Someone else who got snaked is here!
...so presumably at least one of these kissing men is a past snake victim!
Oh my god Lúthien put us outside this building please.
Someone else who got snaked is here!
...so presumably at least one of these kissing men is a past snake victim!
Oh my god Lúthien put us outside this building please.
"And this is compared to other Ardas, by most objective measures it's not worse than your typical authoritarian human population, but it's Elves, and Elves are supposed to be adorable and cooperative and harmless."
"Lúthien's not an exception, I'm not an exception. It wasn't really a problem that had occurred to us to worry about until we found it, and now we have to be careful. Congratulations on not being from an evil Arda."
"...also the Noldor explained themselves very persuasively but I wouldn't characterize them as adorable and cooperative and harmless? Did your versions not have the oath and Alqualondë and the burning the ships and the taking human vassals and being very dubious about that -"
"...the human vassals thing not so much? In Space and Shine the orcs got to the humans first, in Elentári Loki adopted them, in Evil Arda things are, y'know, evil... Kib and I showed up in time to avert ship-burning but Elentári had that... I think Evil Arda actually skipped it... oath was present in Space and Elentári and Evil Arda... anyway by adorable and cooperative and harmless we mean that a typical human population under pressure ranging from 'scarcity' to 'boredom' to 'charismatic jerk with a religion' looks awfully evil in an awful hurry, whereas Elves normally require pressure like 'people are dying and we can't help because these assholes are being precious about their fucking boats' to stop being adorable and cooperative and harmless."
"Okay. Then I think your assessment is right - also your alt has terrifying exploding-things powers and could probably explode a lot of things if he was evil -"
"I don't know that that's what he'd do if he were evil, but thank you, good to know. Perhaps you can tell the story from the start for us now?"
"You want Arda context because we're chronologically latest or should I start with Lúthien landing on me?"
"I guess I am also curious how undisrupted Ardas play out over the next four hundred years..."
"Loki landed on the Nolofinwean host on the ice, right? No one landed on us on the Ice. We crossed it. Sun rose. Elenwë didn't make it, Arakáno was killed in an ambush by orcs the first day off, we were pretty furious with you all. We marched on Lake Mithrim.
The Feanorian host left. Left the walls and the houses and some of the supplies and vanished into the surrounding foothills. We weren't quite sure if it was an apology or a trap or sheer cowardice. Woke up the next day to find that they'd started rebuilding walls for themselves on the south side of the lake. I went over to talk with them. Maglor met me. I asked if the King was ashamed to face us.
Fëanor was dead. Maedhros was "hopefully dead", he said.
They rebuilt their walls and we healed ourselves from the ice and it took me five years to have a song I was confident would get me into Angband."
"No.
I found him. He was three hundred feet up, chained by one arm to a sheer cliff face. I couldn't fly. He asked me to kill him so I drew my bow and asked Manwë to forgive me and instead he stopped me. Sent a Great Eagle, the ones from Taniquetil, to give me a ride up to him on the cliff face. And I cut him down and I flew back to Mithrim with him."
"Elspeth will be able to turn your Valar into something more closely resembling reasonable people."
"I look forward to it. Anyway, Maedhros wasn't okay but it didn't take him very long to get okay enough to fake it. And when he did he threw himself at my father's feet and apologized for the burning of the ships and ordered returned to us everything that had been stolen and named my father the rightful ruler of the Noldor and relinquished forever his family's claim to the crown.
His brothers, uh, disagreed. With the decision, that Maedhros was in a state to make it - he wasn't, not exactly. He didn't believe that this was real, any of it. And I can't even say with any confidence that he was doing what he would have been doing if he'd been confident this was reality - his not believing this was reality was one of the things that, to his mind, disqualified him from the Kingship - but he knew how he wanted this scenario to play out, and he knew what he was doing, and there was a coronation and then the reunited Noldor started building the fortresses to fight our war."
I had you and Findekáno to offload the things I shouldn't be looking at and to catch me if I was subtly damaged. Without that, yeah, wouldn't have chanced it. Must have hurt, though.
"My cousins on the Telerin side hit it off with Elwë -" he nods to Lúthien - "and he gave them permission to settle in inhabited parts of the continent. The rest of us had no such permission, so we settled far north. Maedhros moved his cousins and their host across the continent east, to minimize, mmm, interpersonal friction.
The Enemy didn't start striking back in earnest - real force, Balrogs and his Maiar all deployed - for several decades. When he did we were ready, we won, we surrounded and besieged Angband. They called it the Dagor Aglareb, the Glorious Battle.
We built a hidden civilian city in the mountains, with Ulmo helping. We encountered Men, fleeing wars that the Enemy'd been provoking farther east. There were more battles. We won them. There was a dragon - did he have dragons in time for any of your wars -"
He sends the memory -
"Dragon. Lovely, isn't he? I drove him back to Angband but we didn't know how to kill him."