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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"That's why I had to go through a couple, didn't really have anything on hand and I'm not Elvis so no one's gonna be that excited to hear me sing. Found someone after a while who wanted to go restore limbs to amputee dogs - I said I'd take her to all the shelters in the area but I couldn't promise there'd be any -"

from_scratch

"Aw, that's a cute one. Did you find any?"

"We did! Two, and one of the shelters talked her into restocking their meds and food too and was so delighted and got her name so I imagine future amputee dogs'll be okay as well."

from_scratch

"Awwww."

"I would probably have gone for one of the ones who wanted sex eventually if I couldn't find anyone who was excited about, well, amputee dogs or the L.A. theatre scene, but they'd have to have been like eighty percent less skeevy about it than the first guy I talked to."

from_scratch

"I got a couple of those, one more and one less sketchy!"

"Oh?"

from_scratch

"There was a 'so you know, I only show up to these things because I kink on humans' and there was a - I didn't talk to her long, didn't like how she looked at me."

"Does Hell, like, have the concept of consent, if everybody is indestructible and has sufficient capacity to make other people fuck off I can sort of see it not really ever coming up."

from_scratch

"Everybody is indestructible and mostly has the capacity to make other people fuck off, or at least inconvenienced. There is a sort of concept of - enthusiasm versus agreeableness versus annoyance versus willingness to violently fend one off and it's antisocial to go around annoying people or causing violent confrontations, will get you kicked out of the nice neighborhoods? It has the usual amount of, like, 'if you want a part in this movie you sleep with the director', maybe more, but at least nobody has to wait tables while waiting for their break."

"Soon they won't here, either."

from_scratch

"Mmhm."

"You did good."

from_scratch

"Thank you. What do you do, besides check up on outlandish claims on Youtube?"

"Grunt work for one of the producers on Law and Order. I used to want to write a show, use the money to patch things that money can patch, and then suddenly there were a lot less of those but also the industry latched on fast to summoning and it seemed like as good a place as any to hang out while it became more obvious what was still going to need patches."

from_scratch

"What is the TV industry doing with summoning?"

"Oh, gosh, everything. Half the stuff coming out this year is 'ADAPTED STRAIGHT FROM HEAVEN' - or Fairyland, Heaven's more popular, better aesthetics - you can shoot absolutely anything on-site now and why wouldn't you, the best way to get an authentic 14th century castle is now to find a demon who will be very annoyed by historical inaccuracy, there are three post-apocalyptic series in which someone holes Earth and the handful of people who were out playing around in space try to start up civilization anew, there was a heated debate over whether it was cultural appropriation to cast humans to play daeva but mostly it's cheaper to cast daeva anyway, so there they are -"

from_scratch

"That sounds like tremendous fun."

"No one's bored, that's for certain. If it were convenient to any of your schemes to show up on television or cameo as yourself in something that could be very easily arranged. But - it's merely really fun, it doesn't matter, that's why I wrote asking what you were doing next -"

from_scratch

"I wanna bounce off Valinor and go to the Dwarf planet! Or find a way for this not to require bouncing off Valinor. I am not yet sure how to accomplish this but I haven't been thinking about it very long."

"Why's the Dwarf planet behind the magic maze anyway -"

from_scratch

"One of the Valar - same one who invented Dwarves - presumably made it, so it might have been easier for some reason, magic range or whatever. Or Eru located it there or told Aulë to do so expressly to make our lives difficult. Or something I haven't thought of. There may be an alternate route, but it'd be longer."

"How long is it if you can bounce off Valinor?"

from_scratch

"About a lightyear. They sent Valinor a probe, a while back, the Elves are forbidden to send one back."