They ordered my grandfather to attend. He did. They didn't order the rest of us to attend so we all stayed home, in protest. I was three hundred at the time -- it's hard to give equivalent human ages because our development isn't just slower human development but I looked like a human ten-year-old.

Morgoth caused a cataclysm that extinguished all light visible from the surface of the world -- there's a story there but it's complicated and not directly relevant -- and in the dark he came to the little city we'd built and he murdered the King in an exceptionally gruesome manner and he destroyed the city and all of our possessions and then fled the continent.

He fled with one possession of particular importance. My grandfather had been working on a project that'd let Elves live outside Valinor. Valinor has healing properties, and sustaining ones; Elves who have lived there cannot live elsewhere indefinitely, not by any means we know of. He'd invented one. It was a light source and a magical artifact focus and it replicated many of the properties of Valinor, and he was sure he could get the rest out of it. They were called the Silmarils and they looked like this -

Sparkly.

I think that if once you have some of a thing going without it kills you, we don't usually call that a healing property, more a thing with, like, withdrawal symptoms.

It very much angered my grandfather. Reversing it was his highest priority for nearly a thousand years.

Does this all mean you have an expiration date in spite of being an ostensibly immortal species?

It means we'll have to go back someday. 

Right, I guess that works, go have a spa day and you're good for another few millennia.

No, uh, they don't let people leave. We'll have to go back and then we'll live in Valinor again. The departure last time was - very very bloody, and it's no longer possible at all.

Unless I fix it, right, but - but you need to hear this story before you form an impression about that -

Or if May fixes it! She doesn't say that. Okay.

They rode on horses to the gods' feast to tell my grandfather what had happened. The rest of us stayed -- you couldn't see anything, you couldn't do much of anything, and the air was very heavy and full of particulate matter that settles in your lungs where there's no good mechanism to get it out and you just feel it there all the time. - this happens to humans too but they don't feel it, it just kills them.

We waited in the dark for a week. 

I do not know much of what happened at the gods' feast because all the people telling the story were telling a story, even more than people usually are. I know that the gods were demanding my grandfather give up the Silmarils, that they might be used to restore light to Valinor. I know that when my grandfather heard that his father was dead he departed the feast into the dark alone, and was gone for several days, and they were afraid he'd killed himself. They found him covered in blood, cold, alive, and he told them that they needed to return to the rest of us quickly so we could go off to Middle-earth, follow Morgoth, stop him, recover the Silmarils.

When he came back he was speaking so quickly I couldn't keep up and I usually could, I was always one of the very few people who could. It was the most important moment for him to explain himself and he couldn't do it. We needed to establish an independent Noldorin kingdom outside Valinor and we needed to recover the Silmarils to do it. Morgoth had the Silmarils, had perhaps orchestrated most of the last thousand years to have the Silmarils, and if he knew what to do with them the war was already lost, because they were a tool powerful enough to win it, in Morgoth's hands perhaps a tool powerful enough to remake the whole world however he desired it. He didn't think Morgoth knew what to do with them because the world was still here, but Valar are slow. Maybe Morgoth was being slow. The stakes were unimaginable in every respect but that was the respect in which they were highest. And no one could know. The Valar didn't know what the Silmarils could do. Our people didn't know what the Silmarils could do, beyond 'heal us'. If Morgoth didn't know yet -- and he might not know yet, every day we weren't dead made it likelier he didn't know yet -- then he could never, ever know, and if everyone knew he'd find out somehow. He said he hadn't told even us, for this reason.

And then he said that it could not possibly be hidden that the Silmarils were so important, that a war we were fighting for the Silmarils would look different from a war we were fighting for some other reason, that of course we had to keep the innocent people alive and be just and good and worthy of the weapon we were reaching for but that it wouldn't, really, look very much like a war where we weren't reaching for it, and so the thing we needed was an explanation for reaching for it which wasn't the true one no one could know, and that that explanation was going to be that they were very important to him and he considered them his own children and the only things of beauty in the universe, and he would swear to recover them from whoever would claim them, whatever the cost -

I didn't explain that. I should have. Elves can swear things. We can make promises that bind our future will, that make us incapable of turning back on our word. You can be slow in fulfilling it, for a while. You can be careless, if you're not introspective enough to catch how you're being careless, in which case you can't. 

He was going to swear to recover the Silmarils and war with any who withheld them and he wanted his children to all swear it too and then everyone could accurately predict them -- which was important, people get hurt when you're not possible for them to predict -- and also no one would have cause to wonder why the Silmarils, why at that price, if they didn't already know, which they probably didn't since the world was still here.

I've - said it the way I understood it at the time, so that you see how -

How did he know the Silmarils could do all this stuff? It didn't sound like he ever, like, tested them...

He'd tested some of the smaller things, they worked the way he expected.

I think he may have been wrong, about the big things. Maybe not - he was so rarely wrong about that sort of thing - but it may have been a possibility that loomed until it seemed nearly certain. He was wrong about a bunch of the other pieces - Morgoth had no idea. We wondered if everything, including the discoveries that led him to make the Silmarils, had been arranged by Morgoth so he could steal them later. That wasn't the case. Morgoth wore them on a crown on his head. We have no indication he tried very hard to do anything other than that. 

The mistakes were - all of this was new information for us while he'd known for years, been worried about it for years, so our objections seemed likely to be - and typically were - things he'd thought through a lot more, that made it frustrating to him when we raised them. This information should already have been known to sufficiently trustworthy people, so they weren't all reasoning from an enormous disadvantage under time pressure. There shouldn't have been time pressure. Even if he was right to think there was a chance Morgoth already knew how they could potentially be used, this strategy was only useful if Morgoth didn't know, so the plans to stop him - which were urgent - should have proceeded with urgency and this plan - which mattered only if things weren't urgent - should have waited on years of reflection. They did talk about it for weeks, but it was weeks we spent forging weapons and armor and marching back to Tirion and half-expecting the world to be consumed at any moment, we didn't get any distance. They should have told more people. More confidentiality wasn't worth having fewer inputs, we had trustworthy people.

And - and they were thinking about it entirely wrong? At its best it was a plan to take on an enormous liability as a distraction, and a lot of cleverness should have gone into minimizing the liability. Picking a wording that bound them to as little as possible, and a plan to arrange the circumstances where it'd be relevant wouldn't arise. They weren't thinking about it as a liability, they were thinking about it as a sincere articulation of their priorities and intent, but you shouldn't swear to even the sincerest of articulations of your priorities and intent because priorities and intents can change where oaths can't. 

Yeah, oaths sound pretty bad in general, I don't know if I've ever occupied a state of information in my entire life sufficient that I'd endorse taking one.

Me neither. But - we were trying to do something nearly impossible and he thought he saw exactly one way to do it and it was this and - and he wasn't usually wrong, people weren't in the habit of trying to notice ways he was wrong. They were used to trying to follow the logic, because it was always right, the error was always on your end - you'd get in the habit of trying to discover your error rather than looking for one of his -

He was sleeping even less and he was making such leaps and it was so hard to follow his explanations and those should all have seemed like warning signs, but they - seemed like reasons for urgency instead. He needed this to move forward. He needed this in order to trust people. Not that he said that, I think we knew enough to have been alarmed if he'd seemed to be deliberately leaning on that. It was just obvious if you knew him. And it was thrilling to be needed by him, because he'd never really needed anyone...

They did the oath. In a big public speech, everyone saw it. It made people upset and angry, the ones who didn't trust him as much followed his brother instead, he wouldn't explain himself, but lots of them still followed him. They trusted him. They knew he had a plan and his inner circle tacitly encouraged that, implied that he did have a plan, and people assumed they'd evaluated the plan more carefully than they really had. I think they thought they'd evaluated the plan more carefully than they really had. There'd been all these failures of imagination - we'd never had a war before, we'd just had our first murder -

Nobody around who'd ever had a war that could be consulted?

The Valar refused to move or comment on anything this whole time, they were busy thinking about what to do and they think very slowly. Also I don't know that their war would have had actionable lessons. It might've made us generically more cautious, which wouldn't have hurt.

Okay.

After that we tried to leave Valinor. There was a land bridge -- there isn't anymore, the continent on the other end was eventually destroyed in the war -- but it was nearly impassable. It was only about four hundred miles across if you could fly it, but large sections of it were impossible to traverse. You had to gain a lot of altitude, enough that the air was dangerously thin. There were places where you could only go through one at a time. And it was so cold. We weren't prepared for weather that cold. Four hundred miles if you could fly it but the route that some people ended up taking later was sixteen hundred miles.

The first time, we turned around when we realized that it looked impossible. We went to a port city, instead. They had ships. They thought we shouldn't leave. They refused us the ships. My grandfather decided to steal the ships while everyone was sleeping.

Okay.

The biggest mistake there was not thinking about what could possibly happen but also probably not giving diplomatic approaches more time to work. I think as a practical matter people with the flaws he had should just never be in a position of giving military instructions, they're not atrocious at it but they're worse at it than they are in the domains where people learned to trust them. It was a nightmare, it was a disaster. Some people saw them leaving with the ships. Violence ensued. Thousands of people died. The Valar were angry, and sank many of the escaping ships, too, and exiled us forever from Valinor. -- they've since relaxed that, slightly, now that all the primary perpetrators are dead.

- they saw you were leaving and decided the thing to do was exile you?

The Valar make some decisions that seem inconsistent with goals one might otherwise be tempted to ascribe to them.

Yeah-huh.

A lot of things happened at that point. The Valar announced that we were doomed to fail, or that they were dooming us to fail, it was unclear whether it was meant to be descriptive or prescriptive. Some people got scared and went back. The succession dispute - blossomed into a more dangerous form, previously we'd just been acting like two groups with two kings but suddenly rumors were swirling that weren't even Morgoth's fault and one of the more thoughtless of my cousins was calling on everyone to remove my grandfather from power -

- we left on the boats without them, eventually. I thought probably they'd sink them at sea again, but I guess they'd made their point. It was still a horrible journey. Three, maybe four days, and we didn't really sleep -- it was always dark so it was hard to keep track of how long anything had been -- and so many people were dead and the decks of the boats were still bloody and many of our people were badly wounded, died in the journey -- and people started dying of grief --

We reached the other shore. My grandfather ordered the boats burned. They were burned. We were attacked by Morgoth's orc armies. We fought for our lives for - I don't know, a couple of weeks. Hundreds of thousands of orcs, maybe millions. Eventually they stopped coming, I think because they were all dead. My grandfather was killed in the fighting.