Sigh.

"Lúthien has meanwhile made fast friends with Huan, and has been pitching him the idea of killing Sauron and saving all the people he's torturing, and Huan's convinced. He helps her get her invisibility cloak back, they sneak out of Nargothrond, they assail Sauron, and they win. Shred his body, leaving him irrelevant for the next century, and spare his life in exchange for him handing over the fortress so it doesn't crumble when he dies. Lúthien grabs Beren and heals him. Finrod's already been tortured to death but the other prisoners Sauron was holding in Tol Sirion - there were hundreds - make their way south to Nargothrond, which is in considerable disarray over the situation. 

Lúthien wants to head south and not look back; Beren thinks they can take Angband. Eventually they decide to do it. Meanwhile, Finrod's nephew stages another coup and expels Celegorm and Curufin from Nargothrond, and they run across Beren and Lúthien preparing for their Silmaril quest and open fire on them. Lúthien takes them down, takes their weapons, lets them go."

"...how's that work out?"

"They go home to Maedhros, who is still trying to organize a unified offensive against the Enemy and is less than delighted to hear that Doriath is now definitely going to be unpersuadable to participate and so is Nargothrond and also its King is dead."

"No doubt."

"And Beren and Lúthien go for Angband. Lúthien ventures into the Valley of Dreadful Death and finds, fights, and kills a Maia servant of the Enemy named Thuringwethil, kills her without damaging her current physical form, and then uses her skin as a cloak to get them into Angband in combination with a lot of stealth magic."

"Thuringwethils I am aware of, if not personally acquainted with any. Why did she need a new cloak?"

"Needed two of them, Beren wanted to come along.

The cloak gets them as far as Angband. Once they're inside she throws hers off and tells Morgoth she's switching sides because she hates her parents and their stupid prison of a kingdom."

"...heh."

"And then she dances for him and puts him and everything in Angband to sleep. They'd taken Curufin and Celegorm's weapons, you'll recall, and Curufin had a special magical knife for Morgoth's crown - they try stabbing Morgoth first, obviously, glances off him - and he pries a Silmaril out of the crown and is going for the second when despite the sleep spells Lúthien is still singing, Morgoth and his lieutenants start to wake up.

So they take their one Silmaril and she levels the throne room behind her and they run for their lives, and on their tail is Carcharoth, a monstrous werewolf taller than a man, and Beren's holding the Silmaril and vaguely remembers that they burn evil things so he waves it at Carcharoth, hoping it'll burn him, and Carcharoth swallows his arm whole, including the Silmaril.

The Silmaril burns Carcharoth from the inside out, but he has powerful regeneration, and his body repairs the damage as fast as the Silmaril burns it, and he loses his mind in horrible agony and starts thrashing around killing everything in sight and giving them a little bit more time to run for it, though they're not going to make it out.

And then Manwë sends an Eagle."

"I wonder what the Eagles think of all this inefficient errantry they get sent on."

"Good question. Lúthien and Beren land in Doriath, badly injured, and Thingol swoops over to find them and says to Beren "I told you not to come back here until you'd completed your task" and Beren says to him "even now a Silmaril is in my hand" - waving the bloody stump -"

"...hee."

"Anyway, Thingol has - a revelation, or something, because he apologizes and welcomes them both to stay in Doriath and politely ignores that they'd, um, already gotten married, and offers his blessings for a wedding.

And then Carcharoth comes at Doriath. With a Silmaril he can bludgeon his way all through the protections. Huan - who'd gone back to Celegorm - hears and comes to help fight. Beren considers it his responsibility, goes to fight too. Huan and Carcharoth die with their teeth locked into each others' throats, there's a lot of collateral damage - including Beren. He dies.

So Lúthien goes to Mandos to give him a talking-to."

"Oh, fun fact, in the arsenal of cool multiversal stuff I can grab is my alt's daughter who is capable of talking Valar into being reasonable people, but apparently Local Lúthien got somewhere with that even absent this advantage?"

"Somewhere, yeah. She convinced Mandos to return her and Beren to life, and he assured her that the Valar were anticipating that soon-in-Vala-time there would be a means to take Morgoth down with less collateral damage and that her descendants would play a role in that. She also got promised that there's a plan for Men after they die, and she decided to take that alongside Beren rather than be separated forever.

They returned to life. They settled far south. They had a son. As far as I know Lúthien never spoke to her parents again, but Thingol announced his grandson was his heir."

"The joys of sexist primogeniture."

"Most people who want their sons to inherit just have a son first, makes it less obvious. Anyhow. Maedhros retakes the east, retakes Dorthonion, in 473 they convene all their forces - six different nations of Men, two of Dwarves, the Noldor under the High King Fingon, the Feanorians-about-whom-it-was-never-clear-whether-they-took-orders-from-the-King-at-all, Cirdan's people...

...one of the nations of Men turns out to have been suborned by Melkor, they delay the Feanorians from getting to the site of the battle and then attack them from behind. The Enemy realizes he needs to draw out Fingon's forces before the Feanorians arrive and he's fighting on two fronts, so he starts gruesomely executing prisoners in public in the field in front of Angband and some idiot sees his brother being killed and charges. And the dragons were at full strength, and we were very badly outnumbered. There were very few survivors. They called it the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. The Enemy piled up the dead in the fields, hundreds of thousands of them, and then picked off the remaining kingdoms at his leisure."

Nod.

"There was a human kingdom of Dor Lomin, they'd sent everyone off to fight who could, they were defenseless. The Enemy enslaved the inhabitants - I don't think humans are as fun to torture - and the ten-year-old son of its previous chieftain, Túrin, they smuggled to Doriath, because word had it that Doriath was still safe.

Thingol - Thingol took in the child and raised him as his own and when he came of age gave him a place among Doriath's guard, where he distinguished himself by expanding Doriath's position so they could protect a nearby human kingdom, and he was rising rapidly in Thingol's favor, and someone was jealous. They made a comment which - which I think they intended to be a mild childish insult, your-mother-is-promiscuous, you know how people are -

- but Túrin had watched his people enslaved and taken as wives for the invaders, and he drew a sword and told the joker to run for his life and the next anyone heard, the man was dead and Túrin had fled the kingdom."

"Wow."

"Thingol sadly announced that Túrin was exiled for murder, and then someone came forward to explain what had actually happened - Túrin was screaming at the guy and he didn't look where he was going and he ran off a cliff. Not - ideal, but manslaughter, not murder, and under the circumstances Thingol pardoned Túrin and sent some people to go find him and let him know he was pardoned. 

They found him rallying the scattered bandit groups that had been preying on Beleriand under his banner and into a fighting force he was going to use to liberate his people."

"I'm gonna guess that like literally every part of this story it doesn't end well?"

"It gets much much worse from here. If you were hoping for a happy story I can just stop there and say everyone died - everyone did in fact die -"

"I can cope with an unhappy story."