Sigh.

"I could throw it back into the sea to spite you and all your House?"

"Since when did you feel spite for the House of Fëanor? You're halfway named for him, and I'm pretty sure your mother-name is a reference too."

"That might be a reason to feel spite for someone. I did not choose my name.

"But in fact I admire Fëanáro's greatness and mourn his tragedy as I always have. I only hate you."

Well, as he already said once, damn all his grandfather's opinions on classified information.

"They're going to reembody him. That's what the Silmaril is for—to break in and out of Mandos. And also kill Thanos, maybe, later."

Calanáro manages a half-smile for the first time in a while.

"Now I'm definitely going. I still hate you, but I'm going. He can have the Silmaril, so I suppose I won't throw it into the sea."

Celebrimbor leads Calanáro back downstairs and introduces him to the Avengers.

"Hi. Tony Stark, you might know me as Iron Man."

"Dr. Strange—that one works both ways."

"Peter Parker. Uh, Spider-Man."

"What is this, a party in Tirion?" he says in perfect English. (He has the accent of a BBC radio announcer from the first days of radio's existence, which combined with his youthful mannerisms is a little off-putting to the mortals.) "One name apiece is plenty."

"So you've been to Earth. Dare I ask what year?"

"Uh, Elë and I went to Italy on our honeymoon. I think the local year was, uh, 1532?"

Sigh.

"Yeah I know time is fucky here but that was five hundred years ago."

"I keep up with trends. You've almost managed to single-handedly drag Earth up to our technology level, I'm impressed."

"I know, I'm impressive.

"How long does it take to get to Earth from here?"

"Not long, there's a portal a few hundred miles out to sea and that's instantaneous. Pops you right out in the middle of the Atlantic. Some people are old-fashioned and make the voyage in sailboats which makes it slow but we can do better than that.

"We don't have general FTL, no one has really put any effort into it because no one wants to go anywhere but Earth and we're not going to beat the Valar, who can make their domains adjacent to arbitrary points in space."

"Oh is that how she was doing that."

He smiles weakly. "You've met Varda? Most of them are more subtle about it, bend space instead of breaking it but she's just like 'nope, you're here now'. I suspect Eru finds it horribly unaesthetic but he allows it because she's his favorite."

(Eleniel, who used to be one of the Starqueen's handmaidens, one of those weird things the Vanyar do that's one part religious order and one part intensive astrophysics program, could explain exactly how the teleportation thing works but he is trying so hard not to think about that—)

"Alright, can we get out of this time warp immediately please? I know it's getting late but if we spend the night here that's like four more days at home."

"Late isn't a thing here. We need to sleep like fifty, sixty hours a month and while it isn't pleasant to do that all at once it's not exactly uncommon among the Mírtáni."

"Well we need to sleep a bit more often than that but we can do it when we get back to New York so that it takes eight realtime hours and not eighty."

Tony, Peter, and Calanáro board a ship and fly east, through a pass in the Pelóri, and at some point they are over the Atlantic Ocean on Earth instead of the eastern sea of Valinor. They turn around and head back toward New York.

"Wait so how come every time someone flies across the Atlantic they don't fly through the portal and end up in Valinor?"

"It's supposed to be one-way—Valar have to manually let through elves going the other direction. Sometimes it glitches, though—where 'glitch' means 'Eru thinks it would be funny'. And it can be forced."

"Forced by what, exactly?"