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 wasn't there at the time either, mind. Beren'll have a better picture than me of how Dior ended up ruling Doriath -"

"The Dwarves killed Elu," Beren says, "over the Silmaril, and then they sacked the city and took it and were marching northeast with it - I think Melkor intended them to bring it back to him - and we ambushed them and took it back -"

"Christ." one of Morwen's kids says.

"You should have seen Menegroth after they'd sacked it, children chopped up into pieces -"

"So the magic rock and they deserved each other, sounds like."

"We didn't want it in Melkor's hands, Lúthien could keep our people safe with it, do what her mother had done -"

"Did that work?"

"Yes. For the rest of her life, but then we died - it burned her out, she hadn't been expecting that, she was mortal now and using herself like that burned right through her, and it was up to Dior, and -"

"And the Fëanorians sacked the city, killed nearly everyone who was left," Elladan says. "Your granddaughter was smuggled out with the Silmaril, she was three -"

from_scratch

(Cam is following along in his ciphered notes.)

"She grew up in Sirion. The survivors of the fall of Gondolin and Nargothrond gathered there too. They voyaged west, as often as they could, planning to get a petition to the Valar somehow and get help. The ships rarely made it back. She got married. She had children. Her husband was out trying to reach Valinor. The Fëanorians learned where the Silmaril was, attacked again, killed almost everybody, again - adopted my father and his twin brother, raised them in their last remaining fortress -"

"Why?" Morwen's other daughter asks.

"I really don't know. Possibly they thought adopting children would improve morale - possibly wanted hostages - they were insane, by then, you know -"

"Yes, that much I'd gathered."

"My father loved them."

"Kids do that," Beren says.

"Yes. So when Sirion was sacked Elwing threw herself into the sea with the Silmaril around her neck, meaning to keep it from them, and Ulmo pitied her and turned her into a seagull, and the winds swept her into Eärendil's ship, where she returned to human form. And with the Silmaril to guide them they did find Valinor, and Elwing walked among the Teleri and inspired them to help, and Eärendil brought his petition to the Valar and was heeded, and then they came to help."

"So if we hadn't had a Silmaril -"

"I don't know. I really don't."

from_scratch

Cam really does not think his input here would be valued. If anybody wants to ask what Elvis had to say about it they can ask.

They don't ask. "So the Valar won, and then -"

"And then the Fëanorians attacked the victorious host for their Silmarils back, slaughtered their way through the camp in the dead of night, prepared to die fighting their way out, only Eönwë, the leader of the host of the Valar, Manwë's herald, a Maia - he was so tired of the whole bloody thing, he told them to just take them. And they did, and ran off with them, and that's the last anyone saw of them though the reasonably-accurate rumor, as I understand it, is that Maedhros took a Silmaril and threw himself into a fiery chasm and that Maglor threw his into the sea and then wandered it singing for the rest of time."

"Except now they're back," Andreth says.

"They are. I checked in on them, we've been emailing."

"If demons can make Silmarils -"

"Then I was going to kill them all," Elladan says. "Demons can't."

from_scratch

"Which is good, because I would have been in a pickle."

"Oh?" Beren asks.

from_scratch

"They summoned a random demon, to check. It was me. I agreed to see if I could make Silmarils, and locate the extant ones, for a couple phone calls. If I could make them they were either going to convince me to not do that any more or keep me. There was mindreading involved, about which I was not best pleased when I found out. Fortunately I could not make Silmarils. Later I investigated the languages and once on my current summon I hassled them for an explanation."

Andreth

"Reputation back in the day was intense, oddly sincere, charming when it suited them, and utterly ruthless."

from_scratch

"Sounds about right. I get along with them."

"It's been thirty thousand years," Morwen says again, quite firmly. "I'm sympathetic to the back-and-forth over Hitler and Stalin and Mao being free and clear but I've yet to see any calls to bring Leopold II to justice and I think that speaks well of humans -"

"It says we sleep through our history classes," one of her daughters mutter.

"Better that than mistake them for the present."

"Dior and the babies aren't coming back," Beren says. "It's thirty thousand years they could have been alive."

Andreth hugs him. "I can't imagine finding out like this how your children died. I'm so sorry."

from_scratch

This is probably not the time to break out the "speaking as a murder victim" line.

"My father wrote about the War of Wrath, if any of you would like to read it. It's mostly not personal details but it has some."

"I'd like that," Beren says. "He's in Valinor?"

"He is."

"Is he happy?"

"I think he has a lot of regrets and lives with them comfortably enough."

"Do the rings that make you like a Vala still work?" asks Morwen's daughter.

Elladan looks at his hand consideringly. "They do very little. I suppose I could ask permission to wave a Silmaril at this one."

from_scratch

"They work fast," agrees Cam.

Several people present shudder. "It's never worth it," Beren says.

"They might feel they have some claim on the ring," Andreth says.

from_scratch

"They haven't brought it up, if they do."

He gets a couple exasperated glances that are probably best parsed as 'yep, charming when it suits them, that sure is the people who stabbed the kids'.

"If I had it I could make it impossible for outsiders to find Imladris," Elladan says. "And if they had it they could do the same for their castle, which means everyone can sleep free of nightmares about Silmaril thieves - any day now someone's going to publish an English translation of the whole history and some idiot teenager is going to have a run at it -"

"I resemble that remark," Beren says.

from_scratch

"If you have a way to let them safely bounce off Valinor and fly away to the Dwarf afterlife, please, share away, it's just there's all those Valar in the way."

Andreth

"By reputation those are dense, reactive, and well-intentioned only to the extent that good results need hardly ever flow from those good intentions."

from_scratch