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."

He briefly daydreams about being fluent by the time they get back, so he can be better than Curufin at a language for a few hours. Maybe even for a whole day, if the stranger needs to rest. He picks up another rock. "Three stones. One, two, three."

"Three stones. One, two, three," he echoes dutifully, and then translates. Look at them go. There will be so much learning.

He isn't fluent by the time they get back. He is successfully communicating, sort of. Their vocabulary has expanded to include most of the objects in the area, most things you could reasonably do with such objects, and a few things he sent through with thoughts. Orcs are unfamiliar to Miles.  Death is very familiar indeed. The pod is not a creature of its own, but obeys Miles' commands. 

Celegorm turns that over in his head for a few seconds. Baffling. "Then you are a Power." 

"I - no," he says. "I am not a Power."

He considers how to explain, then produces one of his incomprehensible objects. It is a short stick; now it is a short stick which glows at one end. Glow. No glow. Glow. No glow. The difference between these states is accomplished by pushing on the end opposite the glowing end.

"A... thing, made by people," he says of this minor miracle, in his rapidly improving Quenya.

"You cover and uncover the light source?"

"No... almost." Glow. "Now it is a light source." No glow. "Now it is not."

That didn't make sense. Celegorm knew how to make gemstones that didn't merely refract light but created it, bright enough to read by. There were some that stopped working if you broke them, and there were some that crumbled into smaller glowing gemstones, dependng how you'd married the stone and its new purpose. None of them lit on demand.

"How did you make it?"

"I did not make it. Other Men made it."

"How did they make it?"

He frowns in thought, then puts that object away and gets out another one, which also glows but in writing-like patterns on a flat pane. After manipulating this display for a few seconds, clumsily with his armoured fingers, he concludes: "I don't know."

Perhaps Miles isn't a scholar. This makes him instantly jump in Celegorm's esteem.

Though even Celegorm could explain how to make every thing the Eldar have achieved short of the Silmarils or Alqualondë's swanships. Or some of the obscure mathematics, possibly. He wants to take the light pen and see if he can identify the alloys on closer inspection, but it must be valuable beyond measure. Better to let Curufin be the one to demand that. 

"Who was the creator?"

...Miles considers this question for another few seconds, then repeats, "I don't know," in a tone that suggests he is dissatisfied with the completeness of this response but can't do any better under the current linguistic conditions.

"In our people, to create a thing that enhances the world, or the joy of its inhabitants, is a great good. Everyone will know your name, and desire to study under you, and there'll be festivals, and they'll start thinking of you as collective property and crushing you under the weight of their demands for narrative perfection as well as engineering perfection until you're isolated, paranoid, and beloved by all."

That had started off in simple enough language that Miles was supposed to understand it, but he'd lost the thread of his thought somewhere through the sentence. A few of their cautiously circling guard stared at him. 

Miles caught enough of that for his reaction to be deeply sympathetic laughter.

He puts away the glowing-words-object and gets out the light-object again.

"These are made... many. By many people," he tries.

"But who created the first, and taught the practice, and which of his students built on his work?"

"...More people than that," he tries.

"How many are your people?" He realizes they don't have the vocabulary for this. "We number twelve-twelves of twelve-twelves, four times over."

"Uh..."

Okay, numbers. Sure. He gets out the glowing-words-object and fiddles with it.

"...Twelve of twelve-twelves of twelve-twelves of twelve-twelves of twelve-twelves of twelve-twelves, two times over." He reflects on this a moment and then clarifies, "Not all in the same place."

"Not in the same place," he echoes.

That's more Men than there are grains of sand on the beaches. They'd overrun the orcs with sheer numbers. He has to be lying, or confused. But if he somehow isn't - If one in a thousand was literate and one in a thousand of those could write and one in a thousand of those copied books for a living, they'd have enough books to fill the entire palace. They could know things that not everyone knew, they could know so much that it was impossible to keep up with it all -

"Where?"

A tough question to answer, apparently.

"Different... places." He resorts to the English term: "Planets. Barrayar is my planet. This place, Endorë, is... flat. The sky is up. The ground is down. Planets are not flat." He gestures a spherical shape in the air. "Down is in. But planets are big. Standing on it, you don't see the curve. Just ground and sky, like here. My people have twelve twelves of planets."

"Do the Powers know about you?" They did, they had to, they'd been present at the making of the Universe, and yet to have concealed something of that magnitude from the Eldar - 

Shrug. "I don't know about the Powers."

Well. 

It was a good thing they were nearly back, because this was getting bigger than Celegorm felt equipped to handle. And he'd walked into it assuming he was going to die.

"Are the others coming here as well?"

"No."

He has no idea how he ended up here, no expectation that anyone can or will follow, and no idea if he will ever be able to go home.

"We can't go home either," he offers. Though it's a little different - they know exactly why.

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."

This is too easy. This would have seemed too easy even before the Doom. But Maglor just nods. "Thank you." He should say something else but the sculpture is still shimmering there. Even if this is a trap - especially if this is a trap - he may as well bask in the talent on display there for another few seconds. 

"Do you require food or drink?"

"I should check the air first, now that I've thought of it..."

Unfortunately this requires him to temporarily get rid of the holo display of Arda so he can consult the Betan Astronomical Survey Reference Handbook. He navigates quickly to the correct part of the guide, gets out the appropriate tool, verifies that he can totally breathe this atmosphere no problem, and then restores the map since the elves seem to like it so much.

"Breathable," he concludes, and the glass of his faceplate retracts, though the strange lights beneath it remain. "Yes, food and drink would both be good, although if your supplies are short I can sustain myself with my own for a while."

They're going hungry. For a few years it was almost impossible to grow anything here, and now that the Sun's arrived and changed the calculus of survival entirely they're scrambling to plant things. He's torn between offering the stranger appropriate hospitality and saying "yes, eat your own food." Though he can't require much - he's the size of a child of htirty or so. "Moryo, will you get us all something?" he asks. 

That sounded like a nickname. Names, he knows two names in this room besides his own - also if he's going to be eating their food he needs the Survey Handbook again, to look up how to run the toxin and microbe scans... he sighs quietly to himself and switches the display on the handheld reader back to flat text. He can bring them another reader from the shuttle later; he has at least five, so surely there's one to spare for the telepathic elves to go nuts over.

Maglor would of course give anything for leave to copy the map, but that'd be unspeakably rude. Even with the fate of the world at stake, you simply don't respond to someone's artwork by asking to make a copy for your own purposes. They all committed it to memory the minute it went up; still, they all flinch when it vanishes. Is he storing it in another world, somehow? How can he so casually -

Miles is wondering their names. Right. 

"Canafinwë Macalaure," he says, "this is Curufinwë Atarinkë and Pityafinwë Ambarussa. My brother who just left is Morifinwë Carnisitir. That's all of us, now. There used to be seven of us."

"A pleasure to meet you all," he says; he can manage that much in Quenya. "Sorry for your loss," he has to say in English.

And, because he suspects he knows the source of that flinch: "This," he indicates the reader, "is called a handheld reader. It's a common and unremarkable thing where I come from, but I only had a few with me when I came here, so the number that exist in this world is limited for now. It can hold millions of books," a lowball estimate if anything, "and holo images like the map I showed you. The next time I return to my shuttle I can bring back an extra reader and show you how to use it."

"Millions?" says Maglor.

"They count by tens," Celegorm mutters, "and that's seven tens."

"Why would anyone create something that could store that many books? It'd take you three full Ages of the world to get a tenth of them copied for it!"

"Oh, I'd do it if I knew how," Curufin says, looking faintly more engaged. "Just to see if it could be done. It doesn't have to be useful -"

"There's currently a war on," Caranthir says, walking back in with wine and bread.

Curufin spins around. "You have some nerve, to accuse me of forgetting that -"

"I didn't. Just said,as much as I'd like to devote a few centuries to studying under Miles in the art of the handheledreader, we can't -"

Huan barks anxiously.

"How long does it take to learn?" Celegorm asks.

"Not long to learn how to use it. I don't know how to make it right now, though I'd like to teach that too..."

Thank heaven for telepathic elves going around speaking their language in front of him. He's picking it up at least ten times as fast as he did with Russian, French, or Greek, probably through the sheer psychological pressure of being the only native English speaker on this flat fucking planet... no, anyway, explain information technology to the preindustrial elves, Miles. And perhaps leave the explanation of how they cannot in fact spend centuries learning anything from you for later. Though ideally not too much later.

Back to English for the clarification: "The way they store information, it's very fast and simple to copy entire books or libraries between readers and other things with similar information storage. To copy the entire contents of this reader onto an empty one would take only a few minutes. Less than an hour even if it was full." Does he dare attempt an explanation of how a comm laser actually works? He'll probably mangle it, but where are they going to get a better one?

They all fall absolutely silent.

"You can copy a book in a few seconds," Celegorm says. 

"Yes. One of the things my devices do best is moving information around very quickly," he says. "With the work of a day or two I think I can figure out how to copy all the books in this library onto a reader faster than a person could read them - sort of the same way the reader can do this," and he takes a holo of the current contents of this room and makes the reader display it.

They all stare at the hologram without speaking for several minutes. 

"That - changes the best order of action," Maglor says. "I was inclined to insist that we kill the Enemy first, then learn how to build flying ships that will take us to the planets. But -"

"But if we learn how to do this, everyone in the world can know everything that's discovered, as soon as the creator has time to write it down."

"We can fly to the planets, learn everything they know about warfare and weaponry in a single yeni, come back, and kill the Enemy with that."

"...I have no idea if you can fly to the planets," says Miles. "I know very little about the event that brought me here, and most of what I know is that it should have been impossible and if it wasn't impossible it should have ended with my shuttle and its entire contents including myself shredded down to a dust too fine to see and spread out randomly across an inconceivably vast distance; and instead, somehow, I ended up here."

"But Men learned how to fly to the planets," Maglor says. "We are not less capable than Men."

Curufin is drumming his fingers on the table. "In Valinor the time passes slower, and you don't notice its passing, and it is rude to count the years, or measure your achievements by how swiftly they could be replicated. It's part - a small part, but part - of why we left. And when we left we had to leave almost everything behind, and the Enemy destroyed my father's workshop and all its contents, so we're behind even where we were in Valinor. You see these houses and think we cannot build starships, but we can." 

"The problem is not whether or not you could build the ships. The problem is... there are a lot of problems, actually, and I keep thinking of more. I don't know if it's possible in principle for this place to exist in the same universe as the planets I'm used to. The way starships move between places that are far from one another involves fixed paths called wormholes, and exploring new wormholes is dangerous, and there might not be a wormhole route between here and any planet I know of even if they are in the same universe, which I still doubt. And a starship can only move through a wormhole if it's being flown by a jump pilot, and finding people with the potential to be jump pilots and then making them into jump pilots requires yet more specialized knowledge I don't have."

"How long did it take Men to do it?"

"It's hard to measure exactly, but at least a thousand years. On the other hand, we didn't know what we were working toward. On yet a third hand, there were billions of us even then and we may tend to act more urgently than you're used to because we only live for a hundred years or so each."

Speechlessness, again.

"Yes," Celegorm says after a while. "That's - that's one of the things they say of Men. That you die while still children, all of you. Is - is there anything to be done about it?"

"It'd be the same principle as halting the decay of wood and the aging of animals in these lands," Curufin says, "I can do it. Not - not in less than a hundred years, though. Not without Father, not without - what kind of precision instruments do you have, Miles?"

"...Many kinds," he says - this much he can manage in Quenya. "What do you need?"

"The way we'd do something like this - I think our approach to artifice differs from yours, the lightning-sculptor doesn't use any magic even though there are a few obvious ways it could be applied - would be to write the deep structure of the relevant phenomenon - biological decay, in this case - into a piece of jewelry, and then bind them with the music of creation, and then alter the form of our representation in a way that alters the deep structure. Then you experiment until you find the correspondance between alterations to the representation we've made and alterations to the original phenomenon, and design one that has the intended effect. It's generally powered by the will of the wearer but there's something wrong with your soul so we'd have to find a workaround.

I'm making do without a great deal of equipment for crafting - equipment for measuring and rounding, needs to be precise enough that you can't detect any bumps in a surface by sight or by touch, for something biological it might actually need to be more precise than that. Sulfuric acid for removing the imperfections from soldering and annealing, a better flux for soldering - then there's the things I'll need in order to identify what biological decay is. So I'll need the materials to make lenses - again, precision measuring equipment - " he starts sketching a device - "have you made a lens? The procedure's the same everywhere there's light, so I can't imagine your people do it particularly differently. You need molded plate glass tools, with the right sign for grinding the lenses - with biologicals, we're going to need a precision of a thousandth of a hair's width."

"Curvo," Celegorm says, "I don't think he can understand you."

"Then translate," Curufin says, "He's going to die in a century if we don't fix him, and I can learn his language once this is in motion -"

"Tools for very small things that have to be just right," Celegorm says, "Do you have them?"

"Yes. In my shuttle. May I bring the shuttle here?"

(Telepathic elves getting into technical vocabulary in front of him, it's wonderful, he's going to have this language down solid in a week particularly if he spends a lot of time listening to Curufinwë Atarinkë talk about manufacturing lenses.)

"Yes," Maglor says after an instant of hesitation. "I need to somehow communicate to the other host that we're not attacking them. And we should send you back out with a larger escort, because presumably by now the Enemy has decided what, if anything, he's going to do about this -"

"No matter who we send we'll still be in trouble if the Enemy decides to kill Miles at all costs today," Amrod says. 

"True. Can you defend yourself, Miles?"

"...Yes," he says. "In this armour, against a lot. With my shuttle, against much more than that."

"Then let's send twenty men and rely on speed. If you see trouble, run from it. Miles, everyone you haven't met is dead because they underrestimated the enemy. If you see trouble, run from it. How large is the pod, can it land within our walls?"

"I think so," he says. Running from trouble sounds like a sensible idea, possibly more sensible than he is able to carry out, but that's a bridge he'll cross when it starts shooting at him. It occurs to him to ask what a soul is and what's wrong with his, but he files that away for later. "I saw empty spaces that should be large enough."

"Good, let's go. We might have a horse here that's sized for you, and now that you've taken the glass off and have a smell you'll make them less nervous."

He puts his reader away.

"...How much weight can your horses carry? This armour is very heavy."

"May I try to lift you, rather than try to describe our units of measure?"

"Yes."

He lifts him. A few inches. "Eru. What kind of metal is this?"

"A heavy kind. Several heavy kinds. Again, I didn't make it."

"I'm not going to ask that of the horses. Time is at a premium, though - perhaps we can travel at a run? How can you even move in that?"

"It holds up its own weight. Probably well enough to let me run the whole way back to the shuttle faster than I could by myself. I can try, at least."

"Not if it might leave you exhausted. I expect that we're running into a fight."

"Yeah. Well - I have ways of handling exhaustion temporarily, if it comes to that."

"When we arrived here, the Enemy was frightened. He'd expected Father but he didn't think that our people would follow him, and he thought it would take us much longer. He sent every orc and every valarauka in the continent at us. The fighting lasted three weeks. We couldn't rest, because we hadn't yet built shelter. They kept coming, and coming, and coming, until at last we had some semblance of shelter from the piles of their bodies. We won. But Father -"

"I am telling you this because it would be very unfortunate if you overextended yourself on your first day here."

"I will avoid overextending myself."

They head out. He apologizes to the horses, who have had a stressful few weeks with the new lights and aren't really being fed enough for repeated cross-country trips. "Neither am I, buddy," he murmurs, and sets a pace that probably won't exhaust Miles' baffling armor. 

Miles's baffling armour is not exhausted, and neither is Miles. They make decent time back to the shuttle.

It's swarming with orcs, of course. "We have better vision than them," Celegorm says at a mile out, "they probably haven't seen us yet. Circle around, figure out if there are Balrogs. If so we're going to have to turn back. If not - Miles, is it likely your shuttle would be damaged by a fight?"

"Possible. Not likely." He closes his faceplate.

"Then I think we should fight, if it's just orcs. It's not going to get any safer, not if the Enemy has any inkling how important you and your equipment are."

"I think the same."

"Balrogs have a very distinctive heat signature. We'll be able to see them unless there's several feet of solid rock in the way. If we head north, and there's nothing from there, I think we're safe."

Miles nods. "What weapons will the orcs be likely to have?"

They have archers, they have axes, they have swords. Everything's poisoned, but you shouldn't have a problem - you don't have any skin showing - for that matter, you can stay back where you're safe. We're just going to ride them down, shoot everything that runs, then kill everything we trampled. Five minutes, probably."

"I have weapons with me that could probably make this process more efficient, but if you expect to be able to handle the orcs easily yourself, I can keep my weapons to myself for now, to limit the information available to the enemy."

"We won't lose anyone doing this, unless there's something I can't see from here or they get off an exceptionally lucky -" the thought accompanies the words, he has a great many memories to share for that concept - "shot. I don't know what the Enemy can see. It might be that if none escape he'll learn nothing; it might be that he can see almost the whole land. He knew we'd arrived, but we had kind of lit a very large fire."

"Then I'll stay back and not do much unless something goes horribly wrong."

There's a Balrog. 

He sees it as soon as they crest the hill; the orcs are clustered around it in a dense mob, presumably so he didn't see it sooner. Turn and run, or dive in anyway, this time nearly certain to lose someone? What are Miles' weapons, and can they possibly make a difference in a fight like this? And will they have a better shot at Miles' shuttle? And what could the Enemy do with it? 

Maglor would call off the cavalry charge. But they've been erring on the side of caution ever since they lose Maitimo, and it's starting to suffocate them.

"We could use help," he says to Miles, in a language the Balrog has hopefully never heard, and then flings himself at it.

Well then.

Time to find out how a Balrog reacts to a plasma bolt.

 Something comes flying over the ridge and fries its way through the air and knocks the Balrog back several steps. It kills a few of its own allies, staggering backwards. Celegorm stabs it on a run by and turns around for another round. They still don't know for sure how much you have to damage these to drive them off. They still don't know anything that'll kill them, though something is now leaking from the scalded not-skin where Miles hit it. 

"Son of Fëanor," it says. Morgoth speaks Quenya, so it shouldn't be shocking that his servants would, but he still wastes a second wondering where they learned it. Or were even minor Powers born knowing all languages? Would they know Miles' tongue? Did Morgoth know of planets? 

He'll ask Curufin later, if he survives, or Mandos if he doesn't.

In the meantime, it's talking which means it's not currently slicing anyone's skin into ugly ribbons, so ..."It's not that hard to tell us apart," he says. "Tyelcormo. The one with the giant dog companion. I would have expected everyone who knows my tongue to know my name."

Miles hesitates - there are too many tactical and diplomatic unknowns for him to be sure he should shoot at the giant monster again while it is attempting to communicate.

"You might misguess what your house is known for," it says, "thief and murderer."

"No," Celegorm says comfortably, "I assumed Morgoth knew about that. HIs brothers kicked up quite a fuss about it. They were angrier with us than with him, I think - but then, we're mere incarnates. As soon as we stopped gratefully eating scraps from their table, they started looking for more pliant pets." It's nodding. Their cavalry circles up again, warily. 

"You hate the Valar."

"Cheerfully."

"It seems we have some interests in common, son of Fëanor."

He'd probably have kept this up - it's kind of fun - if the Balrog had just used his name. "Unfortunately," says Celegorm, "I know perfectly well that your master heard our Oath. I am utterly and irrevocably committed to destroying you, and we both know that. And I want this shuttle. So you can fight, or run."

"We'll release your brother."

...hell. This is going to be one of those fights, isn't it.

He charges at it again. This will almost certainly get him killed but it's much better to die fighting a Balrog than refusing to negotiate your brother's release with a Balrog. 

Miles has a guess about the emotion underlying that charge. He tries another plasma bolt on the Balrog, since the first one seems to have had a nonzero effect.

The whips lash out and knock everyone in the area back twenty feet. Celegorm lands lightly; that was probably for the best, because it's not really fair to ask this of the horses. There's going to be a long, ugly burn across his torso but he can't feel it at the moment. The plasma bolt knocks it back again, and it spins around and charges at Miles. 

Celegorm is slower than a Balrog. Huan is more or less apace, but nipping at a Balrog's heels will cook his face and claws. "Most dead are from the burns," he calls, "don't let it get that close to you -"

He keeps hitting it with plasma bolts, one two three four five, standing his ground. He doesn't think he can outrun it.

He does think he can switch to nerve disruptors the very moment it is in range.

Miles' weapons are ripping pieces out of it; it's thrilling to watch. He's not sure it'll save them. The thing gets hotter at the site of every injury, glowing white, whips still ripping through everyone in their path. One of them catches Huan in the side and throws him over a hill. Celegorm feels the hit, and the landing, and the burns, more acutely than his own.

Miles, the idiot, is still standing there. In that armor he'll cook alive.

In this armour, he doesn't feel the heat at all -

And now it's in nerve disruptor range.

A crackling blue bolt splashes against the Balrog's chest. Direct hit. A human would drop dead on the spot, but this creature is huge enough that he might have to get it right in the head or spine; he's already lining up the second shot before he even sees what came of the first.

He watches. 

Weapons that can level cities, he reminds himself. 

Knowing that is a little different than seeing it.

The Balrog collapses. Then it explodes. 

Now Miles ducks down behind the ridge.

Tactical analysis of Balrogs: Plasma bolts do superficial damage. Getting them in the head or chest with a nerve disruptor works, but he can't be sure which was the key shot or whether it was the combination that did it. Also, they fucking explode.

He stands up. He can't hear, and he can't see, but Huan can do both and is already circling to check on everyone. Two of the horses are dead. Two more, and two Elves, critically iljured. Miles is presumably fine. Miles could probably take down everything short of Morgoth. Miles can presumably get his shuttle now. It'd be nice if his vision would come back. The fact his eyes don't hurt is probably a bad sign; a superficial injury would be extremely painful.

With Miles, maybe we could rescue Nelyo, he thinks.

Standing up was perhaps a bad idea; he'd expected his vision to return sooner. Huan is whining worriedly. He sits back down.

When things have been quiet for a few seconds, Miles gets up and crosses the scorched battlefield to his shuttle. If these people were human, he could give them emergency care. He probably can't risk it as-is, not without some kind of analysis.

Now he has his shuttle. Okay. Mission success. Great.

He stands at the top of the ramp, surveys the damage, and wonders whether he can get everyone - and their remaining horses - up the ramp and into the shuttle to be returned home. He really doesn't want to try it without Tyelcormo's help, but if the other option is just leaving them here...

He can hear out of one ear! That's more than half as good as hearing out of both ears, because he can confirm that his voice is working properly and isn't going to make anyone nervous that he's dying. 

He isn't, of course, but the thing about the burns is that plenty of people walked away from a fight with the Balrog only to die a short time later and this will of course be at the front of everyone's minds.

"Miles?"

'Are you all right' seems like a stupid question...

"Yes?"

"I want to move. If the Enemy knows they do - that - when they die - and I'm uncertain if that was an effect of the weapon you used or something that will happen every time - then he'd be stupid not to have a backup force whose job it is is to go in if the Balrog goes boom -"

"Nerve disruptors don't normally make things explode. Can you all get into the shuttle? I can fly you home from here."

"Let - let me ask the horses." Huan is at his shoulder and being reassuringly stabilizing. Time to try giving standing up another go.

So he can communicate with animals... now is not the time to start missing your horse, Miles.

They've been extraordinarily patient with all of this, really. It is impossible to appreciate enough the trust and loyalty that it took to charge a Balrog repeatedly, on command - at least the Elves knew that breaking formation meant much higher casualties. The horses just take his word for it. 

That hurt, he tells them. We lost some people and I'm sorry. We killed a Balrog. Well, Miles killed a Balrog. But he's going to teach us how. And it smells funny and it'll move and it's worse than a ship - and we hated the ship - but we should get on, now, so he can take us home.

Not his most convincing speech. But they're as exhausted as he is. 

He tells Miles as soon as he's won agreement. "Yeah, okay. We have - we have a couple people who can't walk, I think."

"Can they be carried...?"

"Yeah, carefully. Probably not you, not for the horses, Huan says you've stopped having a smell again and it's stressing him out. You can delegate people, if they're standing around and not being useful." 

Right then. Miles has a well-defined problem in front of him and the resources with which to solve it.

He retracts his faceplate again now that battle is not imminent, and commences getting everyone onto the shuttle. There are a few grav stretchers in the back, suitable for moving particularly bad cases if necessary, but they're human-sized and elves... aren't. If the critically injured happen to be particularly tall - well. Are they?

His presence isn't speeding this up, and he still can't see. So he walks a couple horses up the ramp and sits with them on the shuttle, frustrated. The horses are equally frustrated. One has a broken leg. That's hell on horses. In Aman they'd have asked one of the Valar to intervene directly - too slow to heal, otherwise. It's not really fair, he thinks, that you suffer because the Valar are mad at us. They could still intervene and help you out - which, obviously, helps us - I'm sorry, though. Not really fair. Don't worry about the smells; it's Miles, we can trust him. He killed a Balrog, you know. 

Huan is whining very worriedly; Celegorm offers his wholehearted permission for him to go do something useful rather than sitting here with them, but for some reason this doens't lessen Huan's anxiety. 

Right. Everyone on the shuttle. Ramp up. Hatch closed.

"Now we go back to your camp," he says, and takes off, flying as steadily as possible so as not to jostle the injured.

As steadily as possible still allows them to go very fast. It's not long before he's approaching the camp, checking the viewport and vid feeds in search of a good place to land.

The dilemma: send a family member to the Nolofinweans, and risk that they'll be outright detained there? Or send a messenger, who can be trusted to get through but will have to be told more than he's yet prepared to tell all his subjects? Everyone has assumptions about Men, and it's worth considering how best to challenge them. And Miles is dangerous.

In the end he sends Amrod. The message is short: This light does not appear to have been of the Valar's sending. We think these are Men. We're inviting them here. Please discuss how you'd like to proceed.

Enough to keep Nolofinwë busy, and probably to stop his people from loosing arrows at the shuttle when it returns. And hopefully they'll return his little brother when fthey get curious enough to want to respond to the message. 

Sound logic, he thinks, but Amrod hasn't returned yet, several hours later, when he sees the blue light arcing through the sky again. This time it's headed here.

There is a space big enough to set down in. Miles sets down in it. It's one of the neatest landings he's ever made, as gentle as a drifting feather.

He opens the hatch and lowers the ramp to let everyone out.

It's a delight to watch, though he cannot imagine how the propulsion system would work even in principle. People had tried flight, in Valinor, sometimes with Manwë's indulgent approval and sometimes while he was occupied. You could glide, with well-designed wings. That was it. Sustaining the weight of something like that shuttle would take motion, so much of it that the air should be whipped into a whirlwind, but instead it's fairly close to the ground before he can even hear the air moving. So the parts that do the propulsion are internal: sensible, if Men have enemies. Do they? They should have asked that - they should have asked many more questions before sending Miles back out to his shuttle.

As a general principle you ought to ask questions right away, rather than saving them up to look over, day after day, once the only person in the world who could have answered them had crumbled to dust in your hands.

It lands. 

He greets Miles with a few of the questions.

"What metal is this? How do you make it? What's the mechanism that keeps it up in the sky? How fast can it travel, and how far? Could you build one from scratch? Can we take it apart?"

Miles waits until there is a gap in the questions such that he can get a word in edgewise, and then responds with, "I killed a Balrog. It exploded. Did you know they explode?"

"...no. We haven't killed one, they're major Maiar, I wasn't even confident it was possible. How did you do it? If we can find a way to kill them from a distance they'll have to keep them separated from the rest of the Enemy's own forces."

"One of my weapons. It does work at range, but a shorter range than is ideal for dealing with a Balrog. I don't know how to make that weapon, though, or how to make my shuttle. You can't take my shuttle apart now. You can take apart some other things. One of the grav stretchers, maybe," and he gestures to where the two critically injured Elves are floating.

"I'll start on the lenses, actually, if you have the materials with you. It's a time-consuming process and I can learn what you know of your world once that's progressed enough that I can hand it off to other people. Unless you are, unwisely, leaving the camp again. I expect that the enemy dearly desires to kill you, at this point, and if your weapons can fire on one at a time - well, he'd happily lose a thousand for the chance to take them off your body."

"I'll get my tools."

He fetches some things, glancing at Tyelcormo along the way - should he be asking him to play translator? How bad is an injury like that, among these people? The preindustrial elves have magic; he is not at all clear on how this should affect his intuitions about the effectiveness of their medical technology.

Celegorm is trying to focus. 

It was rude of Curufin to say it, of course, but there is something wrong with Miles' soul. It clings to his body like it's been clumsily taped on, coalescing in the vital organs. One tiny knock in the wrong place would rip it loose. 

The Eldar are their souls, and can, if needed, get new bodies. That avenue is out at the moment, the Valar having communicated that they're inclined to hold a grudge, but in principle it can be done: the bare basics are given, the raw materials of a incarnate being, and the Elf's force of will shapes the rest into the form that it remembers.

There've been cases of Elves changing genders, in Valinor, because their mind knew what it was and dragged the body into line.

There've been cases, since Valinor, of Elves who experienced such griefs that their soul rejected their body, suddenly and violently, crushing it from the inside, making it crumble despite no visible injuries.

Orcs, they say, are just Elves raised from birth in such torment that their self manifests as a hidious abomination. 

And the cousins, of course, had hiked across the Helcaraxe. Impossible cold, impossible hunger, a thousand impossibilities powered by sheer force of will. We are not our bodies; we are very powerful, very dangerous, things that realize ourselves in the physical world through them.

So Celegorm can't see, and can only half-hear, and has some fairly serious burns, but there are hundreds of years of the light of Valinor burning within his spirit and all of those other ridiculous things ought to stop being a problem, very soon. My physical manifestation has a nerve there, has retina cells there, can sense light when it hits the tissue there -

...Well shit. Okay. Elves are magic. Good to know.

This distracts him on multiple levels; he finishes fetching the tools, and he means to ask about the practicalities of translation, but what ends up coming out of his mouth when he meets Curufinwë Atarinkë again at the foot of the ramp is, "What did you mean about my soul earlier? What is a soul?"

"What word would you use for the - the visible presence of a Power when it's not deliberately adopting a human form, the thing that is visibly different between a dying person and a dead one, the thing that is different between us and you?"

"...I don't know anything about Powers," he says. "I don't know..." Back to English. "'Soul', maybe, if I understand what you're getting at."

"Soul. So, yours is different than ours. Ours actively is the force that anchors and embodies us in the world. Yours is ...along for the ride, maybe. It makes you look very fragile. I originally assumed it was a distortion because of the armor you wear, but when you lower the helm it is even more noticeable. Can you consciously control your heartbeat?"

"...No."

"That is what I would have expected. Set your body temperature? Your metabolism?"

He shakes his head. "No and no."

"This will complicate fixing your biological decay, because it's probable that whatever is wrong with you is something it will be difficult to identify externally and something which we correct automatically. I will attempt to develop a technology to attach your soul more securely. Though if that fails, this enterprise should in principle be able to prevent wood from rotting, and it doesn't do that through reliance on any innate capacities of the wood. How do I use your tools?"

So Miles launches into an explanation of what all the stuff he's carrying is and does and how you manipulate it.

He has some extremely powerful lenses already, in amongst all this, and other tools that do that job in a more complicated way, a pile of scanners adapted to various specific tasks or sets of tasks and this is how all of those work, and what all the words on the displays and the labels on the buttons say, crash course in English orthography and vocabulary... they could end up being at this for a while, but Miles, like his devices, is pretty good at moving information around quickly. The fact that he's talking to a telepathic elf helps a lot. The mysteries of the handheld reader, and the Betan Astronomical Survey Reference Handbook, are going to come into it pretty soon.

He does not actually notice that he switches dialects of English as soon as he starts reading from the Handbook.

But he does, immediately. "Say that again," he says, and then "I suppose with that many people, you'd have many, many dialects. Which is your native one?"

"Uh... Barrayaran English, that I have been speaking, is the dialect of my father and the planet where I grew up. Betan English, that this book is written in, is my mother's dialect. I'm fluent in both. And I know the three other languages spoken on Barrayar, but not as well."

"Three other languages? Can you say a few sentences in each?"

"Uh..." He thinks for a moment, and then recites the first couple of sentences of a Barrayaran folk tale in Russian, French, and Greek. His level of confidence in the words falls off pretty steadily as he goes: comfortable with the Russian, slightly unsure of the French, very aware his Greek is shaky at best.

He listens, utterly fascinated. "How many languages are spoken in your world?"

"...I don't know. Many. Twelves of twelves at least."

"And documents written in some of those languages are preserved on your book-copying device?"

"Yes, a few."

"I'd appreciate the chance to take a look at that. Though this is probably a higher priority. And the weapons are the highest priority, if you think we could develop the means to replicate them. If Balrogs explode there's no way to destroy them with a sword that isn't suicide, and I'm not sure it could be done even then. But if we had a few hundred of whatever you used, we could storm Angband tomorrow, which would be - 

Well, success is more important than timeliness, but there's someone who might yet live if we act quickly."

"Yes. I don't know how my weapons are made but I am beginning to hope that we can learn together how you might make them. But teaching you how to use all this," he gestures at the assorted tools, "is still the first step in that, I think."

"Proceed, then. Is your mother from a city?"

"...Maybe. Yes." Beta Colony doesn't really organize itself that way, but she's not really from a non-city. "Why?"

"Knowing nothing about either your native dialect or your mother's, except for the way you spoke them both, hers sounds more - Noldorin. I suppose I am really interested in whether your mother's people are the Noldor of Men, but that requires conveying - more - and I want to learn the tools - you can ask someone else later, once I'm working."

He nods. "So, this is a Survey bioscanner..." and these are its functions and what it is able to detect and analyze and how it presents its analysis. It's technically at least ten models out of date of what Survey actually uses, but still ahead of his copy of the Handbook; happily, the Betans are very enthusiastic about backward compatibility, so the sections of the Handbook dealing with the scanner are still perfectly relevant.

These people are competent. He hadn't, when he'd first heard what Melkor had to say about Men, been particularly perturbed for the Men. It was a shame they died so young, of course, but it was mroe of a shame that they warred constantly and would prevent the Elves from having a homeland outside fenced Valinor. But someone created this equipment, and that someone was competent, and if that person died at a yení the world would have been robbed of something of indescribable value.

If Miles notices this undercurrent, he doesn't make anything of it. He moves on at blazing speed, the speed of one genius teaching another, right through teaching Curufinwë Atarinkë about all the rest of the assorted tools. Some of them don't do much more than compensate Men for their lack of Elven sensory discernment; but the Men of the wormhole nexus, never having heard of Elves anyway, saw no reason to stop when they reached the Elven level. Here's a pair of vision-enhancing goggles that embody this principle.

Infrared light visors are baffling; Men can't do that by default? Same thing with ones that enhanced Men's eyesight - when was the practical constraint on your line of sight what your eyes could manage, rather than the terrain? Looking at the Sun directly without doing (and having to subsequently fix) subtle damage to your eyes is useful, though, and he supposes perhaps sometime he'd like to be able to read a book over his cousin's shoulder across the lake.

"How long did all of this take you?"

"I'm not sure how long my species has existed..."

"How long since you invented writing, then?"

"A few thousand years at least. I'm not sure."

"All that in a few thousand years? That's doable, then. I don't even need to discover true immortality, just something that slows decay by enough, and then once we're up to your world's capabilities I can refine it."

They weren't so behind, after all; they'd only invented writing a few hundred years ago.

He suddenly can't make the scanner move beneath his fingers. The sense that he wasn't the one who should be doing this was overwhelming. "You, ah, should have met my father, he'd have it done much faster. He had a gift for everything, but particularly for that."

"Particularly for what?"

"Objects that permanently and meaningfully alter physics. He invented our writing system. And our instantaneous long distance communication system, and most of our chemistry, and the Silmarils which are the only way we can endure as the sort of beings we are permanently outside Valinor."

"He sounds amazing. ...Instantaneous long distance communication?"

"The palantiri. What's the range of your ship? They're truly instantaneous over every range we've been able to check, but with your ship we could probably double or treble it. Though they work off our osanwë, you might have a little trouble with them."

"Off your what? Is this a soul thing?"

"Hmm? No, osanwë is the thought-speech. You do it oddly, your thoughts are hard to catch and I have to speak very precisely to you for you to catch mine. So you might have difficulty conveying lots of precise information over a palantir. I don't think your osanwë has to do with your soul. It's probably just a lack of practice. People vary in natural capacity and lots aren't comfortable with it until they're fully grown, and you can't be more than sixty."

"I'm twenty-four. And I'm not sure if the thought-speech is even a thing I can do. It's unheard-of where I came from."

"I can hear your thoughts, so there's clearly a sense in which you're speaking them - wait. Am I hearing thoughts you don't intend to be public?" He's mildly horrified.

"As far as I can tell, I don't have any control over which of my thoughts you hear and which you don't. But it's helping immensely with communicating with you and learning your language, so I'm not that bothered."

"You should ask someone to show you, though. Someone with more time than me. If you ever do want to hide something - though, I suppose, in one way of looking at the situation it's to youra advantage that we can be confident you're not concealing some villainous motive, it means we don't waste time mistrusting you."

"I do very much see the logic in that."

"I think I have enough to work with here. I'm going to try to discern, first, whether any of your weapons are possible to replicate with our technology, and if not then I'll get started on the decay question, which has numerous other applications. Do you want to help? Because if it's not something you're going to want to do consistently, I'm sure you'd be equally appreciated back in the library - and what's the rest cycle of Men? We fetched you a full sun cycle ago."

"...I do need to sleep at some point. Soon would be good, even. Men habitually sleep eight hours out of every twenty-four."

"I am not surprised at that; I am only surprised you haven't developed some incredibly impressive technical solution that makes you our equals despite the astonishing biological disadvantage."

Miles laughs.

"We have a few things, but it's a bad idea to make a habit of using them."

"I have a bed somewhere. You're welcome to use it."

"Thank you. I might just return to my shuttle, which unlike your bed I definitely know where to find. When I wake up we can start on the weapons - please don't try to take apart any of my things in the meantime, I haven't gone into how to do that safely yet."

"Noted. Sleep well."

"Thank you. Have fun scanning things."

And he goes back to his shuttle and goes inside and closes it up and has about eight hours of moderately uncomfortable sleep, after which he gets up and opens the hatch and peers out.

There's an argument going on on the ground. At least two dozen people are observing, and Maglor looks very unhappy. Amrod, who'd gone to explain Miles to the other camp, is back, and appears to have company.

Miles has just woken up and yesterday(?)'s advanced command of Quenya has not quite returned to him. "Uh, hello," he says to the assembled, in English.

"Hello," Maglor says wearily. "Did Tyelcormo tell you of the other Eldar?" He gestures across the lake.

"In brief."

"This is my cousin Irissë. She is-"

He doesn't continue the sentence. Irissë seems to be asking for a translation, rather aggressively, and when she gets in Maglor's face someone tugs her back and Maglor has to shout some command, rather sharply, to stop an embarrassing tussle from starting. 

Miles sighs. "Good morning," he says in cousin-Irissë's direction. The Quenya becomes more understandable as he hears more of it; maybe in another couple of exchanges he'll be back to the fluency of his conversation about scanners, through some combination of re-immersion and increased wakefulness.

"Good morning," she echoes cautiously, glaring at Maglor as if she expects him to burst into laughter and reveal that the words are some dire insult. 

Come on, come on, language...

"My name is Miles Naismith Vorkosigan." That seems safe enough to start with.

"Irissë. May I come up and speak with you?"

"Yes." He half-smiles. "Though I warn you I've only been learning Quenya for a sun-cycle."

"If you've been learning from them, you're learning wrong anyway." She heads up.

He steps back into the shuttle and sits in one of the seats.

"It is a pleasure to meet you. What wrong things am I learning?"

 "My uncle was a reactionary prescriptivist who politicized a bunch of sound changes in the language. His children talk like him. No one else does." A few words are in fact a little different.

She looks around, awed, raises an eyebrow, runs her hands across the nearest metal surface, and then inclines her head towards him. "You are very talented."

"I didn't make any of this. Everyone keeps thinking I made all this and I made none of it. Among my own people no one ever assumes someone made a thing just because they have it. But, on behalf of Men in general, thank you. We frequently are."

"Well, you're talented at persuading people to give you extraordinarily generous gifts," she says. "I saw it fly, last night. Can you fly it?"

"Yes."

"...is there a reason you haven't filled  it up with heavy rocks and then flown it over the fortress and dropped the rocks on Moringotto's head?"

"My time since I arrived has been occupied with learning Quenya wrong, being threatened by a Balrog, killing the Balrog, and teaching Curufinwë Atarinkë how to use some of my tools so he can research how to prevent me from dying of old age in a hundred years as would otherwise happen. Today I planned to start learning about this war. Then I came out of the shuttle and you were having an argument."

"You're dying? Curufin offered to help another person? You killed a Balrog?"

"I am followed by astonishing events wherever I go."

"Did they tell you we're all Doomed? That's pretty important, if they're asking you to fight with them."

"...I may have missed any mention of the Doom. Go on."

"So first thing, which is just a general point you should keep in mind: my cousins are dishonest as fuck, and in deep denial about basically everything.

Second thing, the Valar - did they tell you about the Valar? They created this world, and taught and guided us while we lived in Valinor with them -"

"...I haven't heard directly about them, no."

"They don't act directly. They're too powerful. Moringotto is their brother, and the last time they were directly at odds they nearly crushed the world between them. But they try to tip the scales, sometimes, and they'll step in eventually. Maybe. Anyway, my uncle committed a series of atrocities on his way out of Valinor, and the Valar laid a Doom on him and all who followed him: that all things we began would turn to ruin, that we would know every grief imaginable before our painful deaths, and that those of us who survived the Age would wish we hadn't."

"...That sounds..." He searches his Quenya vocabulary for an appropriate description, then shakes his head and settles for hoping the elf telepathy is working in his favour. (The thing that it sounds is stupid and petty and vindictive and generally the sort of behaviour that leads him to question someone's right to continue being a godlike figure.)

She laughs. "You've never been that angry? I've been that angry. They betrayed us, you know. They took the boats across the sea and lit them on fire and left us stranded in desperate conditions in the ice. Do you know how many people died? I don't have the power to call down Dooms, but I help my brother hide from his daughter that he still has nightmares, every night, about watching his wife die, and if I could call down Dooms I might be tempted."

His vocabulary is failing him a little bit again.

She realizes this and shakes her head apologetically. "I'm sorry. I - do you have cousins?"

"...Yes. One."

Much is going unsaid here. Some of it is about his cousin Ivan; some of it is about why the Doom is so fundamentally a bad idea. Maybe he'll think of the right words in a minute. Maybe he can hope to rely on elf telepathy.

"If he left you and your family to die somewhere, wouldn't you be - more than angry?"

"Yes. But."

God, how does he even begin to explain...

"The answer to atrocities is not, can never be, more atrocities. Otherwise it just keeps getting worse with no end in sight. I... I want to tell a story, I don't think I have the words for it in Quenya, but I want to try anyway."

She pokes one of the seats tentatively. Sits down. Crosses her legs. Uncrosses them. "Okay."

"Where I come from, flying ships like this are common. Some of them can cross vast distances on paths called wormholes - much farther than it would be possible to travel otherwise; so far you could fly at the fastest speed possible for twelves of twelves of lifetimes of Men and never reach your destination. When my people learned to make those, we left the place where we started and travelled far down those paths, settling wherever we found a place where some of us could live. One of the first such places to be settled was Barrayar, my home. But when the settlers had only begun to build their new home, the wormhole collapsed, became impassable. They had been relying on it for supplies, for a connection to the rest of civilization; without it, they could not sustain themselves as they were. There was... fear, chaos, death. A huge amount of important knowledge was lost. It was six lifetimes of Men before the rest of the universe found us again."

"I'm sorry."

He smiles slightly.

"Thank you. There's worse to come, I'm sorry to say. All this happened before I was alive. So, these paths: Barrayar had only one to begin with, and lost that, and gained a new one when explorers from another place found us at the end of a long route from a place with many paths, a place called Komarr. While Barrayar had been losing knowledge and slowly rediscovering it, everyone else had been going on without us, surpassing even the things we'd had and lost. It made us..." the word he's looking for is 'vulnerable'; he realizes he doesn't have it and goes on without. "Easy to take advantage of. A very powerful group of people from a place called Cetaganda bribed the Komarrans to let them pass by Komarr with their armies, so they could take them down the path to Barrayar and conquer it. They did that. The Barrayarans of the time resisted, but the Cetagandans had more people, better weapons, better transportation..."

"Men," she murmurs.

He shrugs.

"Other people gave us a little help, and we learned very fast, under that pressure. Twenty years later, we fought the Cetagandans again and won. They left. I still wasn't alive yet, but my father was; he led the conquest of Komarr, because we couldn't let the Komarrans keep the power they had over us after the use they had made of it, and he did it as gently as possible, because he didn't want to start things down the path of people committing atrocities out of anger at the atrocities other people committed in response to their atrocities. Almost no one was killed. At first. It was going very well. Then someone on the Barrayaran side decided that he was too angry, that the Komarrans should suffer for what they'd done, and he gathered up about twelve-twelves and five-twelves of the Komarrans who might have been involved in the decision to let the Cetagandans pass, and he killed them all. Because he was angry."

She stares at him. "And then?"

"It stopped going well. The Komarrans were angry about that, so they started committing atrocities against the Barrayarans, and the Barrayarans, who had already been angry about the thing with Cetaganda, got angrier, and in the middle of all this was my father desperately trying to keep order while the Komarrans blamed him for what his subordinate did and many of the Barrayarans blamed him for not having done more of it, and it was obvious to both sides that the other side was evil and deserved to suffer. The point I am trying to make here is that no one is so evil they deserve to suffer, and when people start thinking that other people deserve to suffer for the wrongs they did, horrible cycles of revenge are what you get out of it."

"So if someone murdered your father, would you just go 'oh, well. That's tough'?"

"If someone murdered my father, I might kill them in anger. I'm not perfect. But I hope I would know better. I hope I would look for a better way, and kill them only if there was no better way available - only if they were going to kill more people and I couldn't stop them otherwise, or if they were trying to kill me too and I had to kill them in self-defense."

"We're not killing them. We're here, and I came alone, today, and I didn't shoot anyone, even if I'd love to. But you don't have to shake the murderer's hand, either, do you? They did this to us, and they're not even sorry."

"If a Komarran killed my father, I'd do almost anything to make that not turn into another horrible cycle of revenge like my father had to deal with in his time. Shake their hand? I'd become their best friend, if I could and it helped."

"And if you were their best friend before? Do you think you could - go back to seeing them that way?"

"Not easily. But I've done a lot of difficult things in my life already."

"All right. Fair enough. Now, about those rocks."

"Why rocks?"

"Uh, leaves and sticks won't really do any damage, using pure iron would be absurdly wasteful, rocks are plentiful -"

"I killed a Balrog. Do you imagine I dropped a rock on it?"

(Standing in his armour, its internal temperature perfectly comfortable despite the heat of the Balrog's charge melting the rocks under its feet, firing plasma bolt after barely-helpful plasma bolt until it's finally in range of his nerve disruptor, feeling the silence in his command helmet like a constant lonely ache that he cannot allow to overtake his thoughts and throw off his aim—)

"From high enough, yes, I expect that would do it -" she pauses as she gets the whole story. "Wow. Uh, thanks. Okay, lightning squeezers are also an acceptable way to take down Angband. We'll leave it to the expert, I guess. Men.

Uh, technically I'm here to say that our resources are also at your disposal for as long as we share a foe, and we don't have much because we're starving and they stole everything but still, you know, our pleasure, and Tyelcormo Turkafinwë is a worthless fucking liar but it's fine for you to work with him as long as you know. So. With that said, I think I'll head back before they worry about what the cousins are doing to me. That was a hell of a story, Vorkosigan. Thank you. Good luck with everything."

"Oh, you got that? I don't actually have any control or direct knowledge of which of my thoughts are audible to Elves. Anyway, you're welcome. Good luck to you too. If I can, I'll see about solving your starvation problem in between all the other problems I'm solving."

She doesn't climb down; she jumps, lands about forty feet away, and then walks away. Maglor watches her go for a few seconds before he turns around. "May I request your presence, Miles? We have breakfast and more questions and I think it'll be bad for morale in the long term if anyone who wishes to speak with you has to climb into your home."

Shrug. "Yes, of course."

He leaves the shuttle closed when he departs it; this seems like best practice.

"Curufin hasn't surfaced for air all day, which means that you must have been very useful to him. I appreciate it. You have a better sense of your capabilities than we do, so perhaps also a better sense of what our priorities should be - I want the site scan for mineable iron, but I'll take your word for it if there's something more urgent."

"My shuttle has a finite supply of the fuel it uses to fly, and making more would be yet another enormously difficult engineering problem on top of the uncounted enormously difficult engineering problems already facing us. I did think to do some scans from the air on my way here, but I'm reluctant to take it up again without a clear plan of exactly what I'm going to do while I'm up there. I can show you the map of nearby metals I found over breakfast, and if none of those turn out to be useful to you, 'scan for iron' can be the first thing to go on the list of tasks for my next flight."

"The shuttle will eventually lose flying capabilities. Okay. How many hours do we have? Are there activities that burn more than others? If we can't create this fuel, we should save it for the assault on Angband." He's taking notes.

"It has about four twelves of hours of fast high flight left in it, less than that if I want to go very fast. If I stay very close to the ground and fly in a differerent, slower way, I can use up a different resource which I do think you can create here, but that would make it much more difficult to survey for metals. It's also possible to teach someone how to use the surveying tools and send them out on horseback, but obviously that's slower and may be more dangerous than looking from the air."

"What resource is this? If you have books, you know, I can just set people to studying them, Curufinwë says that you have an appallingly bad script for writing but he wrote out a couple pages of instructions for it anyway. And we've been doing surveying on the ground. We don't lose people often, but - sometimes. What other resources are you going to run out of?"

"I have enough food for myself for three of twelve-twelves of twelve-twelves days... I do have books, but only six readers. What I mean to do today is learn about the tactical situation for the assault on Angband, maybe teach someone how to use some of my weapons, maybe teach someone how to safely take them apart to study them, and get someone started on making electricity - the same phenomenon as lightning but in a more controlled form. Nearly all of my devices use it."

"In that case I"ll leave you to it. Ah, unless you have any questions for me - you talked to my cousin..."

"...I'm curious why she believes you are all liars." Pause. "I am also curious how much of our conversation was overheard by the entire camp."

"Wherever she said 'my cousins', you can assume she really meant 'Tyelcormo', and was saying it mostly for his benefit. And I think a great many people heard you. Which was for the better. You had some interesting things to say." 

"Horrible cycles of revenge are bad. I believe this very strongly. Should I not ask what Irissë has against Tyelcormo?"

"Well, better to ask me than him. We were close with our cousins before the political tensions intensified. Irissë and Tyelcormo were close for a while after that - insulated, a little bit, by their shared dislike for politics. I think they'd promised each other they wouldn't let things get -" he waves a hand. "For what it's worth, I don't think Tyelcormo broke that commitment intentionally. They both just eroded things, convinced they weren't crushing it to rubble quite as fast as the other person was and so weren't to blame, and then woke up one day and -"

"Ah," sighs Miles. "Yes. Thank you for the explanation."

"Thank you for sharing your knowledge and the tools of your people so readily." He hesitates. "How did the story you told my cousin end? The one of Komarr?"

"I suppose it hasn't. Komarr is still a part of the Barrayaran Empire. My father and those who agree with him have made good progress in getting everyone to calm down and stop doing horrible things to one another. He has a lasting reputation as an evil murderer on Komarr and among the rest of the planets of Men, and a... more complicated reputation than that at home."

"That's what I ought to be doing. Metal and weapons and planning an assault on Angband seem much easier, though. You told my cousin you planned to learn today about the war?"

"Yes. It seems like important information to have."

"Moringotto is a Vala. The greatest of all of them, once. There's a tradeoff, for them, between flexible power and entrenchment in the world, and he's poured a great deal of himself into it - the fortress, Angband, the orcs, the Balrogs - so I would expect he no longer has the capacities typical of the Valar, such as the ability to make and discard any form at will. But he still might be able to do that. He has the Silmarils, the last work of my father and the most priceless art of our people. They contain the original divine light of Aman. They can heal, they instantaneously restore the strength that otherwise bleeds away from us in the Outer Lands, they make us stronger and faster, and their presence brings joy and reassurance. They cure grief more readily than anything else. I don't know what advantages they'll lend the Enemy, because it is supposed to be that evil beings cannot touch them. 

We fought around a million orcs, in the campaign to take this continent back. We won. Orcs are weak and disorganized. Balrogs - well, you've met one. Moringotto has a few of the minor Powers on his side, some not so minor, and we do not yet know how to kill any of them."

"Well. That's... a difficult problem."

(Not quite out of adolescence, accidentally in charge of an army, leading them to victory in a mad scramble—caught up in intrigues on the planet of his ancestral enemy, near-singlehandedly saving them from a nasty civil war—uniting ten thousand dispirited squabbling prisoners into a disciplined force capable of assisting in their own rescue—Miles has solved a difficult problem or two in his life.)

"One day you really have to tell me all of those stories. Let's add this one to the ledger first, though, shall we?"

"Happily."

"I don't expect my strength to lie in learning to disassemble your weapons. Tyelcormo'd probably be good at it, but he's off sulking and I'm not sure where to find him. You could also just head out and call for volunteers, we have lots of capable people."

"If I happen to find Tyelcormo I'll ask him; otherwise I suppose I'll look for volunteers. Curufinwë has also expressed interest in taking things apart."

"When he surfaces from the project of designing a magic artifact to prevent biological decay, which may well be in ten years, he'll doubtless be eager to do so. He rather focuses on things, I wouldn't interrupt him. Tyelcormo, you're going to need to know how these weapons work if you're going to test our first efforts at them." He doesn't say that at a particularly raised volume.

The implications of Elven hearing are... interesting. And Curufinwë's approach sounds familiar, although Miles himself more commonly spends days on things than years.

Celegorm catches him on his way back to the shuttle. "I'm interested in learning how your weapons work."

"Good. I'll be happy to show you."

Into the shuttle they go. Miles - who is not wearing his armour today - picks up a few incomprehensible objects from various racks.

"Would you prefer to work here or somewhere else?"

"Here's fine. You mentioned the shuttle will run out of fuel; will the weapons as well? And how are they fueled?"

Miles opens up each of the three objects and extracts from them three slightly different smaller objects, each approximately rectangular.

"These are power packs. They store the 'fuel' - electricity - that the weapon uses. At some point I should find someone interested in learning how to make that on the necessary scale and figure it out with them, but it's not urgent, it's one of the least difficult engineering problems facing us and I'm not about to run out."

"All right." He examines them, fascinated.

"When the weapon and the power pack are separated, the power pack is the more dangerous of the two; under certain conditions, particularly if subjected to extreme heat, the power pack may explode." He outlines safe handling practices: in short, don't light it on fire, don't pry it apart, and don't jam conductive metals into it. He also outlines the most efficient way to turn each power pack into a bomb if a bomb is actually what you want, and the likely strength of the resulting explosion. "But hopefully you won't ever need to do that; we have only so many power packs and making them is much trickier than charging them."

"Noted. Do you have other ways to make explosions?" 

"Yes, plenty, but my supplies are again limited and unlike these they cannot be reused, so I judge them less urgent to teach about. For now: the weapons themselves."

He indicates each in turn, disassembling and reassembling it over the course of a few descriptive sentences.

"Stunner. Fires a sort of immaterial projectile which makes living things it touches fall unconscious temporarily, if aimed well, or temporarily lose function and sensation in affected areas, if not. Useful for any situation in which you might want to take prisoners. It has the shortest effective range of the three. Nerve disruptor. The Balrog-killer. Its projectile is similar to lightning, but nastier; it destroys nerves and brains when it hits them. Plasma arc. The one that made the Balrog ooze unpleasantly. Its projectile is mostly heat. Very destructive, and effective at a longer range than either of the other two."

"They don't work at all outside their range? With an arrow, skill can lengthen your range -"

He shakes his head. "When we get around to demonstrations - is there a good place for that nearby? - I'll show you. The projectile itself can only survive intact for so long in each case. Now - the pulling them apart and putting them back together that I just did is a feature deliberately included in the design, so if any part is faulty it can be swapped out without trouble: here is what each of the parts does and how to determine its condition. First, these indicator lights here on the stunner power pack and here on the side of the weapon itself describe the level of charge remaining in the power pack..."

On he goes through all the parts of each weapon, detaching them from the rest, describing their function and appearance and how they fit together, and then moving on to the next. When the three weapons are laid out on the floor in pieces, he asks, "Do you want to try putting them back together now?"

He does, very very quickly and quite delightedly. "I know you keep saying there's no creator of your things, but they feel like they have one. Someone extraordinarily focused on a specific set of design constraints, and excelling at them so obsessively - it's very impressive."

"Nicely done," says Miles. "The way invention works among Men, it's most likely that twelves of twelves of people all collaborated on the design of each weapon, and then passed it on to many other people who designed machines to make each of the parts, and then even more people revised and refined and innovated on all these designs over time."

"That really, really doesn't sound like it would work. But you're the one with Balrog-killing weapons."

"It requires a different mindset. There's some room for singular genius among Men, but for the most part it's larger numbers of less brilliant people working together. Anyway, now you know how these weapons work and can help me teach it to whoever else wants to know. I have about two hundred of each of these. Would you rather pass the knowledge on to more people, or learn about explosives and other non-reusable dangerous things?"

"...let's go teach 200 people. I've been worried that the Enemy will attack - he must be off balance, what with the new lights, but he has to realize how valuable you and your things are. Also, we could use the stunners if the cousins attacked, so we didn't have to kill them. Though I don't know what we'd do afterwards."

"Sounds good to me," he says, declining to comment on what one does with unconscious cousins. "I think the mass teaching should be done somewhere that it will be safe to demonstrate the weapons in use; any ideas about location? Suggested students? I don't know anyone here outside your family yet."

"I can pick out two hundred people for you. We're using all the flat spaces for crops - we could test over the lake, but the cousins will think we're shooting at them. We could head farther afield, I suppose. With two hundred of these weapons we could win any fight we'd run into."

"I expect so. Well, let's take two hundred people to the nearest flat space not otherwise in use. I'll get my armour on, if we're going to be travelling."

He goes and gets his armour on, a very quick process, and then pulls several large floating crates out of a storage area at the back of the shuttle.

"How easily is the armor destroyed?"

"Not easily. And I have the means to make some simple repairs if it's slightly damaged."

"Do you have more than one of those?"

"Unfortunately no."

He lowers his voice to barely anything. "Can you hear me?"

Apparently not.

Well. That won't work, then. This conversation needs to happen out of Maglor's earshot, but it's probably best if Miles doesn't realize that's what he's trying for, both because Miles might object to subverting Maglor's authority (though it doesn't seem especially likely) or think poorly of them for having a situation where Celegorm is trying to subvert Maglor's authority (how is Barrayar run, anyway?). 

Miles seems oblivious to this plotting.

"Anyway, even if I did they would all be Man-sized. Elves are tall."

"I thought you weren't fully grown yet? There are seats in your shuttle that seem designed for Men taller than you, and I don't know if the conversions I did off your thoughts are precise but they suggested you were not yet thirty."

"Men are fully grown at twenty. I'm just short."

"A tall Man would be the height of a short Elf. Can we create the armor?"

"Creating the armor goes on the long, long list of enormously difficult engineering problems. Sometime after I've got someone making electricity I'll sit down and put that list in some kind of sensible order and then start solving it with someone. Apparently Curufinwë will be working on the biological decay problem exclusively for the next ten years, so not him."

"Our father's body crumbled to ash in our arms. We don't know why. That's not typical. I think our father tried holding it together through sheer force of will, long after it was dead, and that's why. But - in Valinor, a dead Elf can return to their body once it's fixed. Here that can't happen, because of decay. I think you might have inadvertently stumbled on something very emotionally important to my brother."

"That... makes a lot of sense."

"It's also what the Silmarils were for. They prevent decay, make it possible for us to live in this world indefinitely instead of slowly losing the strength we had in Aman."

"They sound very... magic."

"Yes. My father said he put his soul into them, and I think he might have meant it literally. They're alive, in a way. But if he put his soul into them, it was a part of it he never knew how to express in life. The Silmarils are some kind of distilled essence of joy and potential and growth and strength and healing. You hold them and the first thing you think is 'oh, I'm all right, I'm enough.' and then the next thing you think is 'there is so much I can do; I am capable enough, I am strong enough, I'm allowed...'

I love my father. But, uh, "you're good enough" is not something he was good at saying, or conveying."

"I've... had a few moments like that with my own father."

(Seventeen years old, having just failed the entrance examination for the Imperial Service Academy, hearing every reassurance as a lack of faith in his potential, as a judgment that he'd never been going to amount to anything anyway...)

"Different situations, though, I think."

For one thing, the sons of Fëanáro Curufinwë might one day see him again... no, let's not go down that road.

"We only see him again if we fail. If we die."

"Yes. Sorry."

They're a sufficient distance from camp at this point. If he waits until their trainees are firing the weapons, Maglor almost certainly won't hear him. The trainees will. But - well, he'd been the one to select them.

They reach a flat area. Miles sets himself up so that everyone can see him give the lecture on the safe handling of weapon parts, the difference between the three types, the disassembly and reassembly process and the function of each part, how to make a bomb out of a power pack and why you probably shouldn't; then he demonstrates the range of each, by firing them across a long area of flat ground. Everyone can watch the stunner bolt blur and fade from the air as it whines along, watch the nerve disruptor bolt frazzle itself to death at a little more than half again that distance, and then watch a sequence of plasma bolts make successively less impressive scorch marks on the ground at successively greater distances.

"He didn't make them and can't yet teach us how," Celegorm says, "but he killed a Balrog with them and can teach you that."

"Yes," Miles agrees.

So he distributes weapons from the floating crates and has Tyelcormo help make sure everyone is able to take apart each weapon and check its parts and put it back together correctly, and that they all have the meanings of the various settings and indicator lights straight, and then he sets people to shooting at rocks. Stunners have a power dial which can be turned low to conserve energy and maximize gentleness, or high to abandon gentleness and maximize range. Nerve disruptors have no such feature, but run their power packs down slower than either of the other two anyway. It would be very bad if anyone accidentally hit anyone with a plasma arc or a nerve disruptor, so don't do that.

Their students shoot at rocks. Miles watches with a critical eye and a satisfied smile.

"Miles."

"Yes?"

"There's something - you must have picked up pieces of it. My oldest brother. The Enemy offered to give us a Silmaril, call a truce. We knew we couldn't trust him, but Nelyo thought it'd be worth the chance to play along and get a Silmaril. We sent more than the permitted numbers to the agreed-upon site. He had Balrogs. When the rest of our army arrived, everyone was dead but Nelyo. A year later, the Enemy started sending us pieces."

"I've picked up on a little of this, yes."

"I want to go get him."

"This sounds like the sort of situation where rescue missions are stupid. But then, I've always been the sort of person who goes on the stupid rescue mission anyway, and I haven't yet been made to regret it."

"It is. Cáno said no, when we first learned, and I obviously did not go on a rescue mission then. But now we have something the Enemy could not have anticipated - your weapons - and more reason to think we can pull it off. Cáno will still say no, because he regards not being stupid as his job. But my job is to fight for my family."

"It has frequently seemed to me that my job is to do the impossible. I'm in favour of this rescue mission."

"Great. So, Angband is in the mountains, and they're nearly impassable - but you have maps of them, in the lightning-sculptor, so we can find a way through. I have no idea where he's being kept or if he's still alive, though if we're close enough and he's conscious and still sane, I'll be able to hear his thoughts."

"A way through without the shuttle, you mean?"

"It has limited fuel, right? Cáno will literally kill me if I use that for this. On the other hand, if we're going to drop explosives on Angband anyway, it would be a good distraction to try this."

"People who are having explosives dropped on them are frequently very distracted."

"You might kill Maitimo. But - honestly, that's the best I'm hoping for from this. I don't really think we're going to get out with him."

"A successful rescue does seem unlikely."

But Miles has never been inclined to let that stop him.

"I want to do this right away, before the Enemy learns more of your capabilities and so Maitimo doesn't have to be there a day longer than necessary. Can we take a look at your scans of the area?"

"Yes."

Here is his reader; here is his map; here is just the part of it concerning the impassable mountains.

He looks at it intently. "This is passable. It'd be difficult, but possible. That bit - uh, that looks harder. I wonder if there are tunnels."

"We can look for tunnel entrances on this," he says, fiddling with the image some more. "There's a lot of detail getting left out because the display isn't fine enough to show it..."

"What's that?"

"Not sure."

He re-centers the image on the anomalous thing and zooms in another several factors.

"...oh."

"Alive? Can you tell, from there - make it bigger, that's him."

He makes it bigger by another several factors. Yes, that's a person. An alive person, as of the time the holo was taken.

"We should leave right now."

"Yes. Maybe. Yes."

His brain fills with tactical and political considerations, churns over them for a couple of seconds, and comes around to:

"There's a case to be made that the time to make an assault on Angband is right now while we have as many people armed with my weapons as we're going to get anytime soon and the amount of thinking and preparing your Enemy is able to do about the situation is minimized." He dismisses the image of the mountains. "The fact that this would also be the optimal course for rescuing your brother... need not be mentioned until we either come back with him or don't."