At the End of All Things Elves in Revelation
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"I guess I could see that turning out to be a reasonable heuristic."

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"We weren't paranoid enough, growing up, because Valinor was very peaceful. No scarcity, Elves are very - well-behaved..."

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"Well-behaved like...?"

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"The first person ever murdered in Valinor was the King when Melkor was paroled and then murdered him. Elves had at that point been living in Valinor more than three thousand years."

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"Wow."

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"So then we decided to leave Valinor and pursue Melkor to - the rest of the world - warn people, help with evacuation, fight him if we could, we didn't know at the time how overmatched we were. There's no way out of Valinor. There were Elves who had boats. They said we should give ourselves a century to think about it, we could get killed, it was silly to leave. We tried to steal the boats. No one had ever tried that before, we didn't know - they opened fire on the boats, more people got drawn in - 

- before that day no Elf had ever committed a murder and by the end of the day ten thousand people were dead."

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"Jesus Christ.

...A century?"

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"Elves are really slow. Not my family, but as a species -

 - when we got there there were civilian cities penned in and we freed them, there were cities running out of supplies and we supplied them, we took back the continent, the fighting lasted twelve days and we held the line for the next four hundred years."

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"Dang. Did you go in with some overwhelming advantage...?"

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"We had a serious technological edge but in hindsight - 

- by serious technological edge I mean 'really good longbows and enchanted swords and armor', there's no way the Enemy couldn't have equipped orcs to overmatch us if he'd wanted -"

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"Why didn't he want?"

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"Damned if I know." Bitter laugh. "That's not a very good expression, I am in fact damned. After the fight over the boats the Valar got really angry and cursed us and all our descendants."

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"I am pretty sure Hell doesn't contain any Elf war veterans. What is the upshot of you being damned."

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"Uh -" he switches to Quenya - "Tears unnumbered ye shall shed; and the Valar will fence Valinor against you, and shut you out, so that not even the echo of your lamentation shall pass over the mountains. On the House of Fëanor the wrath of the Valar lieth from the West unto the uttermost East, and upon all that will follow them it shall be laid also. Their Oath shall drive them, and yet betray them, and ever snatch away the very treasures that they have sworn to pursue. To evil end shall all things turn that they begin well; and by treason of kin unto kin, and the fear of treason, shall this come to pass. The Dispossessed shall they be for ever."

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"So hypothetically if somebody sailed that wonky route to Valinor and climbed a mountain and yelled 'fuck you all' in a way causally entangled with your lamentations, that would disprove the prophecy?"

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He laughs. "Might. It's also one of the reasons I want the Silmarils back so badly, because the prophecy says we won't get them."

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"Snatching away the very treasures? Why did you swear about that, incidentally, your explanation about swearing to oppose the Enemy made some sense but..."

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"We swore to fight the Enemy and anyone else who might try to deprive us of them. Because we really wanted to found a society outside the reach of the gods and we knew they were tempting to everyone and we thought if people knew we'd go to war over them then they wouldn't try it in the first place."

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"Did that work?"

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"Ah-huh."

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"Predictable in hindsight."

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"How bad was it?"

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"Very bad. We were - allowed to drop it if they'd just give the damn things back. No one ever would."

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"Did they know that was how it worked?"

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