Accept our Terms of Service
Our Terms of Service have recently changed! Please read and agree to the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy
At the End of All Things Elves in Revelation
Permalink

For three months after Revelation he ignores his father's calls.

 

Yes. It should be possible to summon a demon and, depending how their powers work, either get a Silmaril from them or get the location of the patch of ground closest to the Silmaril from them or at worst do binary search over conjured models of parts of the planet to find the Silmarils. Yes, it should be possible to summon an angel to then dig the thing out of bedrock. And then they won't live life walking against the currents of fading, they will be whole again, they can summon some more for spaceship plans and head away from Earth much sooner, and much more powerful, than they imagined.

 

Also, the curious demon might go back to Hell and conjure some more Silmarils, if their powers happen to shake out that way, and might start handing out Silmarils to anyone on Earth who wants one, because why not, and the oath might still be in force, the risk is unimaginable - 

 

- they can of course get a Silmaril and then, if it turns out they can be conjured, not let the demon go home, that is merely incredibly rude and might strand someone a dimension away from their family for centuries. It at least does not risk unleashing the oath on this innocent world that has, at last, left the scars of the last time that happened beyond the reach of living memory.

 

For three months after Revelation he ignores his father's calls because he is childishly frightened, because his well-polished coping skills are fraying, because if he feels the tug of that oath on him again it will be too late to kill himself and therefore he wants, very badly, to do it now. For three months he wavers.

 

And then he answers the calls, and takes some vacation, and goes home for a Fëanorian planning session. He doesn't remember what loving them felt like but he remembers that he loved them, that it was once very important to him, and he knows he would do this for someone he loved. They plan and they read and they learn and they practice - without summoning, because daeva get the languages you speak when you summon them and so the first daeva they summon will know, if observant enough, they're not of this society - 

- he gets two weeks vacation a year, they plan very very slowly - 

 

- and six years after Revelation they have a binding and a few possible options for payment and a plan for the case where Silmarils turn out to be trivially conjurable and conjurable ones oath-relevant. Maedhros is terrified, and miserable, but no one can tell. He prides himself on that. 

 

Curufin doesn't want to do it because he speaks Khuzdul and the Dwarves who taught him it in confidence did not give him permission to share it. (They did give him permission, when it came up one optimistic night, to share it with his father should his father ever return to life, and so Fëanor speaks Khuzdul too.) Maglor's pretending to be a currently-dead pop star and that invites its own host of complications. 

Maedhros does not speak Khuzdul. He speaks the Black Speech in addition to a few human languages and Thindarin and Quenya, but the language won't scare daeva in itself (if they get his exact vocabulary, they might be frightened.) Maedhros picks a place in the castle in Canada that could be a room in an unusually wealthy human's house, unremarkable, and he painstakingly copies all but one bit of the circle they decided on together, and he calls in everyone to look and make sure he did it right, and he dismisses them all - one Elf alone is not obviously inhuman, two or more together raises suspicions -

- and he completes the circle.

 

Total: 4228
Posts Per Page:
Permalink

"Didn't check, sorry." He hangs up. He calls the other number.

Permalink

He picks up. "Hello?" he says in English.

Permalink

"Hi, Matthew said I should call you instead of him with my stack of questions about all the everything? I'm the demon he summoned the other week."

Permalink

"Yes, he said to expect you. He works for the NSA, they listen to weird calls he gets at work."

Permalink

"Gotcha. Should've checked, didn't occur to me. Is he going to be in trouble for consorting with demons or anything?"

Permalink

"I don't know what NSA policies on summoning are but possibly. It's okay, he can retire early."

Permalink

"Okay. Do you want me to present my questions as they precipitated out of bewildered forensic conjuration and have to correct my context six times a minute or do you just want to start from the beginning?"

Permalink

"I am not necessarily planning on answering your questions, honestly."

Permalink

"Why not?"

Permalink

"I have a lot of demands on my time."

Permalink

"Look, I understand you have no strong reason to be interested in resolving the confusion a random demon your brother summoned is experiencing but I am capable of making positive sum trades even when I am not standing in a circle, you can probably think of some way I could save you some time."

Permalink

"I expect you've noticed by now that we're very old and not in much of a hurry."

Permalink

Sigh. "So, you're not necessarily planning on answering my questions, but you might?"

Permalink

"That sounds like about the only stance it would be reasonable to take on the information you've given me so far."

Permalink

"What do you wanna know?"

Permalink

"How likely you are to go on a righteous crusade of vengeance on behalf of people thirty thousand years dead, honestly."

Permalink

"That sounds very unlike me."

Permalink

"Fine. I'm an undergrad at MIT, if you want to stop by we can chat. But only because taking summoning public was a really great thing to do."

Permalink

"Beg pardon?"

Permalink

"My brother doesn't actually work at the NSA for the pension plan, he just says that because he thinks it's cute."

Permalink

"Am I supposed to believe the NSA identified me?"

Permalink

"I am very sure Matthew hasn't let anyone else notice. He wouldn't do that. Presuming you had a reason to do it this way in the first place, and all."

Permalink

"I did but it didn't work."

Permalink

"Why don't you come up to Boston and we can spare him the work of making sure he's the only person listening in."

Permalink

"Sure. Be there soon. How do I find you once I show up?"

Total: 4228
Posts Per Page: