Aydanci is much too levelheaded to turn his pterodactyl around until they know for sure it's safe.
...He is just barely too levelheaded to turn his pterodactyl around until they know it's safe.
Oh Eru where's Kib where's Kib -
The news catches up with them. Fourteen thousand dead, a few hundred missing. There's no settlement at Lake Mithrim, any more. The army found Men and Dwarves at each others' throats with no Thauron involved at all, left a couple thousand warservants to straighten it out, are now back. Please communicate your status.
This is worrying but there is no obvious avenue to provide comfort.
He's the calmest person in the place, since none of this is real anyway. He lets Findekáno fall apart on his shoulder and offers Findekano more than that since now he does not have an extra boyfriend. Findekano observes that there really isn't time, and bites his tongue to avoid observing a lot of other things, and they plan an assault on Angband -
- as soon as Kib can't order any of the golems, as soon as there's a way to see past the illusions, as soon as everything his father developed is bigger and deadlier -
Reordering the golems is pretty straightforward except insofar as some of them have to be recalled from far away for Aydanci to have a word with them. He assigns Lári root access in case something happens to him. And he makes routine terse reports on his progress with the anti-illusion scribelike thing, testing puppets for image quality, honing instruction sets.
Aydanci's time is too valuable to waste awakening more of the things. Lari can do it. Macalaure'll skip her sleep when she gets behind. He wonders if she'll complain but she doesn't, just clings to any of her brothers who are within clinging range. He wonders if his real sister is like that.
He talks Findekano into bed. He's not sure what he's trying to prove. At this point he will be grateful to wake up, at this point he is hoping for the proof that it's not real...
More war golems. Longer-ranged Maia-shredding projectiles. Tyelcormo can kill things from five miles away, and demonstrates this, viciously, at any animal which could be an Enemy pet and gets within five miles.
They hadn't thought about breeding the dinosaurs. Goes rather against Elven instincts, making an animal bear children in wartime. Too late. Too late for so many things. Next hallucination he'll suggest breeding the dinosaurs.
Several of the factories that turn out chassis are entirely automated, now, from the mining to the minute Lari awakens them. The only constraint on how much they can throw at Angband is how many of the things she can touch.
Yeah, probably wisest to split that half and half.
He calls in Aydanci again to let him know what they're planning to do if they find Kib alive. There's a plan for if there's a chance to make it out, and a plan for if there's not. Are you going to want to stay here or are you going to want to petition the Valar to open the portals, if he's dead already or if we kill him?
Agreed. Thank you. You're on a week's rest, no going in the workshops, because your parents are worried you will work yourself to death and my assessment is that you very nearly already have. Eat. Sleep. Get your dreams. Then figure out a project that'll help us kill a Vala, but for a week don't even think about it.
Aydanci goes. He eats, he sleeps, he dreams his first childhood and he dreams Kib coming home to him in their house in Valinor and he dreams watching Aly eaten away by a death that was never anywhere near worthy of her and he dreams the process of realizing he was in love and he dreams telling Kib that it was him who got the pox back -
They've got one well-defended Elf in full armor per battalion of a hundred war servants, to react to things they can't have given instructions for in advance. Someone bounces him Kib's body, their location, the status of the fighting around them -
-get him out, he says, because it wasn't the wrong decision with the King, was it -
He is looking forward to piecing together all the bits of this particular variant on 'failed to actually rescue my boyfriend' later once the operation has concluded.
The operation concludes. They've got ten human prisoners who aren't Kib, gagged. They've got a couple dozen Elven prisoners. The war servants charged Melkor's throne and melted as they did but they are pretty sure they injured Thauron because when they hit him fast enough from a great enough distance the illusions faltered and by the end of the fighting there weren't any illusions and all things considered they're inclined to call this one a victory. Casualties on their side can be counted in the dozens. Lovely, having machines do your fighting.
And he can carry Kib home.
If Kib is broken they will probably have to kill him and hope that resurrection works twice. Not that they'll learn the answer. Kib at least isn't Aydanci and will be fine without them.
They take him back to one of the most-defensible fortresses. Aydanci, can you come order a golem to restrain him if he attacks anyone suddenly? And we'd better assume the Enemy's looking through his eyes, but with that in mind you can come see him. He hasn't said anything yet.
If the Enemy looks through Kib's eyes, he will see the inside of Kib's eyelids. No response to the request.
Aydanci turns up with a rootkitted carefully-ordered Charp. When the door opens Kib opens one eye to glance briefly at his husband - sigh with what could easily be mistaken for contentment - close his eyes again.
"Kib?" says Aydanci.
Kib doesn't react to that either.
Kib does not have anything to say about the healers, or about Aydanci tentatively touching him when he's no longer so thoroughly battered and it doesn't look like he'll fall apart if handled. He does lean in to the hand on his shoulder. Different problems from Maitimo's, whatever the details, apparently.
He has Lari order the golems for the rest of the prisoners. He has his brothers talk to the Elven prisoners so the 'escapees of Angband don't believe they're really out' thing doesn't become widely known. They sing for the dead. They figure out what opposed the Enemy best and refine evacuation plans for if he leaves Angband to come after them. He periodically asks Findekano for status updates. The answer is always the same.
I assume Kib told you parts of this?
The Enemy has prisoners in Angband hallucinate being rescued over and over and over. Sometimes the hallucination of being rescued drags out for years. He can meddle with subjective time so not much of it need have passed. He can also tamper with memories. I don't know what's going on with Kib but he probably does not believe he's safe and he may not have complete or accurate memories of any of us.
"Uh, no answer on questions about preferences, answers on easy factual questions, is one very extreme way to not give the Enemy any information. That might be what he's doing. What I can't guess is whether he's processing normally and just not expressing or communicating preferences - but, no, he's not that good an actor - Kib, what color was the sky in the lost world?"
"Would require thought to answer? Okay.
Are there other things the Enemy can't fake? Some sensation associated with servantmaking - he's got less practice with humans....
We should make sure he's more than three hundred miles from anywhere Thauron can speak to him, that'll delay his recovery."
"So the Enemy wouldn't, actually, have been able to run him through very convincing hallucinations - couldn't erase the obvious giveaways, not lastingly, he'd have one shot each time and a patient who remembered everything, including the ways he tends to err." By the end of that he sounds almost optimistic. "That means it might not take as long for him to observe that this isn't a hallucination and he's in fact out of Angband."
He relays the conversation that evening, and holds Findekano quite tightly for it.
Do you really think any of the things you suggested will work?
No.
Then -
I do think he'll recover a bit eventually. He's - too impatient, he can't have turned it off entirely -
Do we have a plan to have the Enemy die.
Not a more specific one than we had yesterday.
Should I go cuddle him.
Probably sometimes, yeah.
Tonight?
Stay with me tonight.
Is this 'at this point I want the hallucination to end, I will be relieved when I look up at your face and it's Sauron's -'
Yep.
Aydanci gets an un-instructioned scribe chassis and puppets it from a few feet away so he can get work done without letting go of his husband. Lots of work. It's not as dire as when the Enemy still had Kib but - the Enemy does sort of still have Kib -
When Kib sleeps the screams are bloodcurdling and well past forming intelligible words. Aydanci can't sleep through it. Can he... get some enchanted earplugs or something.
Yup. And I don't think you'd want me to leave you like this so I'm going to keep poking you even if I can't think of a way for it to work.
Okay. Love you.
The other survivors of Angband aren't in much better shape, so. Most of the Elves either asked to die or asked to be packed off to Valinor. Most of the captured humans are easier; they're firmly convinced that Elves are evil and dangerous to interact with and will command your mind if you speak with them at any length, but Lari's happy to play diplomat there.
One activity Kib can do is reminiscing. Aydanci gets into the habit of waiting till Kib wakes up, and taking out his earplugs, and telling him what he dreamed about, and Kib can without having to do any novel cognition at all relate his side of the story and fill in anything he recalls from before or after the memory. Aydanci was missing his umbrella that day because he left it at city hall. Aly had to patch up her scooter after that crash while missing half her tools because that jerk never gave them back. What ever happened to that lady? We didn't see her again until the fundraiser the following spring -
It's something. There's some comfort in it.
Aydanci still wants to murder the bastard.
This opinion is widely shared. Fëanáro sends Aydanci letters - Fëanáro spends all of his time under perception-accelerating magic, these days, can't come talk to Aydanci directly - asking for lots of highly specific absurdly bright refracted shines. The railways stretch across the continent now, so they can get servants to the Dwarves quickly. The quick-print golem has other uses.
They work. They keep their factories pretty enough that they barely need to take breaks from them. They sing to go faster, to sleep less, to keep themselves mostly sane. They are crumbling, under the pressure, and the King holds them together. The King is so calm. People find it inspiring.
This is going to take years. The pace isn't sustainable. The Elves settle back to being, well, Elves. There are three-week festivals. They tweak the production lines to make the war servants prettier. They have flying evacuation golems which are stunning.
The King has more time for Kib. If that's any help.
Kib's not going to object; he's not keeping nearly enough track of... anything... to have an idea that the King might be needed elsewhere. Kib appears to be operating under the contented assumption that his boyfriends will show up only when this is a reasonable thing for them to do.
Aydanci's kept them up to date on how Kib responds to this-and-that, if there are any memories the King would like filled in and reminisced about.
He thinks of a lot of things. The most tempting is to go find a human population on the south continent - probably one at risk of a famine or something - and dump Kib on them. He might decide just to smile vaguely and let everyone starve to death, of course, but it seems likely that he would not do that.
It's definitely something the Enemy'd do, but he's not really trying to convince Kib he's not hallucinating, he's trying to convince Kib to be a person long enough to tell them what he would want done if he weren't.
The other option is something - less urgent than a population starving to death, but something like Valinor when he arrived - new situation, where he won't starve if he goes around not thinking but he'll do a lot of obvious good if he's willing to, something that makes it worth the chance it's real.
Wouldn't have helped. I mean, yes, the Enemy would have tried to shake it out of him with 'I will torture this person or this person, you pick, or both of them if you refuse to pick', but then he'd just torture both of them, he'd never set up a situation where Kib was actually advantaged by refusing to do anything for other people...
I can go over a loose outline of everything since I was rescued? I spent a couple months physically recuperating. At one point in that I - explained to you, the sort of games he plays in the hallucinations, and you told your golem to keep people away from me. We came up with the idea of having me read your notes. I liked that, a lot, but I was worried it meant the Enemy had them.
He didn't, they were buried in collapsed parts of the city, but I don't expect you to trust me on that. Anyway, you were working on Charp - since we'd been fooled by an illusion, you wanted something that could talk and see through them - and clinging to Findekano a little and avoiding Aydanci, he was still a child...I disliked doing nothing but sitting around, knew I'd never be able to live with myself for having done nothing but be a liability if this was real and that I was desperately unhappy to no end if it wasn't real. You and Findekano figured it out, had me swear to say a few specific words, loudly, if I realized an Enemy oath was acting on me, told all the golems to kill me if I said that. I took the Kingship back. You and Findekano looked over everything I did to make sure I wasn't sabotaging us.
The Moon rose, and then the Sun. You made sarcastic comments about it taking the Valar two Years just to accomplish copying the lost world's lighting system. We expanded trade with the Dwarves. You finished Charp. We found out there were humans, not servantmakers, and Thauron was messing with them. Sent some Charps. Wasn't much they could do. Aydanci started having dreams and you told him and he took it well. You were very happy.
You told me about it that evening but I don't know the details. I bet you could ask him. Thauron used the Men to kill a community of nearby Elves. We besieged Angband and made it so nothing could go in or out. Aydanci had a really good dream and threw himself at you. My father figured out weapon enchantments that could take chunks out of Maiar. You and Aydanci renewed your vows. We got long-ranged projectile weaponry working. Thauron tried to start a war between the Men and the Dwarves.
It takes years.
They are not betting they will get more than one chance at this.
And they are not betting it'll work at all, within Angband, so something else will be needed to draw the Enemy out. There's a separate team on that. Everything they're considering is very, very ugly. Liquid fire that can be dumped from flying golems in quantities that will have the whole place smouldering for centuries. Bombs with embedded shrapnel of the Maia-shredding kind. Lári can't keep up at the production lines, but a few of the rescued humans are in Maitimo's assessment trustworthy enough by now to wake non-war-related automata that'll promptly be shipped Dwarf-wards.
The King doesn't even ask; if anyone asked him the equivalent he'd refuse, after all. He is himself only involved in this effort at several levels of abstraction. Fëanáro and Aydanci think they have a superweapon, and need circumstances engineered to deploy it; then either he will hallucinate winning or hallucinate losing.
It takes another year to set it up all right, to have communications synchronized, to have a fleet of flying golems to deliver the weaponry who can fly high enough above Angband. Can't be done without enchantment; the air's too thin.
In the Year of the Sun 39, they pray to the inattentive gods and the probably-fictional one and they launch.
(The first fleet flies over. Drops Maia-shredding bombs, drops liquid fire, drops the sharp-edged bits of the Enemy's own servantmaking, indestructible as it conveniently is. Everything set to detonate in midair, before it's in reach of him; each subsequent wave set to make it a little farther - they've mapped how the shockwaves will compound -
Andband falls. And its ruler picks himself up, flaming, seething, uninjured -
And then it's time for the real fight.)
"Is he shaking the continent," says the King, "or is that aftershocks of what we did-"
"Could be both -"
And a hundred thousand automata coordinate the Silmarils in a wild blizzard of light around the Enemy, and they melt and they vanish and more of them keep coming to fill the gaps -
And then there is a roar like a god drawing his final breath, and a few orcish prisoners acquired for the purpose gasp as their oath snaps loose.
And Beleriand sinks into the sea.
They've learned from their mistakes; there are evac golems for the population of each city parked outside it. Doesn't mean everyone reaches one. It's not fast - it appears, actually, if you look, to be like glass shattering in slow motion- but it's fast enough.
Doriath pokes their nose outside their borders and notices they are an island. They are all right with that.
Ulmo's city was in a mountain range, but his seas find themselves at its doors. And peaceably turn away.
My advice, having seen many cases like this, is to temporarily remove memories more recent than the Darkening of Valinor. Then explain to him when he awakens that you were killed in that catastrophe, and he warred against the Enemy and was taken prisoner, and after the war you brought him here for healing, which with his consent included this approach. Now that we have him in psychological health, he can direct the course of his own recovery from there, including how he desires to have memories of your death, the war, or his torture back.
I recommend this approach because for some people, the knowledge they were captured by the Enemy, he can tamper with memory, and that the Enemy does vivid hallucinations of rescue is sufficient for them to conclude they might be hallucinating. Since it seems Akibel is not functional while convinced he might be hallucinating, and since we want him able to advise us on the course of his further treatment, I do not want him to start out knowing that. He can perhaps advise us from there, and if not, that the now-dead Enemy had such capabilities might be something it's simply better he doesn't know.
"...yes."
So Aydanci goes and explains, and Kib is doing that thing where he's just sort of allowing words to happen around him, and Aydanci keeps repeating himself until he thinks at least the gist has gotten across, and -
"You can do whatever you want with me," Kib says.
"I want to help you."
"Okay."
...and Aydanci officially can't do this shit anymore and tells Lórien to go for it.
Now that you are in a position to consent to treatment: you are missing Years of memories. We assume if you had them all back you'd be catatonic again. We restored you to this state, which probably involved more memory loss than needed, so you could advise us on how you want to recover from here. If you desire to spend some time with your husband before considering this, you absolutely may.
"What am I missing besides - catatonia and warfare?"
"Me dying - you were there. Leadup to the warfare. You weren't immediately captured once it started, either, you got some work done before then - finished the talking golems - when I grew up there was some, awkward re-courtship, we renewed our vows -"
"- and then I got turned into a vegetable, shit, sorry, honey -"
And now he has an Aydanci crying on his shoulder.
Kib has no real desire for Lórien's presence at this time. He is learning a new face and comforting his husband. "How supervised-by-default are we in a place named after a Vala...?"
"I asked; not. Unless you want somebody around or listening they're not, by default that includes him."
"Where're -?"
"Maitimo's here. Findekáno's on another continent while they build a new city there."
Kib sighs and rubs his eyes. "I don't appear to look like I was tortured into catatonia. Also Lórien or was Melkor just very cosmetically considerate?"
"Also Lórien."
And Kib would like to see Maitimo.
"We could get short, rote answers out of you. Seemed to respond to tone more than content. You can ask Lórien for some of the memories of being catatonic back, I doubt they'd themselves trigger a relapse - and if they did, well, he could help again, I guess - please don't relapse, I might actually die of grief -"
"You could get your vow renewal! It was lovely! There is also a possibility you'll dream it all back anyway, Lórien's going to try to prevent that but your memory-dreams are weird, and if that happens we'll just have to hope that getting it in that format isn't vegetative-state inducing." He rather clings. "Oh, Kib."
Squeeze. "Hey, it's okay, I'm fine, I'll go through my notes between 'what happened to the Trees' and 'being comically interrupted while writing, midsentence, by my capture' and pick out what needs to go back and - huh, I'm more filled on Aly than I thought I was, not entirely but way farther along, I guess that didn't get snipped by removing the times in which I had the dreams -"
"I had a couple of the indexes in my go bag for mostly sentimental reasons," Aydanci says. "And I wasn't carrying you, Charp - you named the talking golem line Charp - was, so I had my bag. But that's just the indexes."
"Well, indexes'll at least tell me that I probably want this date or that, I suppose."
"Do you want to stay in Lórien until you're satisfied with the state of your head or do you want to go back, meet your Charps, everyone else'll be ridiculously glad too - Findekano's desperate to see you, it just would have looked very fishy for the merry four of us to go along - and then come back once you've got the complete list of dates to restore?"
Kib decides to stay in Lórien until they have a chance to see how Lórien has done with staving off weird otherworldly dreams. He stays up late catching up verbally on what he's missing, writing on conveniently papery tree bark with a conveniently ink-sapped stick to make sure he doesn't forget to ask for this or that restored. And then he curls up with his husband and falls asleep.
To judge by the wordless screaming, the answer to the question of how Lórien did is - not well.
Aydanci doesn't have his earplugs in. He wakes Kib up.
Kib glares at him.
"I would have adopted your strategy too if I thought he could gain from everything that crossed my mind. And he wouldn't even need to lean on the hallucinations, not nearly as heavily as he does, and sometimes I noticed things were wrong but he didn't reset until I'd indicated things were wrong, and that occurred even in hallucinations he erased from my mind as soon as he was through with them and so his intent there clearly was not to mislead me about his capabilities - without Lorien I wouldn't even have known this - my honest best guess is that he gets memories but not first-person, somehow. Like being in someone's memory palace. The Maiar and Valar don't think like us, it took them millennia to even manage to osanwe in a way that was comprehensible to us, they do not have the psychological capacity to read and interpret surface thoughts, he can get senses and I am pretty certain that's all he can get. I can't prove this to you from your own hallucinations because you'd already gone for the annihilation option by then, it's achingly transparent in my own hallucinations and you know I didn't try to avoid thinking even when I thought I was hallucinating, but if that's not enough then I don't yet have enough."
"If you told me this before he got me," Kib says, "I don't remember it."
"Please," Aydanci says, "please, please - stay with us and we can get Lórien and he can put everything back and you can see if it matches -"
"Even taking the premises at face value I'm not a very good actor and with my brain turned on I'm dramatically easier to manipulate -"
"Please no please don't -"
"Do we want to try it again, have Lórien on hand to erase the new memories as they come in, see if we can think of anything else with a week with him to talk it through, or do we want to just let it rest until we've got sleep solved - that way he doesn't have to dream any of it again, at least -"
"It is real," mutters Aydanci. "It's real and I am really not going to pile up more - mutilations - that probably won't even help - to get him in exactly the right frame of mind to do whatever we want and me in the right frame of mind to tell outright lies to my husband and - no. When he won't need to sleep anymore we can try again from there."