Sympathetic nod.

They're approaching the lake now. He realizes he hasn't explained the "there are two camps of us, as hostile towards each other as towards the enemy, glaring at each other from across the lake" thing. 

"Is there a word for the child of your father's brother?"

"...Cousin?"

"Those are our cousins, but not our friends. They did not follow the King, when the war began."

Miles nods.

"The other side - those are ours." He feels oddly self-conscious about the fact the new camp is only half-established. Miles will think that the Nolofinwean host is more competent, when the fact is that the Feanorians had given them everything. And he couldn't explain that Maglor had surrendered his fortress and city and his own bed without making Maglor sound weak or incompetent, which wouldn't help at all. 

Miles nods thoughtfully and does not seem noticeably judgmental.

Maglor is waiting for them. 

Of course he is. That means all of them are, gathered around for a show that's doubtless been scripted in his absence. Celegorm will be useful for about three hours, translating for the newcomer, and then he'll be hopelessly behind. "That's my brother, the King," he says.

(They're probably still half a mile out; Celegorm is assuming Miles has Elven eyesight and I don't know anything re: the suit's capabilities.)

Miles squints. The lights in his glass faceplate do things. Then he nods.

That thing is making him deeply uneasy. 

If Miles is really the one representative of a civilization of billions with capabilities beyond description and  a penchant for horrible atrocities, it might be better to have shot him before they'd met. What if the thing is some kind of weapon? 

On the other hand, Miles can obviously win them the war, assuming Curufin can reverse-engineer all the technology, which he assuredly can. 

"Does Barrayar have a King?"

"...Yes," is the answer he settles on after a few seconds' thought.

That's reassuring, in a way. Men swarm like insects across their planets, whatever those are, developing things that change when you touch them and which they don't themselves understand. But still they have a mothername and a fathername and a King. The similarities in daily life endure tremendous differences in everything else. Someone with more to say about philosophy would be able to take that thought somewhere. He instead lets it settle into vague fondness for Miles and for Men. 

"What's he like?" he asks, not really interested.

Maglor looks serene, commanding, and capable. But then, he never had trouble looking the part of a King.

They have an audience from across the lake, too. In fact, the performance will probably be more for them than for Miles, because Maglor doesn't realize how valuable Miles is. Very valuable, Celegorm thinks at him determinedly, very valuable, good thing you sent me to go and find him.

Miles thinks of his Emperor and smiles. But he doesn't answer the question, lacking the vocabulary to describe the quiet, sad man with planetsful of presence.

And now, for his audience with the local ruler. Look sharp, Miles, you didn't play tag with this fellow as a child.

Maglor doesn't leave the walls to greet them. He also has about half the town out of their beds and on guard, which is probably appropriate. Celegorm considers briefly whether they could take down Miles, if he turned out to be an enemy. That armor, one assumes, could protect him against any number of arrows, and he presumably has the weapons that melt the skin off cities worth of people. 

How did you stop someone like that? Stab him in his sleep, perhaps. 

They approach. Maglor smiles, for all the world as if he'd wished for nothing more than a child-sized creature in strange armor to come waltzing out of the woods, and says "is this the light that fell from the sky?"

"No," Celegorm says, "that's his mount, though it's mechanical. This is a Man."

"Canafinwë Macalaurë," says Maglor gravely. "A star shines." His thoughts blossom out like music, warm and inviting and beautiful, to convey the meaning and the majesty of the words. Celegorm wonders how long until Miles concluds he's been introduced to the stupid brother. 

"Miles Naismith Vorkosigan. It is a pleasure to meet you, Canafinwë Macalaurë."

God, it's like trying not to think of a pink elephant - he wants to be respectful, he wants to make a good impression, he wants to help these people, and they are all apparently bloody telepathic, and all he can think of is how Fletchir Giaja has thoroughly ruined his ability to be properly awed by the majesty of anyone who doesn't rule eight planets. Each of which alone could absorb all eighty thousand existing Elves into its population like a lake accepting a single raindrop.

"What brings you here?"

"Accident."

Not only does he lack a sufficient grasp of Quenya to render any better explanation, he's also totally at a loss to explain what a wormhole jump is and how they normally work and how staggeringly, inconceivably abnormal it is to enter a jump the ordinary way and emerge, intact but detached from your jumpship, into the sky above a flat alien world.

"But now that I am here, Turkafinwë Tyelcormo has asked for my help, and I want to give it."

Maglor is reminded of their efforts to explain themselves, when first they'd arrived on these shores. "Did the Valar send you?" everyone had asked, because of course they had. They'd been bad liars, then, unused to having anything to hide. The stranger is not a bad liar, if he's lying, and he lets his thoughts flutter around in the space between them like leaves caught in a breeze. A genuine accident, maybe. 

"Perhaps we can help each other," he said. "If there are ships that sail the sky, we would happily help you build one."

And they have now reached the limit of Miles's Quenya for sure. "That would be a sight to see," he murmurs wryly in English. Can a camp this size pull together the necessary infrastructure even in theory? Does he have enough books with him, enough knowledge in his brain, to lead them the whole way from their preindustrial state to the construction of space shuttles?

Well. They'll get to find out, he supposes. It might not even turn out to rate as the most impossible thing he's ever done.

Maglor invites them all back to the town center, his home, which is unfinished and roofless except for the library. They use it as a conference room to impress people - a hundred books, an outrageous show of wealth. Celegorm suspects that Miles won't be impressed.

"How do they order sentences?" Curufin hisses at him, so softly their visitor might not hear it (or will he? Perhaps Men have better hearing), and Celegorm answers with all the details that Curufin himself would have noticed, casually, as if he's remembered those things without thinking. 

The books are pretty respectable, under the circumstances, but impressed is not really the emotion he's feeling. The emotion he's feeling would be more aptly named 'embarrassed about how unimpressed he is'. Again.

Maglor sits down. "I'm not sure how far we'll understand each other, but it seems important to try." He pulls out a sheet of paper and starts sketching a map of Arda as far as they know it. The map of Valinor is quite detailed. The map of Middle-earth is less so. "Can you add anything to this?"

Well... yes, as it happens. He overflew this insane flat world on his way here, and he wasn't too stunned to take holos.

Out comes one of the incomprehensible objects Celegorm has seen before, the one that shows ever-changing writing on a flat glowing pane. He fiddles with it - he should probably get out of full combat armour at some point, but he hasn't actually had the chance to check the atmosphere yet, he keeps getting distracted - and produces, after a few seconds, a small but detailed holographic projection that includes every part of this world visible from its sky.

(Are they going to think it's magic? They're going to think it's magic, aren't they, and he's going to have to go over the part where he's not a god again. He glances briefly at Celegorm, for the moment internally labeled The One Who Knows Better.)

Celegorm's thoughts are humming in the back of his head the whole walk through their camp. The armor is airtight, he says, Huan can't smell him. That should be impossible. He can turn off and on the lights at will, but he didn't make them, and doesn't know their creator. He says his people number twelve to its own power, spread across twelve twelves of planets, each one spherical - 

Maglor looks to Caranthir, there, who bites his lip and projects the calculations into their shared anxious thoughts as they walk. A world that appeared flat to an observer standing on it, but  actually spherical - 

Yes, the verdict was, down would be in, on such a sphere. But it would be so large that down would also crush you. To appear flat to an observer, the distance to the horizon would have to be at least a hundred miles, which implied a sphere with a radius so great - he calculated - down would be the pressure of ten minutes' swim straight down in the ocean; no Elf could walk on it. Unless Men can't see as well as we can -

They can, thought Celegorm.

Then he is lying or mistaken, Caranthir answers simply. And a minute later, more thoughtfully - ask him if one can see the curvature of the planet from the tallest tower in his land. 

Ask him how he arrived here, and why he landed where he did, Amrod says.

The armor is a higher priority, Curufin says.

Maglor rearranges their voices in his head, makes them sound less anxious, less exhausted. When he can stand them he listens to them again. Celegorm is giving Curufin a whispered, stumbling treatise on the language. Amrod is trying to compose a good communication to the Nolofinweans. Caranthir is trying to imagine how rocks would drop if our fundamental assumptions about the forces of physics were wrong in a way that let 'planets' exist. 

The stranger - Miles Naismith Vorkosigan - sits down.

And generates, from the device in his pocket, a sketch of the world.

It's a sculpture, made from harnessed lightening, and Maglor's first thought is not of the terrifying implications of the stranger's power, or of the tremendous benefits, but of utter delight.  The sculpture is maddeningly intricate, yet colored like a child trying to use every paint. Every dust mote that floats through it lends it a strange dynamicism. Mountaintops are twinkling at him. Here is a vision to rival the greatest works of Valinor.

"That's Cuivienen," Amrod says aloud, rapt.

"That's Angband - there might be a way in from behind, now we can see every mountain -" Celegorm is glowing like a proud parent. 

"You're talented," Curufin says, with a faint note of surprise. 

Father had given himself a few seconds of optimism, and now he is dead. Maitimo had given himself a few seconds for optimism, and now (Eru willing) he is also dead.

Maglor is not remotely inclined to optimism. Or perhaps he's spent it all on that insistence that Maitimo can't still be alive. Either way, he rips his eyes from the artwork to meet the glass-shielded face of the artist and carefully tamps down the delight in his heart. "...thank you," he says. "That is precisely what I was hoping for. Do you happen to have one that would help us identify good sites for mining? We're short on iron."

Miles thinks about this. Is his Quenya up to the task of explaining...?

Okay, try it in English first, fill in the gaps afterward when people ask questions. Thank heaven for telepathic elves no matter how embarrassing they are.

"I have a copy of the book that the explorers of my mother's people take with them when they visit new planets," he says. "It tells how to look for metals, how to identify plants that are safe to eat, how to tell if the air is safe to breathe - I still haven't done that here, it's part of why I'm still wearing my armour, that and the armour lets me see almost as well as you can. But with the book and some of the other things I have with me, I can definitely find iron. Any metal you like."