Fëanáro has something. They're shaped like oversized cut gemstones, responsive to their environment, stunningly pretty. Indestructible - or, at least, no weapon of theirs and no scrap of the work of the Enemy can scratch them.

"Aydanci," he says, "I need automata that can take orders from these."

"...in what format?"

"They're intelligent. They're responsive to the environment. I am pretty sure they can also be responsive to the Enemy's magic, and here's how, and here's what they'd need to pick up on..."

And so Aydanci notes what patterns of light the automata will need to pick up on and what they'll need to do in response. And he flings himself into work.

They keep it very quiet. Just in case. Few dozen people. They're still assuming the Enemy could somehow be reading Kib from here, so it can't be talked about around him - which is a problem, because Aydanci does as much work as possible around Kib.

Kib has absolutely no objections to being blindfolded while Aydanci puppets a scribe along a page, working out pseudocode and then code. He never looks at the work anyway. He never asks what he's working on.

It takes years.

They are not betting they will get more than one chance at this.

And they are not betting it'll work at all, within Angband, so something else will be needed to draw the Enemy out. There's a separate team on that. Everything they're considering is very, very ugly. Liquid fire that can be dumped from flying golems in quantities that will have the whole place smouldering for centuries. Bombs with embedded shrapnel of the Maia-shredding kind. Lári can't keep up at the production lines, but a few of the rescued humans are in Maitimo's assessment trustworthy enough by now to wake non-war-related automata that'll promptly be shipped Dwarf-wards.

Kib shows no signs of being untrustworthy, but it does not seem likely that he is willing to perform the action of waking anything.

The King doesn't even ask; if anyone asked him the equivalent he'd refuse, after all. He is himself only involved in this effort at several levels of abstraction. Fëanáro and Aydanci think they have a superweapon, and need circumstances engineered to deploy it; then either he will hallucinate winning or hallucinate losing.

And Kib will hallucinate being curled up over Aydanci's lap, held with one arm and petted with the other because his husband is a servantmaker and doesn't need his hands to write.

And Aydanci will wake the weapons.

It takes another year to set it up all right, to have communications synchronized, to have a fleet of flying golems to deliver the weaponry who can fly high enough above Angband. Can't be done without enchantment; the air's too thin.

 In the Year of the Sun 39, they pray to the inattentive gods and the probably-fictional one and they launch.

Kib was still thinking and therefore forming associations between things the last time there was an earthquake. He doesn't have a productive panic response but he has a panic response.

(The first fleet flies over. Drops Maia-shredding bombs, drops liquid fire, drops the sharp-edged bits of the Enemy's own servantmaking, indestructible as it conveniently is. Everything set to detonate in midair, before it's in reach of him; each subsequent wave set to make it a little farther - they've mapped how the shockwaves will compound -

Andband falls. And its ruler picks himself up, flaming, seething, uninjured -

And then it's time for the real fight.)

"Is he shaking the continent," says the King, "or is that aftershocks of what we did-"

"Could be both -"

And a hundred thousand automata coordinate the Silmarils in a wild blizzard of light around the Enemy, and they melt and they vanish and more of them keep coming to fill the gaps -

And then there is a roar like a god drawing his final breath, and a few orcish prisoners acquired for the purpose gasp as their oath snaps loose.

And Beleriand sinks into the sea.

(Aydanci has to get Charp to carry Kib to the evac golems, Kib's incoherent with fear -)

They've learned from their mistakes; there are evac golems for the population of each city parked outside it. Doesn't mean everyone reaches one. It's not fast - it appears, actually, if you look, to be like glass shattering in slow motion- but it's fast enough.

Doriath pokes their nose outside their borders and notices they are an island. They are all right with that.

Ulmo's city was in a mountain range, but his seas find themselves at its doors. And peaceably turn away.

(Kib calms down some while they fly away on the golem.

He doesn't watch the continent fall.)

They land on the south continent. They send emissaries to Valinor to convey the good news and inquire after the dead. There are a lot of dead. And Dwarves and Men don't have Mandos.

When Aydanci tells him that they did it, Kib manages something almost like a smile and says, "That's two. I love you."

And then he resumes being as he was.

Fëanáro's next project is memory. But it'll be a decade and might not even help. Do they want to try Lórien.

Might as well.

The Noldor are building a city. Pretty city. No one's sure how long to sing for the death of a continent, so they have not stopped. Even Elven voices get hoarse after a few months.

They wish Kib and Aydanci good skill, a bit distractedly.

The King is going too.

Lórien's comfy.

Lórien can stop dreams, or send specific dreams. He doesn't know if this will override Kib's existing dreams. He can also remove unwanted memories, with Kib's consent. Which in this case he'll take from Kib's husband, under the circumstances.

"What would we even tell him, about why we're in Lórien..."

My advice, having seen many cases like this, is to temporarily remove memories more recent than the Darkening of Valinor. Then explain to him when he awakens that you were killed in that catastrophe, and he warred against the Enemy and was taken prisoner, and after the war you brought him here for healing, which with his consent included this approach. Now that we have him in psychological health, he can direct the course of his own recovery from there, including how he desires to have memories of your death, the war, or his torture back.

I recommend this approach because for some people, the knowledge they were captured by the Enemy, he can tamper with memory, and that the Enemy does vivid hallucinations of rescue is sufficient for them to conclude they might be hallucinating. Since it seems Akibel is not functional while convinced he might be hallucinating, and since we want him able to advise us on the course of his further treatment, I do not want him to start out knowing that. He can perhaps advise us from there, and if not, that the now-dead Enemy had such capabilities might be something it's simply better he doesn't know.