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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
But imagine if you could bottle the underlying peaceful nature. 'Dump this in the water supply and watch your violent crime rate evaporate unless a god spends hundreds of years sowing dissent!'
What is the violent crime rate in normal societies?
purposeful_glory
Varies a lot, don't remember much about the numbers. And my standard of a normal society has a very dense population, so if I say there's a murder a day in a big city you have to remember that a big city can have six million people in it.
Still. We never had a murder, or an attempt, before Alqualondë.
We had - we knew what the Enemy'd done. My father did at one point memorably draw a sword on Nolofinwë and was I think aware that if he stabbed him enough with the sword he'd stop moving. We played games where if you were playing as evil you'd be willing to do it. But in the same way that if you were playing as evil you'd be willing to kidnap small children and raise them as princesses, it wasn't conceivable.
Morgoth found me amusingly naive.
Morgoth found me amusingly naive.
There are things we didn't have a concept of. Things we wouldn't do even as a move in an evil game of Governor, wouldn't even name, things we wouldn't even have accused the Enemy of, because we had no idea...that might be true of any realm, though.
purposeful_glory
There's a story which may or may not be apocryphal about a world which lacked a concept of suicide and had a very serious problem when someone noticed that and explained it.
i'm inclined to say they'd had a problem before and no way of solving it.
purposeful_glory
The story is not told in a way to imply that they acted out of actual suicidality, just a complete lack of memetic immunity, but that's possible.
He spirals a bit lower. Hmmm. Anyway, I have no idea if Morgoth would also have found Asgardians amusingly naive or if all the horrors of the world have already been independently reinvented. We were missing a lot of concepts. Not sure if I should try to remedy that.
I promise I wasn't going to start throwing things at you.
If my purported rescuer had been one of my people, I wouldn't have said as much. It was unfair to raise it with you as frequently as I did.
I don't think I am. It's a serious shortcoming, I'm annoyed with myself for not noticing it much earlier in my life.
purposeful_glory
I mean, I don't know how you're doing internally but you're functioning pretty well for an extremely traumatized person who has every reason to believe he's in a malicious hallucination.
You weren't present but I spent a day curled up in a ball before I could even retrain my brain that blades of grass weren't a reason to collapse into a puddle. I've had nearly three weeks to work on it and I cannot eat or drink.
purposeful_glory
I don't have overwhelmingly high standards for extremely traumatized people, admittedly. ...There's probably all kinds of reasons this won't work for you, but when I don't like how my brain's behaving I write it down so I can have a look at it from the outside and see if that makes it easier to approach.
I am really not willing to put much of this to paper.
purposeful_glory
Yeah, I didn't think so. I invented a cipher so my sister wouldn't read my notes. Don't know if that helps.
Amusement. We also have not invented words for much of it.