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: 1215
Posts Per Page:
Permalink

It is really pretty! It is appropriately admired. There's a room with a gorgeous view and she kisses him. "Sorry to give you more work."

Permalink

Kiss! "I like to be busy. Besides, you weren't soliciting an Elf kid, were you? So you are not the one generating the work."

Permalink

"I have a boyfriend now, I hear it's conventional to consult those before getting pregnant. I could've written you right after she mentioned it if I knew it was a pending catastrophe, though."

Permalink

"It might be fine. Maybe half-Elves are just souped-up humans and they get the same afterlife options as everybody else nowadays and maybe the clinics wouldn't dream of letting everybody request Elvis's child in particular just because he's the only Elf they've got certainly identified. But the worst case scenarios are ugly."

Permalink

"The divine intervention bit I gather. Elvis would freak out?"

Permalink

"Elves have a thing about kids. Elves have things about a lot of things and that is one of them. I mean, I'd be upset if random strangers wound up getting themselves pregnant with my offspring - hell, that's probably going to happen at least once, isn't it, just because I don't have genes any more doesn't mean they didn't exist in the past - but Elves would freak out."

Permalink

"What other things do Elves have things about, just so I know -"

Permalink

"Prettiness, being imprisoned - that one can get fatal - oaths - they are literally unbreakably binding - also the extreme monogamy is metaphysically enforced turns out - hair, don't touch it - I think that's the things."

Permalink

"Metaphysically enforced extreme monogamy. Gosh. What with not dying after all we definitely have the better end of the deal."

Permalink

"I'm sure some people wouldn't mind it but yeah."

Permalink

"I don't mind monogamy but I can't think of a magic enforcement mechanism I'd really endorse."

Permalink

"The enforcement mechanism is 'they have magic marriage that kicks in if they have sex'."

Permalink

" - and that's an especially bad one, yikes. Uh - as described that does not imply consent -"

Permalink

"Yeah I didn't actually ask that question - they have a very low crime rate, maybe it actually literally never came up, but as described it did not metaphysically discriminate."

Permalink

"I think people will be sold on not doing that to their kids."

Permalink

"Hopefully."

Permalink

More sightseeing! It's such a pretty castle.

Permalink

And when she has had her fill of castle and Elves he will look up demon-assisted fertility clinics.

Permalink

There are twenty-three of them! Four are in L.A.; they're also popular in China and Korea.

Permalink

He doesn't have Korean. He starts with the ones he can talk to first.

Permalink

"By law we're not allowed to use DNA from a living person without their written and notorized consent," says the receptionist at the first clinic, "and we were advised by our legal office to stop using DNA from dead persons as well, once the whole afterlives thing came out."

Permalink

"Great, that's very good to hear. In the unlikely event you get ahold of an Elf willing to notarize consent please be exquisitely clear about what parental rights they can expect, they will expect more than a comparable human by default."

Permalink

"I'll make a note. Thank you for calling Miracle!"

Next four places have the same policy. The one after that says "our clinic provides a safe environment for new families to arrange for fertility assistance. The arrangements are between the families and the daeva involved."

Permalink

"There are potentially serious negative externalities associated with the possibility of Elf children or Elf hybrids," Cam says.

Permalink

"I'm sorry?"

Total: 1215
Posts Per Page: