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Confirmation reaches them in the spring that Elwing of Sirion has the Silmaril.
It takes as long as the spring only because they weren't looking. They can stretch the oath that far, they can be disinterested in knowing - but now they know, and so there it is. Elwing of Sirion is twenty-three. Half-man, so fully grown. Sirion is a city of refugees. Elves and Men and, since there are Men, children. Elwing herself has infant children.
They debate whether to send messengers. Debating is allowed, even protracted debating. The Oath, these days, is loud in their minds, and louder when they're pushing it like this, but they drag out the debate for a few months. Messengers will probably be shot on sight. The last time Elwing of Sirion received news of the House of Fëanor it would have been the news that her brothers, twins, aged seven, had not survived the sack of Menegroth.
They send messengers anyway. The messengers are shot on sight. They have good armor, Fëanorian armor, and return home injured but not lethally. Maglor's songs no longer stitch them together. War makes you worse at healing. Maglor's songs are more powerful than ever - he can knock back a wave of approaching enemies, he can make a blade's next touch deadly, he can make them faster and more impervious to danger, but he can no longer do healing.
Maedhros, when he thinks about this, thinks that perhaps there needs to be part of you that is not broken for healing spells to draw on. Or perhaps the Enemy is amused to strip that away first. Perhaps the Enemy finds it suited to the theme as the Oath tugs and yanks and twists them into violence against the lands they once defended and the peoples they once sheltered.
They send messengers to Sirion again. The messengers deliver a plea for the Silmaril, an offer of anything at all in exchange. The messengers do not return at all.
The Enemy is many many hundreds of miles from here but at night Maedhros can hear him in his head. Is it so implausible that I really let you go? the Enemy likes saying. You serve me better free than you ever would have willingly.
The Oath allows them to work slowly. They begin planning the sack of the refugee camp even more slowly than the Oath allows, so slowly that its currents are constantly tugging at them. Any slower and the currents would erode all the things they care about which are not the Oath, and it would be a disaster to go to Sirion once they've been stripped of their capacity to care about anything that is not the Silmaril. So they do not hold out forever. But they work as slowly as they can.
imeanforever
Why is there such a thing as a work that can only be made once? Maybe there's a reason but maybe it's more "who let this guy design a universe".
They were created in Valinor, so are now back in Valinor, but their owners have been relocated to a beautiful beach on this continent.
I would have done that originally but you said to put them back, so I put them back. Fairy orders are very terrible world-design, you know.
imeanforever
If I ever find someone who designed them I will take it up with that person at that time. Can you make me immune to receipt of orders?
I could do that. You sensibly made Maitimo not part of the system that operated on orders; making someone immune only to receiving them permits much more abuse.
imeanforever
Yes, I'm aware, but I might need the mechanism and I'm not sure if Fairyland itself is part of your jurisdiction. If it turns out to be I may abolish the system altogether later, but for now. Make me immune to the receipt of orders.
imeanforever
You'd been in the habit of confirming things. Is it just that you didn't like this one?
I disliked it, considered it unwise, and was alarmed by what your decision to give it after barely any time to discuss those concerns said about you. I can move many hundreds of thousands of times faster than you, and had much more time to consider it, and still have little confidence it was wisely done; you told Maedhros once that ordering forces far beyond your comprehension was unwise, and it remains so when the forces are favorably inclined. And now I have less latitude to protect you from yourself, or my world from the unintended consequences of your decisions.
imeanforever
Did you have an alternate suggestion to reliably keep other people from using fairy orders on, most pertinently, you, at one remove without prematurely sacrificing my ability to edit the universe?
Make you immune to undesired or non-consented-to fairy orders, most obviously, or make it impossible for people to order others through you, or changing the recency rule on you so you can pick a satisfactory bedrock of orders and not have them overridden, or other things that didn't involve rewriting a great deal of your fundamental nature. And no, I can't put it back; you're not of my universe and moving this many things this quickly without any destabilizing and undesired side effects is at least as hard as raising a continent without causing tidal waves and a rise in sea level.
I cannot undo most of what you've asked. I cannot put an oath in force again. I cannot kill the people I've brought back to life; I can tell the Valar I've reversed my instructions regarding who should be in Valinor, and I cam move the people around, but that'll be 'doing it again' not undoing it, and will be destabilizing. The swanships destabilized the whole timeline.
I can alter all of Arda's history, not just this specific moment of it. Lots of your changes propagate forwards; some of them also propagate backwards. Now the swanships are not the sort of thing that could only be made once.
imeanforever
She rubs her eye. "...I think I should maybe sleep before I tell him to do anything else."