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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
"So I should go test the healing spells on your cousins."
"I'd expect it to be more situational than that - like, if Angband attacked and we were fighting alongside Nolofinwë's host, I'd expect anything I could do for them to work fine even if my personal feelings towards them were adversarial. If they attacked us, then no, shouldn't work, though I'd actually add in a theme specifically about repairing old wounds or about family turning enemy respectively to make it clear to the song."
purposeful_glory
"So I should go catch an orc, test the spell on it, and convert it only after that?"
"At that point would I still consider it an adversary? You could bring two orcs, one of which you've converted and one which you have not, so that my inclination would be to still regard neither as friendly, and see if the song affects either of them."
purposeful_glory
"Is the distinction in fact friendly or is it more like allied or appropriate healing target or what?"
"I can design a better targeted version. It's friendly, but in the sense of 'if we met in this battle we wouldn't raise weapons against each other' rather than 'we trust each other' or 'we'd spend an afternoon together'."
purposeful_glory
"I suppose I do have a purely at-will backup if I want to heal somebody you would feel inclined to stab."
"I told you before that I have no grievances with my cousins. And you can ask Findaráto for songs, too, I know he has them."
purposeful_glory
"I don't mean your cousins, or at least I don't mean them right now, but something might come up, I do keep meeting all kinds of people. Hey, is there any reason I shouldn't just run this spell basically all the time? I can spellcraft at the speed of thought, I don't have to move."
"No one's tried it before, if it has side effects we wouldn't know what they are. Anyone in my family would try it anyway and find it useful information if they sank into a week of dreamless sleep after a year of doing it, but I don't know your risk-tolerance."
purposeful_glory
"Well, what amount of use is known to be safe, and would you like a time-acceleration room set up so people who are less linchpin-y than I am can play with it?"
"I've done it for a week at festivals with only brief breaks and no sleep - I have another song for not needing to sleep, that one catches up with us after about three weeks. And yes, let's set that up."
"It's a sleep-twice-a-week spell unless you're my father, and even for him it's a sleep-every-two-weeks spell. You can go longer, obviously, but when it catches up with you it really catches up with you."
purposeful_glory
"And I assume I'll need more sleep than you, but still, I'd already have the ability to do without sleep altogether if I could have covertly used it in Asgard. How abruptly?"
"About eight times longer than you should have gone, your thoughts get foggy and you feel jittery like you're being sustained by external strings. As soon as you close your eyes at that point you will sleep for a few days, and if someone tries to wake you before then you will have something resembling a very bad hangover and also still be exhausted." A rueful smile. "The sample size is quite large, but all the tests were on me."
purposeful_glory
"But I could skip a night to get somewhere distant faster?"
"You can skip a night regularly just to have more time to work in. You could skip a week to get somewhere faster - or, at least, we could."
He smiles again, leans back, starts singing. The air seems to grow slightly colder. After a minute it feels as if there are snowflakes landing on their faces.
purposeful_glory
Record record record. She will ask when he's done if the snowflake thing is essential.
It takes around half an hour. "Which is why I don't do it for Father every day," he says, concluding. "If it still works sped-up, we'd rather like having copies as well."
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."