you took your time with the call | Glowfic Constellation

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.

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"I thought it was clever how you did the stencils for Revelation so if you dropped any piece it wouldn't be a valid circle at all."

from_scratch

"My anonymity did not, like, actually do its job, but thank you."

"Yeah. But hey, if it had, you would be teaching summoning instead of being a demon and handling Elf relations and having Elvis sort your mail, so."

from_scratch

"I wish to make it clear that I did not go 'hey Elvis, sort my mail'. He said 'are you looking, I would be delighted to filter your admirers'."

"I was not imagining Elvis a particularly easy person to push around. I was kind of imagining him more the sort of person to entertain his own admirers, though."

from_scratch

"He's married. He's not, like, very married, he is in fact the least married married person I know unless one of his brothers is also married and never mentioned which come to think of it is totally possible, but Elves are very monogamous."

"I didn't actually realize there were degrees of married!"

from_scratch

"She's in Valinor, he hasn't seen her in thirty thousand years, and when the fairies were sending letters he didn't include one for her because he doubts she's in a position to be practically useful with any projecty stuff."

"Oh nooooo. If you're going to be very serious about monogamy you have a very serious obligation to endeavor to see your spouse more often than once every thirty thousand years!"

from_scratch

"He was dead for all but the last few hundred years," acknowledges Cam.

"Still. What if she's terribly lonely."

from_scratch

"Yeah, I probably wouldn't want to be her. Although I don't know the circumstances under which they got married, maybe she doesn't miss him a bit and is enjoying herself fine."

"Maybe she doesn't remember him. Or do Elves have seriously supernatural memories."

from_scratch

"They have better than human memory. It's not eidetic but it doesn't seem to deteriorate very much over time."

"Daeva's no different than human, though? It'd be weird to be five thousand with a normal human memory, most of your life just - vague guesses -"

from_scratch

"Yeah, daeva are humanlike there. I think you can keep anything you really want, but it has to be kind of a short list if you're not going to write stuff down. You wouldn't forget your name, or a memorized story you told everybody you met - might have to translate it into new languages over time, though, lose a little detail in every translation - demons in particular get kind of obsessive about making sure things are recorded because then we can always get it back, I felt very at home with that."

She nods fervently. "Do demons have much better recording devices than ours -"

from_scratch

"A little better on the high end but we never have any reason to use cheap stuff. Do sometimes have reason to go mini, and demon minis are gonna be better than human minis."

"You'd think you could be well ahead, what with none of the constraints human engineers work under."

from_scratch

"There's less incentive to collaborate, I think that holds us back? And every single demon who would rather be playing Civilization all day long can just do that."

" - yeah, I guess that'd do it."

from_scratch

"I'm looking forward to demons and humans getting to bounce off each other more. Demons have been copying humans forever, of course, but creating the feedback loop'll be awesome."

"It's going to be amazing."

from_scratch

Wingrustling. "And getting different kinds of daeva in the same room, because there are certainly brilliant angel and fairy engineers too and the latency period without human help is a decade long."