The light approaches swiftly, but slows as it nears the ground. Details become visible: a somewhat egglike shape, pointed at the narrow end which faces forward in its trajectory, made of an assortment of unfamiliar materials, decorated inelegantly although symmetrically with mysterious protuberances. The main source of the light is the flatter, wider trailing end, and there are other, smaller lights arranged in arcane patterns across the surface of the object, including two very bright ones at the tips of its stubby fins; but by the time those patterns are clearly visible, it is already extinguishing its blue-white flaming rear.

It comes in toward a flat stretch of rocky ground, unfolds a set of four tiny legs from its flattened belly, and settles down gently.

The horses are nervous. They've put up with a lot, lately: the Darkening, the exodus, the journey across the ocean, five cold and hungry winters, the rising of the Moon and the Sun. Celegorm motions for their little scouting party to pull up a quarter mile short of the thing, and murmurs a reassurance that is probably unconvincing to the horses and certainly unconvincing to the men. 

Father couldn't have built that. 

So what the hell had?

It sits there, dousing more and more of its lights, not doing very much of anything.

Then part of its outer shell detaches from the rest, lifts outward, slides down out of the way, and a ramp extends toward the ground from the lip of the opening thereby revealed, all of these actions being accomplished by unclear mechanisms.

A very short bipedal figure, either of some unknown species or wearing some carapace of unknown manufacture or possibly both, steps into view at the top of the ramp and peers out.

A trick of the Enemy? Landing out here, luring a handful of them out to scout, planning to take them captive - it is the sort of thing the Enemy would try. If that's what is happening it can be presumed that it's already too late to turn and run. He's distracted, briefly, by trying to imagine how his brothers will take it. 

But the Enemy couldn't do things like this. The pod-like creature has an iron, armored shell. The lights were arranged in patterns, and went off apparently at will. If the Enemy had capabilities like those, there wouldn't even be a war. 

Even after he's decided that he is not going to shoot the thing he doesn't let his bowstring go slack. 

There were ancient powers beyond the Void, beyond even the Valar's knowledge. He would not have expected any of them to manifest in such a form, but if they had, there was a chance they weren't hostile. 

"Don't kill it," he said, "and don't let it take you alive."

The short probably-armoured person stands at the top of the ramp for a few more seconds, fiddling with incomprehensible objects, and then begins to descend. When they have reached the ground, the ramp retracts and the displaced piece of shell returns to its original position. The person fiddles with some more objects, and then the top of their head/helmet starts projecting a bright beam of light forward and down, which lights their way very conveniently as they look around and then start heading for the nearest plant, some twenty feet away from the pod-creature.

It is ignoring them. 

He would have understood a grand show of its power, to declare its presence - had half-expected that the lights were for that purpose. He would have understood if it ran from them. He would have understood if it killed them. 

It does not make much sense that it is ignoring them. 

Oromë had encountered the Elves besides Cuivienen. The force of his divine presence had been so powerful that most of the Eldar had fled before him. Celegorm had been born to paradise, had been accustomed to the Valar, and still he felt it. From this distance he should know if he is in the presence of a Power.

And he isn't. 

Just in the presence of something no one short of a Power could possibly accomplish.  

"Let's head in a little closer," he murmurs. "The previous orders stand."

The armoured person approaches a shrub, prods it, does things to it with their incomprehensible objects, shakes their head, and - the curved pane of black glass that was previously serving them for a face turns transparent, revealing an actual, perfectly ordinary face beneath, lit by strange lights that flicker and move in possibly-meaningful patterns. He glances around, pauses, but then continues doing things to plants.

Celegorm is reminded of their own frantic recalculation in the aftermath of the rising of the Sun. Everything had died, curled up and shriveled beneath the glaring new rays of the Sun, and plants that had lain magically dormant for Ages had begun to awaken. Perhaps this creature was looking for food.

Perhaps they had something to teach each other. 

"It's all right," he murmurs to the horse, believing it this time, and approaches the creature at a cautious walk, one hand raised in what has to be a universal gesture of greeting.

He looks up, perhaps at the sound of Celegorm's approach, although who knows how well he can hear in there.

After a thoughtful pause, he mirrors the gesture and then puts away his plant-prodding objects and waits.

If you were to order the whole family by "likelihood of causing a disastrous diplomatic incident on first contact with a tribe of powerful strangers" - well, Nelyo would be your safest choice, but Nelyo was currently being tortured to death because he'd rode out to a parley when he shouldn't have. And Cáno would be your next safest choice, but losing two consecutive Kings to the same error was inexcusable. Not that the family hadn't made any inexcusable choices lately. 

Anyway, Celegorm would be way down the list, competing for "likeliest to cause a total disaster" with Caranthir who had at one point or another punched 14 of their cousins and cast aspersions on the paternity of most of the King's children. 

He dismounts. 

Huan is sniffing the air anxiously. Celegorm pets him, because it makes them both feel a little better, and because if the stranger has ever seen a dog before then it'll have to recognize the gesture as at least as peaceable as raising one's hands in the air. 

The best outcome would be that the stranger has seen dogs before, correctly interprets the gesture as peaceable, but has not seen a Power in the form of a dog before and will assume that the two of them, on foot, are effectively unarmed. 

"A star shines on the hour of our meeting," he says, more for the benefit of his party than for the creature, which surely doesn't speak any Quenya. Then he says it in Thindarin. Then he says it with his thoughts, awkwardly, because in those few words there is so much to communicate. We are the Eldar, the people who awoke beneath the stars of Cuivienen, and saw their light on the water and heard the rushing of the rivers. We are the people of the stars, and we have grown stronger so we can take back that land from the monster who poisoned it and drove us away. We went to paradise, where the divine light shone so bright that the stars could not be seen, and we begged the gods to dim their lands so we could glimpse our stars again. And when the divine light was extinguished, we endured and we grieved and we fought and we came here, chasing the light of your strange iron ship, awakening like newborns beneath new skies. He thought of a sunrise. He thought of a Silmaril. He thought of Oromë thundering across Cuivienen, of the terrified, cowering Elves.

The stars shine on the hour of our meeting, stranger. We are the Eldar. 

He is mildly startled by the thought-based communication.

Cautiously, in a totally unfamiliar language, he says something back. A greeting, then an expression of confusion.

And if you were to order the family by swiftness in learning new languages - 

Celegorm decides to stop wishing for situations to arise which he is uniquely qualified to handle, or at least not uniquely unqualified. A situation has arisen that has not yet killed him or anyone under his charge, and that's about all one can ask for.

"Turkafinwë Tyelcormo," he says "of the house of Fëanáro Curufinwë of the Noldor."

He hasn't said his father's name out loud since they'd scattered his ashes. He hadn't expected it to hurt. 

The stranger pauses for a moment, thinking over his response, seeming almost to weigh a risk; then he gives his own name as,

"Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, of Barrayar."

Miles is a personal name, an expression of self, carrying a simultaneous sense of boundless energy and bone-deep weariness.

Naismith belongs to a tall red-haired woman with wise eyes and a gentle voice, wearing an exquisitely fitted gown that never quite sits right.

Vorkosigan belongs to a dark-haired man with a face very like Miles's own, and another, older man cast in the same mold, and a desolate wasteland seen from high above, and a range of jagged mountains, and a pale sun rising over a calm lake.

Barrayar is a shade of green, the smell of a cool breeze, and the feeling of being home.

A few unfamiliar phonemes; Curufin will be delighted. Well, no, he won't - he's grieving, and grieving by declining to feel anything at all. Curufin will throw himself into the work with the fervor that would have corresponded to delight back before their father died. Celegorm tries loyally to commit the syllables to memory. Miles Naismith Vorkosigan. A mothername, a fathername, and a chosen name, if these strange people choose names in the same manner as the Eldar. 

"Endorë", he says, pointing at the ground beneath their feet. "It is a pleasure to meet you, Males Naysameth Vorkesegen."

He listens to this, smiles behind his glass mask, and then echoes back with the pronunciation only very slightly blurred, "It is a pleasure to meet you, Turkafinwë Tyelcormo."

Not a power. Not some automaton - the armor gives his face a different shape, but beneath it he looks like any Elf, only short. And ugly. There is an obvious conclusion, but it isn't until the stranger echoes back the Quenya that Celegorm permits himself to reach it. 

Melkor, in the days before he'd showed his hand and burned paradise to the ground and murdered the King, had told them of Men. They hadn't trusted him, but it was inconceivable that a Power would lie. Men, he'd said, were short, brutish, violent creatures, and the gods were keeping the Elves locked away in paradise so our homeland, our birthright, could be claimed instead by the imposters. 

Men, he'd said, would commit crimes so terrible that Elven minds could not fathom them - the murder of children, the slaughter of whole peoples. Men would develop weapons that ate their fellow men alive from the inside out, or burned them so their skin sloughed off, and hurl these weapons at the cities where their rivals lived, killing tens of thousands. Men died before their first century was out. Men locked one another in cages as punishment. Men led brief, senseless, and violent lives.

They'd asked Manwë, lord of the airs, who sat on Taniquetil and was closest to Eru of all the Powers remaining on Earth. Manwë had been troubled. He had denied none of it.

At the time, there had never been an Elven murderer; there had never been an Elven death by violence. For one person to take up arms against another would be unforgiveable; for whole communities to do it was literally unimaginable. Men, his father had said, had to be fundamentally different, broken inside, cut off from the music of creation. The Eldar would return to their homeland before the tide of blood and atrocities overtook them. They would prevent Men from committing such crimes. They would defend themselves if necessary. 

But that had been before Alqualondë. Celegorm hadn't had a chance to ask his father, in the frantic weeks that proved to be Fëanor's final ones, but he thought that his father might have revised his opinion. You didn't have to be cut off from the music of creation to raise a weapon against a stranger in the dark, to leave the shores of a city stained with the blood of your enemies, to live with yourself afterwards. Man this creature might be, but if he was a murderer, he wasn't the only one standing here. 

And weapons that burned the skin off all the peoples of whole cities would be very useful for shattering the walls of Angband. 

Vorkosigan had been the stranger's fathername. Celegorm calls up the face and impression that accompanied it, sends that one back along with his own. Fëanor carrying three sons at once through the courtyards of their home; Fëanor riding with him through the northern foothills; Fëanor alone, surrounded by Balrogs, their weapons slicing across the ground too fast to see, leaving his father's ribcage crushed and his pelvis flattened and his sternum caved in. The Enemy, Celegorm thought. Valinor's light extinguished, people screaming and crying their children's names. The Enemy. His father's workshop, the art and engineering of a lifetime smashed and stolen. The Enemy. Orcs. The Enemy.

Fëanor, dying, his eyes flickering frantically as he tried to keep all his children in his line of vision. The words they'd spoken in desperate unison as he'd suffocated on his own blood. 

Can you help us, stranger?

...For some reason, what he thinks about as he absorbs the message is this:

Light, bright and hard and constant, making sleep impossible at first until you adjust; a dome of light over bare ground, and thousands of people kept prisoner inside, made to fight over the food provided to them at unpredictable intervals.

As the memory comes clearer, the reason why it came up does as well, because the feeling associated with it is extremely relevant: this is a problem, and it is in front of me, so now it is my problem and I am going to solve it. A sense that what is not right must be made right. Not as an abstract cosmic principle, but as a very personal commitment.

(He rescued them all. He had only been sent to rescue one, but once he actually saw the place, well. Plans change.)

What he says out loud in his own language, with a wry awareness of both how impossible the task seems and how many impossible tasks he has already managed in his short life, is: "Well, I'll do my best."

The words are utterly foreign, but he thinks he can recognize the sentiment. 

He briefly debates whether it's a good idea to invite the stranger to their settlement, but offending him carries its own risks. The iron pod could presmably have landed on their heads as easily as it had landed here. Sometimes extending trust is safer than withholding it. 

So he points in the direction they've travelled from, and thinks of sturdy walls and people hard at work building new homes. 

See? Diplomacy is totally manageable. That went fine, really. Celegorm decides that he likes Men.

That sounds (thinks?) like a fine plan to Miles. "I accept your invitation."

These horses were bred and raised in Valinor, and stand taller than Celegorm at the shoulder. He's not sure the stranger could possibly manage it. Ah, well, they can walk. Learn the language along the way. "We're heading back," he said for the benefit of everyone else. "I believe we have just encountered the first of the race of Men."

It was two hours out here on horseback; it will take them all night to get back, assuming that carapace doesn't slow Miles down. 

Miles doesn't complain about the pace. He does attempt conversation: asking the name of this language, to start.

"Quenya." 

The first thing his father had done, reaching these shores, was find the locals and learn their language. And take notes. Detailed, comprehensive ones, a hundred pages in a single week, more useful than the work they did in the entire year afterwards. Celegorm isn't good with languages, but he knows they matter. 

His father had done it procedurally, holding two rocks in his hand. "Stone. Two stones. - so now we know the default adjective ordering, see?" Handing one over - "your stone. My stone. Curvo, add that to our lexicon -"

He hadn't asked Celegorm to take notes, because Celegorm made mistakes when writing quickly, no matter how urgent. But he'd nonetheless wanted him there. Celegorm could speak to animals. Celegorm knew that this was important. The stranger was the only one who spoke his language: he must be desperately lonely. 

Celegorm picks up a couple of rocks and shows them to the stranger. "Stone. Two stones."

He echoes this, then offers a translation in his own language: "Stone. Two stones."

Technically you're also supposed to elicit determiners - 'the stone', 'a stone' - but he doesn't remember how to do that. This would be easier without an audience - academic skills are unpleasant enough, but outright hell when people are expecting them from him - but of course the whole party is crowded around, watching interestedly, echoing the unfamiliar words. "The orcs certainly saw this," he says to them. "We need a few eyes on horseback, no matter how interesting you find this."

He should commend them for their commitment to learning the new language quickly. Maglor has a policy about that. He doesn't. He hands one of the rocks to Miles instead. "My stone. Your stone."

"My stone, your stone," he echoes, correctly identifying the possessor of each rock; and again in his own language, "My stone, your stone."