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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.
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imeanforever
"Well, I agree that everyone on the continent dying is bad, but commanding ridiculously powerful supernatural entities could also do really bad things and I don't know the scope of those things. Isn't there anyone besides Ulmo who'd know more?"
"It's not just the dying, orcs are bound to serve Melkor and you could help all of them. I don't know who'd know more. Huan's dead. Melian's dead. Everyone is dead."
"We have probably at least a few decades to think about it. I was going to let you heal insofar as you can before we even think about it."
They spend the day on magic songs. He also shows her some of the ones where the shape of the magic is determined by the singer. By the end of the day, she can do visual illusions, though not as gripping or detailed as his.
imeanforever
She couldn't do that with sorcery! She'd have to cheat with a bunch of fairylights. This is cool.
He seems delighted to have a student with a fairy voice, if nothing else, and doesn't even notice when it's gotten dark.
"Food. Does it need to have specific nutritional content for you, or is that like the idea that meaning attaches to sounds when people speak?"
imeanforever
"...There's foods with medicinal properties? I'd get bored if I ate nothing but one thing, maybe unless it was haws from my tree? What's protein?"
imeanforever
"Not really? Just commonsense stuff I picked up from learning transmutation, and, like, 'if you drop things they fall'."
imeanforever
"Metals are more like each other than they are like other things, so it's easy to transmute a metal into another metal, that sort of thing. Mercury's harder because it's liquid."
"Oh. All right. In this world there are about eighty fundamental kinds of things. Metals are many of them. We call them fundamental because you can isolate a single tiny essence of them - the smallest aluminum, the smallest gold, the smallest oxygen - and then so far we can't break those tiny essences, and we think that if we did we wouldn't get an even smaller aluminum, we'd get something else entirely.
Now, if you take all eighty things - some of them only exist in Valinor, so it'd be hard, but if you did - and you write up their properties, you get certain regularities. In particular you get regularities in how they link up with each other and with other things. Metals are kind of a category of regularity. So are gases. To make this simpler than it really is, the regularities come from how many other things they'll connect with - like, imagine everyone has arms and they use those arms to catch hold of other essences. Carbon has four arms. Helium doesn't have any.
Most of the world is made out of essences holding hands, or floating around freely if they're the kinds with no hands. They're only stable if everyone has all of their hands occupied. Does all that make sense?
Now, if you take all eighty things - some of them only exist in Valinor, so it'd be hard, but if you did - and you write up their properties, you get certain regularities. In particular you get regularities in how they link up with each other and with other things. Metals are kind of a category of regularity. So are gases. To make this simpler than it really is, the regularities come from how many other things they'll connect with - like, imagine everyone has arms and they use those arms to catch hold of other essences. Carbon has four arms. Helium doesn't have any.
Most of the world is made out of essences holding hands, or floating around freely if they're the kinds with no hands. They're only stable if everyone has all of their hands occupied. Does all that make sense?