeks to compose the song, but the computation involved in 'hear the raw material of creation' isn't needed at all; once I have the spell, I can just play for it."
"All right. So consider a project Curufinwë and I have been tossing ideas back and forth over - a spell for true seeing, that lets you see invisible people, lets you see everyone present in their real form, lets you see through illusions and possibly through hallucinations but we don't know how Moringotto does that so we won't be able to convince Maitimo that's happened anyway.
If he does it, it'd be in the form of a magical ring or necklace, and what the ring or necklace would do is have to - hmm, look at the raw material of creation, and decompile a second version of the raw material of creation from what the wearer is actually experiencing, and compare those, and find the differences, and stitch the 'truth' in for the lies in the wearers' experience. Curufinwë would need to do a great deal of difficult theoretical work to describe that last sentence sufficiently technically that a ring could be forged that would do it, and then the ring would work only with delays of hours and he would need an exhausting process of testing that involved simplifying the magic so it did only the needed parts of its work and did them faster and turned up less bizarre false positives.
If I did it, I would ask to hear the raw material of creation, and hear the world in front of me, and I'd sing a spell whose job it was to harmonize them and let the truth triumph. It would still take weeks to compose the song, but the computation involved in 'hear the raw material of creation' isn't needed at all; once I have the spell, I can just play for it."
purposeful_glory
...This is interesting and Loki writes it all down. "Why a magical ring or necklace in particular?"
"Needs to be a single continuous piece of metal, should ideally be in direct contact with the skin."
purposeful_glory
"Why? And once the technical work was done what would - at what point and how, in the forging process, would the technical work interact with the ring-or-whatever? When I'm doing spell work and I finish a piece it 'snaps' into place in my head and I can't forget it, and casting's a mental action, it's all in my head to begin with, but how do you get your definition of truth into a ring?"
"You'd have to ask Curufinwë or my father for a proper explanation, but on the very small projects I attempted in the forge, magic was a step in the process of treating the metal, and the work starts working if it works when the metal was made continuous."
purposeful_glory
"...None of the mental images I'm coming up with make sense, I'm assuming you don't burn a written copy of the definitions involved or sternly inform the metal that it is to contain thus and such..."
"Have you ever tried osanwë with an inanimate object?"
"It's pretty pointless. There's not nothing there but there isn't a mind there, just a sort of vague tedious resonance like the echo you hear when talking to a stone wall. Except if you have very very precisely defined what you want, you can know which thoughts to think to get the resonances that will do what you want. Thinking the wrong thought during the process disrupts it. It is absurdly difficult."
purposeful_glory
"Okay. I probably can't do that part because I don't actually have osanwë, I'm just interacting with yours. Is there a cheap simple test I can try to make sure that objects don't 'have' enough osanwë of their own...?"
"When I was young the first lesson my father started me on was making a ring that produced its own light, I think that's a standard simplest case. It still took a month. If you cheated and received exactly the series of resonances, you might be able to tell in three days."
purposeful_glory
"Well, that's a fairly brief test, I will consider it as a disposition of my time here - but more overview first - can you go into more detail on your version? How do you hear the raw material of creation, can anyone do that?"
"Any Elf can. You're supposed to get there by meditation, but I picked it up by sheer force of will - there was music making the world reveal itself around me, and I wanted to hear it, and I - hmm, maybe it still is osanwë, but it feels different from the usual sort if so - you look at things moving around you and try very hard to listen for them. Over time it develops into a sense as strong as any other, if less precise and more mediated by your will and concentration."
purposeful_glory
"Sounds much costlier for me to test, but it's the music thing I may be able to cheat at..."