Of all the times to experience deja vu, notifying emergency services about a snake monster before it eats her is an odd one.
She arrives on a pleasant sandy beach.
The rising slope of the sand blocks her view inland, but off to her right along the curve of the shore she can see some crudely made wooden huts, thatched with gradually disintegrating grass. In and around the huts, some people of a largely Elf-like body plan but few other resemblances to Elves are preparing to go out fishing, in small boats much prettier than the houses they live in.
The language they're speaking bears no resemblance to any she's heard before. It's approximately aesthetically acceptable, but clearly not designed with beauty in mind.
As she approaches, more of the village is revealed behind a low ridge; the huts are clustered around the mouth of a river, and the buildings get nicer as they get farther from the sea, although none reach the point of being something an Elf would admit to having constructed.
Someone spots her and calls a greeting. Busy not-elves have a brief, friendly argument over who should go see what she wants; then the youngest person there, a small boy, volunteers himself and darts off toward her.
He retrieves a woman from the second-prettiest dwelling available.
The woman is - old, and not old like an Elf where mostly what you see is mannerisms indicating experience and maturity. She has those too, but she's... withered. Her curly black hair is fading to white; her medium-brown skin is wrinkled and papery. (The hair is wrapped up in a scarf, but from beneath the scarf it falls loose down her back.)
The small boy chatters at both of them, and the old woman smiles and pats his shoulder and introduces herself as Viasarae, then attempts to inquire (supplementing her incomprehensible words with mime and gesture) where Ambela is from and how she came to be here instead of there.
...the 'another planet' part seems to be unduly puzzling. Viasarae sends Kioh to retrieve a map from inside her house, and indicates that the village is right here on the coast, at the end of an unmarked offshoot of this particular river on the map's sole (large, blobby, unrecognizable) continent.
(Rather inexplicably, the map has a single city with no surrounding landmass marked a considerable distance away from the main continent. It almost looks like, rather than 'this city is right here in the middle of the ocean', the map is trying to say 'this city is somewhere but your guess is as good as mine about the specifics'. The dot and the handwriting that labels it are both fancier than any other city on the map. The alphabet, of course, is totally indecipherable.)
With reference to objects in the environment, Viasarae is able to not only name some local landmarks but also translate the names: the big river is the Rocky River, the offshoot is the Pebbled River, the village is Pebbled Shore, and the fancy city in the middle of the ocean is Skygarden.
She tries to ask after the spatial relationship between Valimar and this here continent.
Viasarae is perplexed. She attempts to confirm the identities of these various objects, incidentally providing Ambela with local vocabulary for 'sun' and 'moon' and 'dawn' and 'dusk' and 'day' and 'night'.
Kioh, meanwhile, fetches chairs for them to sit on (Ambela would be a little tall to fit inside one of the houses) and a sun-shade to set up over them, and two empty wooden cups. When he hands one to Viasarae, it fills itself with water, and she holds the other one out to Ambela with a little motion as though to offer her the same service.
She says something that is probably an expression of sympathy, then conveys an offer for Ambela to stay in the village for now if she likes, and a suggestion that if she'd rather take her chances elsewhere there are some larger settlements upriver, although she'll have to go quite a ways to get to one that's important enough to be marked on the map of the continent.
"What magic do they have there? Is it the same as ours?" she asks, and then takes a brief vocabulary detour to explain that magic is the thing she is doing when she makes water appear from thin air or manipulates it once it exists, or when Kioh lights a bit of paper on fire by pointing at it, or when the farmers in the village upriver make plants grow more vigorously than they otherwise would have, or when the Emperor builds a flying city.
"...people near him, whenever he likes. Well, not just anyone, that's one of the ways he could be worse. If you mind your own business and stay out of trouble, he won't bother you. But people who get in his way, or annoy him..." She shrugs and shakes her head. "And he's not very nice to his slaves, either."
Eventually the boats start coming back in, and Viasarae introduces Ambela to the rest of the village. It's a really small village. Most of them are kind of confused by this pointy-eared stranger, and content to let her stay Viasarae's problem, but a handful of Viasarae's children and grandchildren take an interest and join in the language lessons as afternoon wears on into evening.
Everyone is very impressed.
They do not have an entire extra house for her and it'll be a bit cramped if she tries to fit into one of theirs, but there's a couple of spare beds she can put together and a tent to put up over them in case of rain, and if she really wants a roof over her head then she can probably find a spot on Viasarae's floor with room for her to curl up in.
Yep! And here's a little magical lamp to read by!
Some of the recipes are a little baffling; others sound delicious. The poetry is hard to decipher, but rewardingly pleasant to read aloud even when the meanings continue to elude her. The history of the empire is mostly kind of samey, although if she reads closely enough there's an unsettling implication that everyone (with the exception of the Emperor) just dies eventually and then is never heard from again.
Magic seems kind of complicated, and she might have to get someone more interrogable than a book to re-explain the basics in the morning.
"Okay!" he says. "So there's three ways to get magic - do you know the nine elements? Life and Death are the first tier, and Land and Sea and Sky are the second tier, and Fire and Ice and Light and Shadow are the third tier. Some people are born with a little bit of magic in some of the elements, and the day you're born someone can pick you up and dedicate you to some elements and you'll get a little more magic than that, and the day you turn sixteen you can dedicate yourself to some elements and get a lot of magic. But dedication is more dangerous the more elements you're trying for, especially if you already have some of them. Like Grandmama, she was born Sea and dedicated Sea as a baby and then again on her sixteenth birthday, and that's really dangerous and she could've died but she didn't. I was born Fire, that's why I can light fires by magic. And I want to dedicate Sea like Grandmama but sometimes I think I want other elements too, like Life so I can learn how to not sleep."
"I'm not sure, never having built one myself. Sky and the full third tier are probably best for it, but I don't know if you need both, or whether you need to have most of them self-dedicated or only a few or maybe even none. It might depend on whether you're trying to build the flying ship by yourself."
She nods. "—oh, in case no one's explained, the elements don't stay strictly inside their own domains; there are combinations that give you a little extra. Fire and Ice add up to something with motion and lightning included, Light and Shadow together give you more things to do with the senses, and if you have the whole third tier you can enchant objects. Completing the first or second tier has similar benefits but it's harder to explain what they are, since I imagine it won't mean much to you if I say that it gives you a more complete command of that tier's domain."
"The same thing that lets Elves have blessings also let us, and orcs, who have a similar thing, make promises we could not break. The orcs were all made to promise as small children that they would serve their inventor, who was evil. Now oaths don't work that way any more, and only let us swear to being honest and things like that."
"You're welcome."
She thinks for a moment, then adds: "I do think he cares something for the peace and safety of his empire. If there was some unfathomable disaster threatening my village that I couldn't face on my own, something that seemed likely to roll over us and keep going if no one stopped it, I'd send for the Emperor and expect him to make it better rather than worse."
"Give up one or two of those to the right buyer," she says, nodding at Ambela's rings, "and you'll have not only passage to Skygarden but enough left over to buy a house when you get there. The right buyer might be more trouble than they're worth to find, though. I don't deal in that sort of thing often enough to know."
The city of Skygarden is beautiful.
Oh, it's clear enough that Elves don't live there - a lot of things are dirty or in poor repair, there's litter and so on - but underneath the wear and tear of use, most of the architecture would hold its own in a Valian design contest. The gardens visible along the sides of the island are gorgeous. The palace in the middle is huge and sprawling and exquisitely lovely, made all of stone that rises from the ground in a single seamless piece, with courtyards and fountains and greenhouses and ivy-clad towers and a low outer wall to mark out its territory.
Inconveniently, people within human hearing range of her singing mostly don't talk. But when she listens farther away than that, or spends time not singing, she can overhear Emperor-related gossip such as:
- remember that time he threw somebody off the palace roof a few years ago? Working at the palace must be terrifying!
- they finally tore down my old neighbourhood and the Emperor came in and built new houses overnight and they're all gorgeous
- my friend's cousin's husband sold one of his maids last year and the Emperor bought her, poor girl
- it's been a while since the Emperor added new land to the island, I wonder where he'll put it on next?
- I was at a party last month, more upscale than I usually go to, and the Emperor showed up, but people mostly weren't frightened - maybe you get used to it, if you run in the sort of social circle where the Emperor shows up to parties - anyway I left early and I'm not accepting any more invitations from that household, maybe some people can get used to socializing with the Emperor but I'm not cut out for it
- my uncle's girlfriend's sister is a palace secretary and she says it's just like any other job really, but she doesn't dare go near the Emperor's personal wing because she took a shortcut right past it once and she could hear the girls screaming, which doesn't sound much like any other job to me
- my ex-landlord's family fell on hard times and had to sell his niece, and he ran into her in the market and she said it was so awful she'd rather belong to the Emperor, I'm sure she didn't mean it but can you imagine—!
The Emperor is, variously: out, napping, napping, torturing someone, out, out, descending from the sky on huge grey owl's wings and landing on a balcony as she watches (and then taking a nap), torturing someone again, and in the public section of the palace having a conversation with some sort of bureaucrat.
"I don't see why you want me involved."
"I thought you might like a chance to comment, all things considered."
"He annoys me. I don't have people executed for annoying me."
"...well..."
"'Well' what? That incorrigible pest from a few years ago? I threw him off a roof; the law of the empire did not at any point get involved."
"...fair enough."
"I have no idea whether Lord Estulas defrauded all those merchants and no particular urge to find out. Leave me out of it."
"Very well. And I assume you're equally uninterested in looking over the proposed changes to tax law—"
"Tax law does much better without my input. I'm going to go redesign my bedroom or something. Send for me if you think of anything that could actually benefit from my attention."
And then he does in fact go back to his wing of the palace and reshape a sizeable chunk of it into a new but equally beautiful form.
And, having seen him land on his balcony that one time, she'll probably recognize him despite the lack of wings when he comes by to listen to her sing.
Nobody else seems to catch on; he doesn't attract any more attention than any other listener approximately that well-dressed. After a few songs, he comes up and drops some very high-denomination coins in her basket.
There are two ways to become a slave: voluntary sale (with the money usually going to a close friend or family member, although you can have it directed anywhere), or forced sale in case of debt (if you owe so much money that you couldn't possibly pay it all, your creditors get everything you have plus whatever you raise at auction). Attempting to forcibly enslave someone by any other means is very illegal. Once somebody is legally enslaved, though, there is approximately no legal protection of their rights or well-being except very incidentally - if you torture your slaves loudly at all hours you might incur a noise complaint; if you mistreat them grievously and then can't find anyone willing to buy what's left you can't legally collect insurance money for that any more than you could after deliberately burning down your own house.
(If a slave bears children, the children are born free but the mother's owner is responsible for their care. No one under the age of sixteen can be legally enslaved.)
"Yes! I have a very good memory. That one is a little sad but not really on a scale that tends to get to me; it's about a nightingale on Endorë encountering nightingale-scaled travails and eventually dying and Eru is able to notice most of them but by the end he's scaled down to a less obsessively birdwatching form and it dies by itself and no one pays attention."
"My favorite really tragic song is one about the invention of a - a thing, that we have, it's not magic but it might be simpler to understand it that way. The invention of a blessing that lets Elves look at orcs and see them as Elves. We have a hard time being around things that aren't beautiful and orcs were deliberately crafted to offend our aesthetic sensibilities; I can spend about a day in an orc city if I don't look at anyone too closely and know I'm going to go home to my husband and sing with him a lot, and I'm on the high end of tolerance. So if we invented such a thing it'd let us socialize with them a lot more than we currently do. And the song is about an Elf who in this way falls in love with an orc, so deeply that she manages to woo this orc and overcome general orcly annoyance with Elves, and they get married, and decide that since they are so in love surely, if she turns the blessing off -"
"It was so exciting. Oromë found us - the Valar didn't know that there were Elves yet - and he made us ships with miniature ecosystems in each one and loaded us all up and brought us there and it took two and a half Valian Years, or twenty-five Endorë years - I'm not sure exactly how long yours are but I think closer to Endorë's. And we planned how we'd live in Valinor and I talked to Oromë a lot about Ainur."
"It's very strange to talk to someone who knows I'm the Emperor and isn't terrified of me, but I suppose being a five-thousand-year-old visitor from another world would do it. I spent probably much too long not being quite sure you knew, just because I would've expected more of a reaction."
"I can actually bring back the dead, it just takes about half a day per, which means that since I can't do it casually all the time for everyone I prefer to do it secretly and infrequently so people don't start expecting it. But I also don't plan to hurt you, so hopefully you won't have to find out how far you should be trusting spontaneous suicide as a defense mechanism."
"That sounds more pleasant all around. I wouldn't be expecting to permanently de-Mirelótë the world, my chip sends backups to the Vala of the dead back home and while it may not be managing to send updates from here it's probable that eventually my husband would authorize forking me from the time of my disappearance."
"It has other things to recommend it. ...Perhaps I should say it has any things to recommend it, Eru not really being one. The Valar he seems to consider pets more than playthings and they can make more progress on him than incarnates can, I think he is reasonably tame now with the possible exception of having been responsible for sending me here."
"I'm not attached to the inherent mortality of my species, but if anyone's going to mess with us they'd better be really sure it's not going to do something just as stupid like make it impossible for any more people to get magic. And I really do not want your omniscient creator deity anywhere near my world."
"Oh, sure. But I think you might be underestimating what it would take for me to stop being terrifying. I go to great lengths to arrange my life so I never have to risk losing my temper at anyone, and I still sometimes end up throwing somebody off a roof because I have less impulse control than I'd like."
"Temporary but not exactly an oversight. The airship docks are in the west right now, which means if I build the island to encourage gawking in that direction then people will tend to crowd the area to watch the ships, and it'll make a mess of traffic. When I've expanded the island enough to displace the docks, I'll shift them north and put in a sunset garden on the west edge."
"Sixteen-year-olds don't always have the greatest risk assessment in the world. And the skill element is hard enough to articulate that I think a lot of people misunderstand it, and think they can get by on just being stubborn, just being a good dancer, just having a high pain tolerance..."
"That's adorable," he says. "But I was going to make you wings—here—"
A single large flower on a thick twisting stalk spirals up out of the ground next to Ambela, and when it opens its delicate silver-white petals, instead of any usual flower parts they reveal a pool of soft blue-grey fabric with a shimmery luster, like a smoother, softer version of silk, light enough to flow like water.
Extracted from the flower, it turns out to be a dress, with elbow-length sleeves and an open back. The skirt is made of a multitude of long overlapping petal-like layers. Tiny imperfections in the weave of the fabric form a subtle pattern that resembles falling rain, especially when the layers move over one another.
And she grows wings.
It happens over the course of a few seconds - first a strange weight hanging from her shoulders, then a rush of odd sensations as the wings develop to their full size and acquire nerves and bones and muscles and feathers and skin. As promised, though, it doesn't hurt. And when it's finished, she has wings, just as much under her control as her arms or legs and with just as much grace and precision of movement - maybe even a little more.
Per her suggestion, the wings are based on the form of a hawk's, but with pale shimmering feathers that ripple with subtle colour as though carved from mother-of-pearl. They look absolutely magnificent.
The Emperor follows, closing the portal behind them.
The ocean is a long way down from here, and there's no land in sight - but it's not that hard to figure out how to glide. Her wings seem to have some muscle memory pre-installed. Up to her if she wants to attempt flapping on this basis.
Meanwhile, the Emperor lets himself fall for a second or two before he summons his wings and catches himself.
"Some people complained about the introduction of money. I think we would have kept with the gift economy if we'd had a smaller population - it was so cozy. But Dwarves convinced us that markets were the only sensible way to handle large amounts of information about what people wanted to have. So we do basic income."
"And - I like it when people are happy that I made them nice things, I've known that for a while, but until you came along I hadn't known what it was like when they're also not terrified of me - I think I could've been very happy in a society like that. Well, as long as I hadn't grown up in it. Nobody deserves having me grow up near them."
"It was right after my self-dedication. Under the circumstances, nobody was going to argue with me about whether murdering him invalidated my claim. And then I discovered that running an empire is actually a lot of work and I'm not any good at it, and it took me a while to put together a functional government that didn't need me for anything, and by the end of that I was starting to notice things like 'the law of the empire works much better if I at least mostly obey it'..."
"...I'm not sure how to say... it's... the thing that things being important is for. I'm a lot less - caught up in that - than I used to be, but mostly because there's no reasonable way anyone could make me stop being Emperor. And no way at all that anyone could make me stop being absurdly powerful."
"Yes, I likely should. I think - hm, how to put this - I think that insofar as I have objections to how you run the world I can at least be confident that they won't be exacerbated if I provide the world with arbitrary advances, and that makes being here less stressful. I would have no such confidence if I encountered a world with a full-sized unrestrained Eru operating it."
"—the slavery and the torture are related, that's part of what I meant about the laws of the empire working better if I follow them. People are better off if they know when to expect that sort of thing - they're still mostly terrified of coming to my attention, but back when I used to pick up whoever I felt like, it was much much worse."
"I mean I don't want to stop torturing people and I don't want to go back to the days when everyone was terrified they'd be next, so I'd have to find some other way to make it - obvious and predictable and legal and something that most people are safe from and know they're safe from."
"Because it's fun. Right up there next to architecture among my favourite hobbies. —I don't think the part where they don't want to be there is necessary to the fun part, if that helps at all, you could plausibly solve this problem just by finding someone who thought being tortured by the Emperor seemed like a desirable lifestyle, but I've never run into such a person and I'm not sure they exist. It's not like they wouldn't know where I live, if they did."
He follows, closing the portal behind them and exchanging his wings for a shirt so as to be less recognizable. Feathers turn to smoke, then recoalesce as fabric.
"...I think... what I get out of it has to do with making people afraid, and I'd like it just as well, maybe even better, if I was making them happy instead. Godlike beings pretending to have bodies but not pretending hard enough to get hurt would be the wrong sort of thing on a lot of levels."
"They might not, I suppose, though it seems obvious enough to me. ...there's also the question of - maybe there's someone out there who would like it, but wants to be able to quit if they change their mind, and they really don't have any good reasons to trust me and I'm not sure how to give them one."
"Oh, it's not the same, really, I didn't have something in mind for it. Melkor rendered a lot of Elves as pure bodiless information which he could duplicate and torture more conveniently in parallel at high speed. The results did not want to exist, so after the war their pre-capture instances were instantiated once per, instead. My husband's one of those."
"He didn't like that there was a fated plan and decided to do things so horrible that they couldn't possibly be in the fated plan, to derail it. This did not work at all because Eru has appalling taste in stories. Also he just liked torturing people or I imagine he would have come up with something else."
Snort. "If I heard there was a fated plan where I was supposed to make people suffer for some omniscient creator deity's entertainment - assuming I had a very good reason to believe it was definitely true - that might get me to stop torturing people. What kind of an idiot do you have to be, to not notice that 'well I'll be even worse then' is the kind of plan that sinks in the harbor? Or did he not know what his role was in this drama?"
Sekar spends a little while designing outfits, then has them anonymously delivered. Ambela will have so many pretty things to wear. (By and large they're pretty modest by local standards, because other people are likely to care about that sort of thing even if she herself wouldn't.)
Absolutely! At this rate a pretty little house shouldn't be more than a few weeks away. Longer if she wants to be selective about location; property with a good view tends to be more expensive, although near the edge of the island this effect is not as consistent as it could be, because people expect that eventually their view will be obscured by more pretty little houses.
His government governs pretty respectably. They're not Elves or anything, but there is a detectable underlying consensus among government employees that the point of their jobs is to maintain a stable and functional society where important tasks get done on time, even if some of them are less concerned with that ideal and more concerned with playing political games or flirting with their coworkers.
The current owner of the house was enthralled by her last concert and is happy to take a significant chunk of the price now and wait until she has the rest.
After another few days, she walks by the palace when the Emperor is home. He looks up from the book he was reading, steps out onto his balcony, and raises his eyebrows at her across the significant distance between them.
"Oh, hard to say. I show up when a self-dedication runs longer than ten hours or so, but I don't keep close track of them after that. There's some people around who took the full second tier, and a handful of people have ever survived taking Life but I don't know offhand if any of them are still around, the last one was a while ago."
"I like to meet people who're going to have significant power, so if they're obviously going to be trouble I can stop them before they get there. Early on, somebody got through Life and Death while I wasn't paying attention, and he didn't manage to kill me but he made an awful mess trying; when people know they're going to meet me the moment they step out of a long dedication, that sort of thing doesn't happen so much."
"It's actually not possible for me to resurrect everyone who dies. At the end of every year of trying I'd have a bigger job ahead of me than I did at the beginning, evem if I never slept and did two a day, which is not a pace I could keep up any longer than a month. So something has to change before people start getting resurrected at scale. Maybe I figure out how to do a hundred thousand people in a day, or maybe someone else survives the self-dedication for Life and Death and goes around encouraging more people to try it and bringing them back when they fail until there are enough of them to keep up. Who knows. But I don't plan on setting aside time for it someday because the only way it's possible is if it stops being a thing I'd need to set aside that much time for."
"He's kept in a virtual reality setup. For Elves imprisonment just is a form of torture, so - although it's not the case for Ainur - we're very much inclined to being generous about the details insofar as we can without letting him threaten anyone. Virtual reality is - he can set up things to experience and then they'll be presented to him as sort of illusions."
The government governs. Someone reforms a tax law to make it more understandable. There's a brief discussion of preparation for the next expansion of the island, which ends with no one volunteering to go ask the Emperor if he has any plans. A judge is investigated for corruption. Somebody mentions idly that the imperial wing has been weirdly quiet these past few weeks, but nobody wants to speculate too hard about why.
"It does. Dwarves pay a lot more explicit attention to safety hazards - I think they might do that anyway, just to price them in, and they definitely don't have our reluctance to compromise aesthetics to put in railings and warning signs and such, but even allowing for that. And humans seem farther along the axis."
"Wow, I wouldn't even have thought of that," he says, "the railings and warning signs—yeah, of course if falling off a cliff is a temporary inconvenience at worst, you're less motivated to make sure it doesn't happen—I cheat, of course, when there's a section of edge where railings would ruin the view I just magic the wind so you'd have to be trying pretty hard to fall off."
"We don't exactly think it's awful if animals die but we're definitely less easy about killing them, and we've invented ways to get meat that don't require it. Orcs used to have - farmlike institutions - that produced meat from animals incredibly efficiently but were deeply cruel to the animals, but they were willing to replace those when we had a solution."
"Elves find the idea that someone might have a child without intending and wanting to horrific. Orcs like large families and aren't terribly concerned about exact timing, so they didn't mind not having a way to prevent conception, but they took one when we offered. I'm not actually sure to what extent humans have that."
"Well, my life would be a little more convenient if I could resurrect a hundred thousand people with a wave of my hand, and I can't do that. Although if it's possible to do, I'll figure it out eventually. And - there are things that just can't be taken by force, the thing you get if you try isn't the thing you wanted to have. I find myself somewhat at a loss in that area."
"Meanwhile, if I never get home I expect my husband would pine for a few thousand years until someone gently explained to him that I did authorize him to consent to forks for me because that might ever have been necessary and I wouldn't want to miss everything and I'd get along great with myself if I ever did come back."
"The idea is that the moment you realize you want to be with someone for the rest of your life is the most romantic possible moment, and you can sort of extend that moment a bit if you wait and contemplate how great they are, and the longer you hold out the more highly you think of your would-be partner, and he thought I was fantastic, so, hundred Years."
"I have so many reservations about that. And - I can talk to almost anyone I like, even here, if I don't tell them who I am. But the not telling them who I am makes it..." he trails off and shakes his head. "I think I'd have some of the same problem even with people who hadn't otherwise heard of me."
"They're very passionately cognizant of the fact that in a well functioning economy money represents value - free time and comfort and satisfied preferences - and even if you happened not to charge for the portal they'd be aware that you could have made scads of money on it and consider you to have provided a lot of value."
"Dwarves like to live underground in dizzying cave systems and orcs like to live in dense angular skyscrapers all packed tight. Dwarves go for less organics - gems and marble and metal where we'd put fishtanks and ivy and wood, not that we don't like gems and marble and metal in our own way. They like really legible layouts, even if you've never been to a particular Dwarf city before and don't have a guide you can often find things by pictogram or just going where it seems the path wants you to be. Orcs like steel and they have a lot of monochrome greys and a lot of bright bold colors for children - they usually avoid more jewel tones and pastel sorts of things, too Elfy. They also don't sing for the same reason - some instrumental music, some non-melodic chanting, little overlap. They don't like sunlight, their cities are pretty shaded and don't have many plants though they do live aboveground, but they have thirty-story playgrounds for their little ones."
"Not openly. He kept trying to coax me into changing this or that law, and I think sometimes it was just because he wanted to have a say in what the laws were, more than he wanted whatever particular thing he was arguing for - the only one I'm absolutely sure was personal was the one about polygamy, because he acted like he just couldn't fathom the idea of anyone not wanting to marry thirty slave girls if marrying thirty slave girls was an option."
"Mm... I wasn't quite... thinking about it like that? I told him to shape up or fuck off, he apologized, I figured that was the end of it, it wasn't, I repeated myself, he apologized again, I can't remember how many times we went around on that but it wasn't much more than a handful, and then I found him waiting for me when I got back from flying, and, well, that was the last time."
"Yes. Though I'm not sure it's even that, it's—I've spent five thousand years finding out what I wanted and then arranging to get it, and I thought I had it all more or less worked out, if not perfectly, and then... I'm suddenly so much more aware of what I'm missing, and I can't do anything about it because the last five thousand years of my life are getting in the way."
"Oh, the results aren't private, that would be fine. Elf hair is considered sexual. We all have it long and it's always braided in public - some places scarves are considered polite if you're not swimming. You can get away with just a ponytail for extremely casual situations."
"If you ended debt-based slavery there are presumably other places you could obtain a slave class so most people wouldn't need to expect that you might abduct them suddenly," she says. "But I wouldn't like to be in a position of having to suggest other ways to add to the slave population."
And on the other side is a broad courtyard, gravel paths winding between slender trees and marble fountains. He hasn't done anything to the gravity, but he's obviously done something to the atmosphere, because there is one.
The dominant colour is pale grey; even the trees and flowers are nearly colourless, just a hint of green lingering in the leaves, a touch of pink in the petals. The restricted palette lends the place an ethereal air, especially in combination with the architectural style, which favours spare lines, delicate curves, and organic asymmetry, and takes advantage of the low gravity to climb in otherwise-hazardous proportions up to otherwise-impossible heights.
"They used to do things like prohibit homosexuality and refuse to reembody people without making sure they were straight first, and had some interesting ideas about the relative importance of the members of various species and divine command and such, and the book examines their ideas and the principles according to which they evolved over time."
"When Oromë found the Elves on Endorë and offered to bring us to Valinor, he was the most interesting thing anyone'd ever seen. He made the air around him crackle and he had to speak to Elves by osanwë because he didn't even have vocal cords, let alone a word of Quenya, and he was so strange and enthralling. The man who is now our King, with a couple of his friends, went to look at the paradise he told everyone about and see if it was good, and they came back fifty years later to confirm that it was, and I was a little girl then and Oromë was a little better at interacting with incarnates by then but not by much, he was so strange. And I thought, 'him and the other ones like him are the most important things there are that I could go talk to' - since you couldn't go talk to Eru, then - 'I have to know how they work, I have to know why they do things and what they can do'."
"I find different ways people think to be one of the most interesting topics in the world. I had been vaguely considering writing another book consisting of interviews with married couples, who if they have the right marital style and blessings have a lot of insight into each other's thought processes."
"...Mercy feels evil," he says. "To have the power to hurt someone, and want to, and not do it, feels to me the way I imagine most people feel about, I don't know, rape or something. Like I'm doing something actively, terribly wrong. A lot of the... arranging my life to be better for everyone in it... that I've done over the years has been finding ways to think of things as something other than mercy so I can do them. It... seemed like you might want to know that."
"Yeah. Did that for a while, early on. But - if I want a functioning empire, I have to pay some attention to its needs, and that means things like buying slaves instead of abducting every attractive person I pass on the street. So I had to learn to think my way around that."
"...it feels like the right kind of person for me to be is defined by my - imperialness, that this is who I am because my father was the Emperor. But I don't know if that's actually why I feel that way, or if I'd have exactly the same moral compass if I'd been born in a gutter."
"Yeah. I don't know, I've never tried to explain it to anyone before. And I think it might be different because... I'm not trying very hard to be the person I feel like I should be, I'm mostly trying to live my life without letting that person get in my way too badly. So as long as whatever I'm doing doesn't feel actively awful, I don't bother too much about whether it's better or worse by that measure than something else I could be doing instead."
"Most of the problem is mercy. When I took all the elements and then killed my father to become Emperor, that was about - needing to seek power - but I've sought enough power by now, even if I found something else as big as self-dedicating all the elements I wouldn't feel like I had to take it. —that's also what I was talking about when I said that being Emperor is what things being important is for."
Thoughtful pause.
"I think if I couldn't be Emperor without having to do the work, I'd want to get out of it, but as it is I've got a solution that works and I don't see a reason to stop. And I would be so annoyed if I let someone else have a turn and they somehow managed to do a worse job than me, or even just do some particular thing wrong that I've learned not to..."