you took your time with the call | Glowfic Constellation

on-the-clock

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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Aricin Conway

"So do we. Perhaps I can ask Elladan for a summary of the relevant changes over time."

from_scratch

"Perhaps. What are you gonna tell him?"

Aricin Conway

"...that my Thindarin is out of date and since I'm going to publish a guide I should be apprised of later linguistic drift?"

from_scratch

"You collectively and besides that."

on-the-clock

"I don't think we have quite decided yet."

from_scratch

"Anything I can help with or should I leave you alone on that?"

on-the-clock

"How much did you pick up about the whole thing -"

from_scratch

"...it was not begun well, and could therefore end decently?" attempts Cam.

on-the-clock

"Their mother had the Silmaril. We wrote her. She said 'come and get it'. A - combination of inexperience, bad advisors, and the conviction that the righteous always triumph, I think, she was in her twenties and running a refugee camp and perhaps could not have been the sort of person who did that without also being the sort of person who believed against all evidence that things would end well if you were the good side. We attacked the city - some of our own people defected, fought with Sirion's defenders, or it would have been over inside an hour, they had no idea what they were doing. As it stood we lost a few thousand people, it took most of the day...she threw herself out of her tower into the ocean. To keep the Silmaril out of our hands. I don't know if the children witnessed it, they never said. And we could have left them there, hoped their allies arrived before Morgoth sent some orcs in to pick over the remains of the carnage, but we took them with us instead. They were terrified. Took them months to talk. We were waiting to die, and that's not a good environment in which to raise children. But - we certainly did have things to teach them. So we taught them. And when the Valar at last announced with their trumpets that they'd come to war with Melkor and invited the peoples of Beleriand to join their host, they both wanted to go, and we - did not regard ourselves as having the authority to refuse them that, though they were only fourteen.

So we taught them how to stay alive, and we sent them off. And we'd taught them well, I suppose, because Elros became first king of Men, king of Númenor, and chose the fate of Men and lived five hundred years and built a thriving and prosperous kingdom which remained so for nearly three thousand years. And Elrond became advisor to Gil-Galad, the last King of the Noldor in Middle-earth, and he build Imladris, which apparently still stands, and fought Thauron for seven thousand years and was remembered well long after. They were great men. I think they were also happy ones. I - didn't know they remembered us kindly. I wouldn't have."

from_scratch

"...what in the hell did the Valar need random peoples of Beleriand to accompany them in their war against another Vala for?"

on-the-clock

"They had them marching in formation? - and, to be fair, handling the freed slaves, which the Valar would've been very bad at -"

from_scratch

"Okay, handling freed slaves does seem like a logistics problem best handed off."

on-the-clock

"There were lots of them - Elves he'd torture but humans he'd just hand off to different, loyal groups of humans as prizes -"

from_scratch

"Ah, humanity."

on-the-clock

"We're ill-positioned to be judgmental."

from_scratch

"I'm not."

on-the-clock

"Yes, all right, you can be as judgmental as you please. During the Nirnaeth we were attacked from behind by some of our human forces who'd decided to side with Melkor, he'd promised them a continent for it. He lied, astonishingly. He did reward them by having them enslave Dor-Lómin's human population."

from_scratch

"Did they find that a satisfactory bait and switch?"

on-the-clock

"They were terribly disappointed and of course took it out on their new slaves."

from_scratch

"Ah-huh."

morifinwe

"You did, as a species, grow up. Took a while, but..."

from_scratch

"I don't like that framing very much. This wasn't an evolutionary problem. The sociopath to culture victim ratio can't be that high even among slaveowners."

Caranthir

morifinwe

"Sure, but how do you accrue a better culture except by trial and error -"

from_scratch

"Even if that's the only way to do it, saying humanity 'grew up' makes it sound like the ones who were or are doing appalling things have some kind of developmental problem instead of an inadequate context."

Caranthir

morifinwe