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not some lighter color
Cor and an evil Maitimo
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It's past time to stop. And it's simultaneously too late. Magic is everywhere, there will be defectors against any coordination, and all the clever targeting in the world won't make there be more world.

Cor gives all his savings to a project that's trying to eat away the distance to the Moon, and he gathers supplies and tries something else.

 

A young human man in nothing but a pair of shorts, painted all over in broad patterns with still-wet blood and fine ash, appears on his knees in the middle of an unreasonably pretty city and falls unconscious.

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The inhabitants of the unreasonably pretty city are concerned. They confirm with one another that, yep, appeared out of nowhere, and are more concerned. Soon all of the people around who weren't in uniform (there weren't many to start with) are standing a reasonable distance off (but not going home, they were near when it happened and it's a necessary precaution).

People in uniform approach the unconscious person.

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That's sure an unconscious person with blood and soot all over him! He doesn't seem injured, so it's probably not his blood.

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...huh.

Someone carefully sketches the blood and soot. 

Someone else holds a piece of metal to their eyes and frowns at him and at the surrounding area and says he's probably not a Maia. 

 

Traffic gets peaceably redirected and arrangements get shuffled and they wait for him to wake.

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He wakes up! He looks around.

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Unreasonably pretty city. It has the bit of a feel of a fortress to it - or maybe concept art of a fortress, a bit too surreal and clean and tidy and artsy to be a real fortress. High walls in the distance and narrow windows and thick walls and wide avenues with chokepoints and gates, and also exuberant flower gardens and elaborate woodworking. And someone must have, like, handcarved these cobblestones into excessively pretty patterns.

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Huh. Okay. The place is inhabited, which is not really ideal, but he's alive and proof of concept! They're not going to speak either language he speaks. He's lucky they have things like cobblestones and flowers. ...and that they didn't decide to kill him in his sleep for suddenly appearing in their fortress, that would have been an interesting way to fail. He attempts to look nonthreatening as he sits up. He feels vaguely bad about getting cow blood and ash on the pretty cobblestones.

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There are tall uniformed people who were apparently keeping a bit of distance. One of them closes it, warily. They're humanoid. Awfully tall. Very pretty. He asks a question in a few different languages.

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"Sorry," he says, "I don't know the languages."

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Where are you from?

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Okay that's convenient and disturbing aaaaaah. "Gatesnest."

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Do you know how you arrived here?

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"Magic."

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So you did so deliberately? Were you targeting this city?

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"I didn't aim for this city. I was attempting to find another world but I didn't have very specific expectations about what they'd be like."

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(Prince Curufin confirms he's from a human society not yet in contact with the Noldor, at minimum.)

 

Can you return the way you came?

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"With a lot of prep work, yes."

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It is an honor to meet the people of Gatesnest, then.

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"Thanks. Uh, are you reading my mind."

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Yes. 

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"I would rather you did not do that."

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I understand. You landed in the middle of a war. Can you think of some alternative reassurance that you and your magic do not endanger our people?

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"I apologize for landing in the middle of your war. I have no intention of harming you; I was looking for an uninhabited world and will still probably attempt to find one at some point. Can you stop reading my mind now."

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Certainly. In that case, can we offer you accommodations until we can find someone to learn a language? You can nod your head for 'yes'.

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Nod.

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They start walking.

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He gets up and follows them.

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They walk until they reach a little house! It tries very hard to compensate with pretty for the thick walls and windowlessness.

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"Why doesn't it have any windows?" he wonders.

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The locals, who are no longer reading his mind or at least no longer acknowledging doing so, cannot understand the question!

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"I don't care if you can tell what I'm saying, but I guess I didn't ask if you could limit it to that."

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The locals continue not to understand what he is saying.

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Ah-huh. Into tiny windowless house?

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Yep! One room, with a bed and a couch and table and chairs and and some kind of harp thing in the corner.

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Okay.

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We'll bring meals by. Someone who can learn your language is on the way.

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A ballpark time estimate would be nice. "Thanks!"

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They leave.

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For lack of anything better to do he picks at the harp thing. Pluck pluck.

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After a little while there is a knock.

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Cor gets the door.

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Local! "Curufinwë Atarinke," he says, gesturing at himself.

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"Corbelan. How does this work, do I just talk? Did the people who picked me up generate you a little list of vocab?"

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"Talk? I talk? The people who picked me up talk?"

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"Those are all grammatically correct and the second bit is also true. I'm not sure if anyone picked you up so I'm not qualified to evaluate that one."

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"You talk?" He points. "You? I? I'm not qualified to evaluate that one." 

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"You," point, "I," point, "random passersby I guess -" point out the windows that there aren't.

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"Uh huh. You talk, I talk, random passersby talk. You talk, I generate you a little list of vocab?"

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"It would work better if you wrote it down probably. Very inconvenient that this mode of transit didn't let me bring notes. Or more clothes. I would have needed so many sheep." He mimes writing when he mentions it.

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He can take notes! In a swoopy sort of alphabet. "Wrote?"

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"You are writing. Congratulations. Pretty lettering."

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I'm glad you think so. My father invented it. "I are writing. You are writing. You are writing a list of vocab?"

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"- 'I'm glad you think so, my father invented it,'" repeats Cor. "That would be a more efficient way to get specific words you wanted - I am not writing anything, I don't have any paper. And I have no idea what in particular you're taking down there but it's probably a vocabulary list."

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"I have paper. I am writing -" the grammatical principles and some theories about related word roots - "and a vocabulary list."

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"The grammatical principles and some theories about related word roots. Are the related word roots very useful or is that just for fun?"

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"Probably just for fun. Useful for vocabulary if you don't have any paper."

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"I suppose they could be if you were of a linguistic turn of mind, which you must be since you're the guy who they call to learn languages from suddenly appearing strangers who are fussy about mindreading. I don't suppose you can selectively mindread enough for useful telepathy and not enough for nightmarish privacy violation."

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"Probably. The selectively mindreading works off how you -" structure your thoughts - "for some people meanings of words and other thoughts would be separate, some people they might be close enough selective would be imperfectly selective. Still mostly selective."

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"Structure your thoughts," echoes Cor. "You want 'selective' there not 'selectively'."

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"Telepathy is not nightmarish privacy violation for Quendi, we structure the thoughts so we send only what we mean. You can learn different structures of thoughts and then use telepathy for communication but it is not efficient and we are not reading your mind."

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"Communicative telepathy sounds grand. Why isn't it efficient?"

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It takes months of practice to pick up. "Communicative telepathy is very useful." Humans don't have it and it makes military logistics significantly more complicated.

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He repeats the telepathed phrases. "I did notice this place looks fortressy. How come this house has no windows?"

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If there's fighting in the city it's better for people inside the houses to be relatively protected. There are slits to fire through.

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Repeat. "Who're you fighting?"

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He's called Melkor, or Morgoth. He doesn't leave Angband himself, he sends orcs, which are magically bound to his servitude and ordered to war.

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Translation. "Charming."

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"Yes. If you were looking for a good world you have not found one. Yet."

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"I was looking for a world that could gradually cease to exist without anybody minding, actually."

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"Ah. We would mind. Why are you looking for that?"

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"Nothingness is a magical waste product."

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"Not our magic."

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"Cool. What's yours like?"

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Two kinds. Magic songs work for everybody, including your species, and composing them involves direct I think pseudo-sensory interaction with things best described as ambient magic fields - in the sense of 'magnetic field' not 'corn field'. Magic artifacts Elves make with telepathy and Dwarves make with special equipment made from magic ores their god planted for them and you write very long detailed instructions and then inscribe them and then the object obeys them. Song effects are temporary; artifact ones need not be.

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Cor murmurs along to this - "You have my species here? We don't have yours. Or Dwarves."

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"We have humans and Dwarves and Quendi and orcs and Maiar and Valar."

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"We just have humans."

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"Are they okay? Our humans were not so well off before they met Quendi but the Enemy had been making it worse."

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"Uh, we are having a nothingness problem but we're... fine?"

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"You are out of things to turn into nothing for magic?"

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"Not quite - it's complicated. But if it doesn't stop it's gonna eat the world."

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"Oh dear. Is this an unavoidable feature of your magic or something specific to your society's use -"

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"If it's avoidable we don't know how. It took a while to get this bad. A while and a war."

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"Ah. Should we hesitate then to deploy your magic in our war, even if we can, or are there precautions -"

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"Uh, you don't want to overdo it, but a small amount would take millennia to eat a world or even a really inconvenient fraction of one."

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" - well, dooming the world in a few millennia won't do either."

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"It might give you long enough to find somewhere else to live?"

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"Lot of people wouldn't go. I suppose if we can't find a better way we might have no choice."

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"Yeah, sorry, I did not come equipped for a rescue mission."

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"We aren't losing the war. Just - better to plan for the worst."

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"Yeah."

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"Do you know anything about the distribution of worlds? How many, do they have different magic each time..."

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"I wasn't even sure there were any, I put my affairs in order before I magicked myself away from mine. This is promising though!"

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"It really is!!! What do you need to do it again -"

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"Uh, from here I can't monitor how much worldeating is accelerating back home, so I'm reluctant to do any magic while attached to my current - dump site for nothingness - except very sparingly to the point where it's noise against how much magic other people are doing. I can make a new one but then there will be one here and I won't be able to attach myself to my home world or a new one in a third world without physically going there, which requires doing magic. Apart from that I need fresh blood and fine ash - do you have baths here, by the way - and some other miscellany."

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"We have baths. Once there's a dump site will it keep growing on its own, or only when you do magic?"

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"We used to think the latter. Turns out probably the former, but if I do only a little and no one else is sharing the site it could be a long time before you could notice the difference."

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"A long time for humans is not a long time for Elves."

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"Then you will want to use my magic even more sparingly than I."

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"More matter can't be produced to replace what gets - eaten?"

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"...that would help a lot but not completely solve the problem, and my magic can't do that."

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"We cannot straightforwardly do that but a Vala could. Why would that not completely solve the problem?"

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"Nothingness is not the same as emptiness. Nothingness also destroys - distance. People have tried to use nothingness to make tunnels but it doesn't do tunnels - it does gates, which are great, but work by making there be nothing between point A and B. Our planet is shrinking."

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"Huh. Do you have guesses about whether other peoples can use your magic, or only people from your world - are you even confident it will work here at all -"

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"I would expect it to work but I obviously haven't tried it. I don't have a strong expectation about whether it's human only but you have to attach to a nothingness spread point first thing."

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Nod. "What sorts of things can the magic do?"

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"It's purely destructive but that's more useful than it sounds, you can destroy diseases even if you're not very good at it and you can work your way up to more abstract. And gates."

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"Is a gate how you got here?"

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"No, I did something experimental where I weakened the barrier between worlds, on the hypothesis that there was such a thing, and surprise surprise."

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"There is such a thing!"

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"Apparently!"

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"What are your next steps now that you're here?"

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"Since the place is inhabited and you'd object to it disappearing I stick around long enough to determine what else you've got that might help, bring it home, and try again."

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"Can you set up some people here with your magic before you go, presuming that works?"

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"Not if you don't want the place disappearing. Like I said, you have to set up at a disappearance point. I'm still attached to one at home but I don't want to overdo it."

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"We'll consult on how to balance our risks, then. Doom this world but have access to other ones, some of which might have magic that can reverse what was done..."

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"Yeah, exactly."

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"What happens to people who are in a place that gets - disappeared?"

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"They're gone. Used to only happen as part of really extreme total warfare - set up a point over a town, connect a few mages to it - but it happened. Then one of the disappearance points that was just aimed into the ground, wasn't even over an aquifer, who cares - punched through the planet and obliterated half a city and started a war and then it got a lot worse a lot faster. Things are lighter than they were when I was a kid, there's that much less planet."

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"You said we'd have a few millenia? If we used it only once, and then stopped entirely -"

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"Uh, yeah. We've been using magic pretty indiscriminately for millennia and it took till last year to get through the planet."

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Nod. 

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"I mean I do want to be a little circumspect about destroying an inhabited planet even if it would take a while."

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"Not moreso than us, I imagine, we live here. But it might be worth it to destroy Melkor. I think in a few thousand years we could figure out enough even if we don't find promising other words - that's long enough the Valar might even act -"

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"The Valar is or are...?"

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"The -" creators "of the world."

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"Creators. My world does not have those, far as we know. Well, some people would say we do, I suppose I shouldn't dismiss them completely out of hand."

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"We do. They are angry with us at present but it is conceivable they could be assuaged over the course of a few centuries or persuaded by people they are less angry at to cancel a world-threatening kind of magic."

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"They would need persuading? What, are they angry enough that they'd just as soon start from scratch?"

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"Quite possibly. They are not very good creators."

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"Sounds like they have issues, yeah."

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"If we could evacuate everybody to another world we might do that. Then they would save this one, as it wouldn't be a favor to those they disapprove of. Or we could use our magic to find a way to do it ourselves, or we could hop for more magic and find things that interact well...if we definitely have at least a thousand years I think it's worth it, though it wouldn't be my decision."

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"Assuming your years aren't a lot longer than mine that'll cover lots of magic."

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"Angband. And a few worldhops. Nothing else, though I take it it'll eventually destroy us even if we stop using it."

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"That's the going theory. What's Angband?"

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"Enemy fortress." Accompanying visual.

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"Lovely."

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"Yes. We'd kill some prisoners - irrecoverably, I take it - but they'd agree if we could ask them. And he'd be gone."

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"Is there a non-irrevocable form of death going around?"

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"The Valar can reembody Elves and orcs if they see fit. They rarely see fit with Elves and never with orcs but there's the hope that one day we could do it without them, since it is possible in principle."

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"...my magic can also do non-indiscriminate destruction."

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"In that case maybe we could get Melkor and his Maiar and kill the orcs and prisoners the recoverable way."

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"Maybe."

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"It's promising that our worlds both have magic systems and both have different ones. It'll be more promising if they work for each other now that we've encountered them."

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"Work for each other?"

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"You can employ ours, we can employ yours. Signs that magic's contagious and we should expect if we find ten kinds we can stack them to get things done."

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"Yeah, that would be great."

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"It would!!"

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"You are rather unreal at language-learning. Like, even if I assume you've been nefariously reading my mind you're bizarrely fast."

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"I -" swear? "I haven't been reading your mind. I am just great at languages. It's partially a species difference, even mediocre Elves are much better than humans, and I'm not a mediocre Elf."

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"Swear," supplies Cor. "I know two languages but I'm better at this one."

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"Our world has Quenya, Thindarin, Khuzdul, and a few human languages, our humans speak Taliska. My father was always sad there weren't more to learn. He'd be so delighted at the hopping worlds."

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"Is he dead -?"

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"Yes."

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"I'm sorry."

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"Thank you. Maybe there's magic somewhere that can change it."

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"Maybe! Maybe it will wind up being a good thing I landed on an inhabited planet instead of a dumping ground for nothingness."

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"Presuming dumping grounds can be found we are glad you landed on us. ...most worlds without life might be ones that cannot support it, I'd rather expect you to die in the attempt."

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"My planet's in real bad shape. I gave all my money to the next most promising project and took off, not because I have a death wish but because this would've been a better way to die."

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"Fair enough. How long do you think your world has -"

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"Depends how long the ceasefire lasts and how accurate the projections are. Parts of the planet will probably still be habitable until it can't hold an atmosphere any more."

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"The war started over the accidental city destruction?"

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"Yep."

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Sigh. 

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"It was a nice place." Sigh.

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"There's probably something for it somewhere. Once we can devote all our energy to the problem it might not even take a thousand years - and we'd be able to pick up a project to do something about human lifespan -"

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"Ooh."

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"There are lots of things we could get done if the war were over."

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"At some point I'm going to want to like - evaluate the war."

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"I bet. What do you need for that?"

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"I don't know what you have. I assume warfare is very different here."

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"It certainly sounds it. We have history books?"

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"I can't read your language and it will take me a nontrivial amount of time to learn."

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"I could translate but that introduces most of the problems there'd be with just asking me about the war. Hmmm. I can't recommend you go ask the other side for their version, no one leaves Angband intact and humans don't leave alive."

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"Yeah, that's a complicating factor."

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"We could bring you orcs but you'd need a translator and it would be necessary to kill them afterwards."

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"Not really ideal."

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"Indeed."

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"And time is kind of of the essence. I wonder if it wouldn't make more sense for me to jump again, find a place to put a disappearance site, then come back. Of course if I land somewhere that kills me then we have a problem."

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"Or lands you some place like Angband. Or even some place not as bad as Angband that doesn't want to give you access to the materials for powerful foreign magic."

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"What I brought with me would be enough for one more jump, although they'd have to let me use it."

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"Maybe you could jump home and confirm to them that it works and is at least occasionally safe, and then there can be more than one person trying?"

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"Maybe. The only people who I can think of who would likely listen to me on that are currently working on a more conservative stopgap project, though."

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"You couldn't take it to your -" rulers -" and get people assigned? How does leadership work in your country -"

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"Rulers. Uh, Gatesnest is an international hub. A nest of gates, if you will. It's in a state of anarchy at the moment, it was heavily contested in the war and everybody of substantial importance got killed. I could try another country but it'd look - partisan -"

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"Ah huh."

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"And miiiiight get me assassinated. It is not a risk free proposition."

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"The King says that were it peacetime he would offer to go back with you. That would be interesting."

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"Yes it would. It would not make it risk-free and I would need a lot of sheep but it might help."

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"I expect it would. Regrettably we can't spare him."

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"Yeah, I understand."

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"Are there things you could do with extra - sheep, or whatever - to make a jump safer?"

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"I can try. This is completely uncharted territory, it's kind of - I can design spells to do things but sometimes spells do not work, or do not completely work."

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"How does that work?"

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"The thing with all the blood and the soot is telling the destruction where to go. The fact that the spell knocked me out means I didn't have it perfect and there was some extra, and that's one of the nice side effects."

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"Will it be consistent? Will you be knocked out next time also?"

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"I can step it down if you can tell me how long I was out for. If I do it exactly the same way I'll get the same results though."

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"I'd need words for your timekeeping."

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Cor can supply these! And numbers!

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Then he can tell him how long he was unconscious!

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"Cool, next time I can avoid that."

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"That probably reduces the risk slightly."

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"Not by that much, if I land somewhere without air I'm still fucked, but yes."

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"You can move your - target site - to here before you go if you're willing to hook a local up to it."

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"Magic is actually complicated, it would not be super useful without instructions."

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"Instructions would also be very much appreciated. If there are other worlds it'd be a terrible loss to be stuck without the means to reach them."

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"My point is that would take a while."

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"Could we maybe get the four-hour summary and then have something to work off in rederiving the rest ourselves?"

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"Post-war-evaluation."

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Nod. "Decided what you need for that?"

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"It's probably impossible to do responsibly without learning the language but I really don't have the time. I'm not yet sure what to settle for. I guess if I pick up the thought structuring thing so I can telepathically talk to more Elves without going 'aaaaaaa' that would help."

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"Considerably but it usually takes almost as long to pick up as the language. I could give you the idea?"

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"Yes please."

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"Thought structuring works by -" internally distinguishing things you intend to be public and things you intend to be private, and then developing with practice the habit of automatically sorting your thoughts that way. People usually pick a metaphor or visualization - public thoughts as ones abovewater and private thoughts below water, or public thoughts as if spoken and private ones as if written on the inside of your skull -"the hard part is actually structuring off it, and maintaining the habit."

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"It doesn't sound that hard..."

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"I've never heard of anyone not being able to do it, it just takes lots of practice. I can leave you to it?"

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"I'll need to be able to do it while doing other things, I might as well keep - teaching, if you call this teaching - my language while I work on that."

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"All right. Is anyone expecting you back?"

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"I sent people letters, but they did account for the possibility that this was a suicide mission."

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"And should we be gathering, uh, sheep - is it sheep in particular - or anything else for you -"

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"It doesn't have to be sheep in particular but it does have to be a mammal and the blood has to be pretty fresh."

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"And do you need that or do you have enough to get back -"

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"I can use my own blood and I would have enough to get back but one doesn't make a habit of that."

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" - right, I can imagine. We can arrange livestock."

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"That's why I didn't bring a sheep along, though, having the option is handy."

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"You might have better human medicine than we do, I think our humans often die of relatively minor injuries and I wouldn't want them to risk it."

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"Magic destruction destroys infections. It won't close a wound but it'll keep it from getting really dangerous. That might account for it."

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"Probably. I can see how it gets tempting to overuse."

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"Yep."

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"If the knowledge is widespread, it saves lives, you have to be incredibly willing to police it or it's over -"

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"And it's hard to police, there are innocent reasons to have livestock and matches."

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"Probably wiser not to have the knowledge widespread, if it does work for us."

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"Unless I can find a planet it's all right to destroy."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Unless you can find arbitrarily many of them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not actually sure what happens if a point runs out of planet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We don't want to get dependent and then find out that makes magic stop working or everyone get randomly chosen new destruction points or something."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, yeah, dependency is absolutely a bad plan."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you know anything about what causes ongoing destruction when there's no magic being used - in particular do you know if it'd still happen if there were no surviving magic-users -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It seems like what doing more magic does is both take a chunk out of the disappearance point's surroundings, and increase the rate at which it deletes stuff at other times, but the rate starts out too slow to notice. I definitely don't know what would happen if we were all dead."

Permalink Mark Unread

Nod. "If the disappearance point is in the ocean?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's been done. You lose some ocean. It can still punch through the planet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We don't have anyone living on the other side but I assume subsequent to punching through other bad things happen."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Gets wider."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Valar would fix it at that point but they'd probably also start intervening directly in Beleriand and that's not worth it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What would they do?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uh, in the areas they consider their domain they read everyone's mind every long year - a hundred forty four local years - to determine if people have -" rebellious or antisocial or otherwise problematic inclinations "and then correct them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...rebellious or antisocial or otherwise problematic inclinations."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Blasphemy! Lack of faith in Eru, the divine creator of the universe! Disobedience to authority! Willingness to break the law! Homosexuality! My father invented some things that would make it tractable to leave and survive without the Valar interfering, and then things really went badly. But now we're out."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Congratulations."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thank you. Anyway. It is a bad idea to attract their attention even though I am sure they could save your world."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not sure it's worse than 'everybody dies' but it is shall we say not plan A."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Some universe might have resurrection of humans."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm more optimistic than I was this morning."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Us as well."

 

Someone steps in to bring them dinner. It is an unfamiliar soup and meat and vegetable thing. It smells delicious.

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're pretty sure I'm the same kind of thing as your humans and they can eat this?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I cannot discern any differences, though they could be subtle ones. Our humans can eat this."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll call it good." Soup! "I would like some paper and writing material."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I will have them brought!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thanks."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Talk more in the meantime? What's your world like, what did you do..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I did magic! We didn't know it was a problem - we knew the disappearance points disappeared stuff but didn't realize how fast it would get so we just chucked things we didn't want into them, no one was going to miss some rock supplemented with garbage. The world has about a billion people and we're all humans and there's a ton of languages - I know two, the one I'm teaching you and a sort of creole of a bunch of world languages that's spoken in Gatesnest as a kind of trade language."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What sorts of things was magic used for?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Healing, demolishing buildings, making gates, weeds, cleaning, it used to be used for weather but we did figure out we shouldn't disappear water in huge quantities even before we knew magic was generally a catastrophe."

Permalink Mark Unread

"But no one could measure how much was disappearing per use?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No. You aim them at the ground. After a while they hit molten rock, but no one was measuring very exactly."

Permalink Mark Unread

"This sounds rather like a magic system specifically tailored to be hard on humans."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Would it be more convenient for Elves somehow?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We find it more natural to plan a few thousand years ahead and have more tools to solve coordination problems."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Just the telepathy, or...?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We can also bindingly commit to things in an easily verifiable manner."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's the way Melkor enslaves his soldiers. As soon as they're old enough to talk he has them bindingly commit to obey him."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Wow that's intensely fucked up."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am glad we agree on that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It is sort of a catch-22 that I would have to take your word on that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We could get you orcs, it'd just be the recoverable kind of lethal for the orcs."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean I have to take your word for the existence of the oathy thing. Unless the orcs would voluntarily confirm that for some reason, I guess."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe if you found the right angle on them? Not if they thought it'd be helpful to us, certainly."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not really a skilled interrogator, let alone in whatever orcs speak."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Then I wouldn't expect it to come out in conversation, no."

Permalink Mark Unread

Sigh.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Should I give you some time to think about who you might want to talk to and so on?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can you check my thoughts thing?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You mean by trying to read you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Unless you have another way to do it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We do not." Pause. "I can tell you're there but I'm not getting specific content off you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hiding I'm there is a separate thing? -" Now he's not there.

Permalink Mark Unread

"There are lots of things -" access to your senses - osanwë is often used to look through someone's eyes, knowledge of their presence, thoughts, memories, sensations. "That changed it."

Permalink Mark Unread

Translation. "Good. Hopefully I can keep it up."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yep! That'd make communication substantially easier!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not that I am not incredibly impressed with you but I would like to be able to communicate with more than one person! So yay."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Lots of people should have a passable grasp, I've been forwarding them instructions. But it does seem like it'll be easier for you to investigate things if you can talk to everyone."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, who-all else is interested?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"All of the linguists I know are of course delighted, the King and his advisors are probably getting updates for more -" pragmatic - "reasons, couple people are paying attention specifically in order to notice if anything's messing with my head - can't be too careful with foreign magic -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I suppose you have a similar taking my word for things problem if I assure you I can't suddenly do anything nor do I know how to do anything subtle and mental. Some people can - delete memories, is the most common thing - but it's discouraged."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The Enemy can do that. Delete them, add fake ones. Only to people in his custody, not at range, thankfully."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I definitely can't add fake ones, that wouldn't be in keeping with the magic-is-for-destroying-shit theme."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Which we're also taking your word for but in a much weaker sense, the story's oddly crafted to conceal memory-tampering of all things. I'm not really worried, but the King's paranoia has saved us all several times over, I'll let him have it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure, I'm not like offended or anything."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh good. We'll probably be a bit nervous when you draw up your ritual blood but we won't stop you, there's no reason to think there's anything to your mission beyond what you said."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It will be completely harmless except for the associated, uh, world-destruction."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Which we cannot complain we were not warned about!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's been rather a theme!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am optimistic we'll get it figured out."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hope so!"

Permalink Mark Unread

People come by to draw up a bath. 

"We have running water and we have hot water but we don't have hot running water," he says regretfully.

Permalink Mark Unread

"We don't have hot running water either."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Valinor did but we found the price a bit steep."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't blame you!" He hops into the tub and starts scrubbing off dried blood and smears of ash, shorts and all. "I could also use clothes when I'm done."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Melkor is the worst of the Valar - I wouldn't try to wield your magic to destroy the others even if it didn't have such awful costs - but none of them belong anywhere near incarnate peoples."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Noted."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They- " paroled  " -Melkor. See, a long time ago he captured and tortured lots of Elves and bred them into orcs and enslaved the orcs and bred other horrible monsters and ran around causing as much horror and suffering as he could, and so the Valar captured him and imprisoned him, and then after a while he said he was sorry so they let him out."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"'Paroled'," Cor supplies.

Permalink Mark Unread

"They said they were keeping an eye on him but he planted a bunch of evidence of treason on the part of various parties in order to start a civil war and they didn't notice. They did notice when he killed the King and sacked the continent and torched our libraries and ran away with our most valuable magic treasures but by then it was a bit too late."

Permalink Mark Unread

Nod.

Permalink Mark Unread

Permalink Mark Unread

"So you went and chased him?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"This continent was lower-tech, one thing the Valar did was teach us science and we'd invented many things they hadn't. Orcs had overtaken it, were capturing and enslaving everybody. We didn't have the means to kill him yet - still don't, we're working on it - but we came here and took the continent back and -" besieged - "Angband and bought time. To find a solution. Which perhaps we now have, though it's itself a very buying-time kind of solution."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Besieged. And yep."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Leaving involved stealing a fleet of boats. The Valar were very angry about that. - I'm not in favor of stealing boats but we'd asked to buy or borrow them, and asked them to teach us how to build our own - they turned us down because of the mass" psychological conditioning to obey the Valar - "and if we'd gotten here a month later tens of thousands more would have been dead or worse."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Psychological conditioning to obey the Valar." Clothes have appeared by telepathic suggestion. He gets out of the tub and gets dressed.

Permalink Mark Unread

"The thing I previously mentioned, not an additional thing on top of that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I figured."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We can give the boats back if it's ever safe to return to Valinor."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds like that might take a while."

Permalink Mark Unread

"it's been three hundred years."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That is in fact a while."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Even for Elves."

Permalink Mark Unread

"How old are you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Eighteen hundred years."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Dang."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Elves live as long as the world, unless evil or accident find us."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nice deal."

Permalink Mark Unread

"In many respects."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Mixed bag in others?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The people we didn't arrive in time to save are still in Angband. Sometimes he gets bored of one and releases them to - remind us - but not often."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And they're not thrilled about living as long as the world? Well, there's a shorter-lived world available..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They don't believe they're out. He breaks up the torture with vivid hallucinations of release, or of rescue, that always turn out to be a lie - he can do time dilation, sometimes it's ten years subjectively before the scenarios reveal themselves for lies, he makes every microexpression or question or situation a cue that it's about to unravel, the ones that come out intact at all generally prefer not to die only because then they'd wake up in Angband even sooner, and the others act - almost normal - until something sets them off and they murder their family in their sleep."

Permalink Mark Unread

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"I'd, uh, offer you a prisoner to talk with but once we realized he was doing it for our reactions and the effect on -" morale -"we started killing them on sight."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Morale."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Same with the orcs. He'd try sending unarmed families of orcs out to settle on our lands. They'd refuse to go back, say they'd been driven out of Angband. If we let them stay, then eventually they get remotely ordered to commit massacres. So - devote endless resources to guarding little villages of innocent pending disasters in our own territory? Or cut down families holding their little orc babies? Morale."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can't adopt the orc babies who can't talk yet?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's not safe to have children from oathed species in a war zone, the Enemy can osanwë them and coax them into swearing to things."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are Elves just not having children?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's correct."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I guess if that works for you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"This is not a good world to bring a child into."

Permalink Mark Unread

Nod.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Even once the war's over we'll probably make sure we have a world for them which won't be eventually destroyed."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Seems reasonable."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's not a luxury humans have. We try to" incentivize "ours to wait until they're stable and can support them, but 'wait until the war is over' not so much. At least the Enemy doesn't bother human children."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Incentivize. Why not?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can't make them swear to things. He tried manipulating humans, earlier, but - well, we were better at it, and that was when he could interact with them directly."

Permalink Mark Unread

Permalink Mark Unread

"Eru dropped humans on the world at the start of the war with no knowledge. They had a language, that was it. Enemy found them, taught them stone buildings and scared them with monsters and tried to build a -" community ritual practice around a particular narrative about the deities? - 

Permalink Mark Unread

"...religion?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Religion based around worshipping Melkor. Then he fabricated evidence that the monsters apparently killing -" ostensibly random -"humans at night were some nearby Elves and led them to war against the Elves and so on. Eventually we made contact with them and - Elves are not inherently suited to governing humans but we thought it was important enough to put a lot of effort into picking up and we offered them citizenship and they overwhelmingly went for it and now when new human tribes show up worshipping our enemies we can say 'that sounds nice, we pension human citizens off at 26 and after that you can spend your time however you like'. They don't end up spending it worshipping Melkor."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ostensibly random. What unsuitedness do you have?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Because of oaths we didn't have law enforcement beyond 'can you swear to tell the truth and clear this up for us, and if appropriate swear to avoid reproducing the circumstances under which you acted wrongly'? We're more cooperative - hard to say how much of that is the Valar's mind control - likewise with being more pro-social - we have much lower rates of mental illness and disability - we had an economy structured on the assumption people'd spend fifty years learning the skills to do their chosen careers -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"This doesn't take much of your lifespan but it still sounds annoying."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We derive a lot of satisfaction from deep expertise - anyone who can sew a tapestry can also make the loom and gather and spin the thread and collect the plants for the dyes, anything you do you do in perfect awareness of all the tradeoffs that went into the materials at every stage. Elves don't find it annoying. Perhaps even long-lived humans would."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I guess I can see the appeal but it seems an onerous requirement."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If someone made beautiful tapestries in ignorance of the materials we wouldn't decline to display them. In practice Elves with thousands of years of experience are also faster and more able at many of the crafts we prize, but we've gotten better about making sure people with the talent can get instruction suited to their patience."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Fair enough."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It has improved significantly over the years, we're happy with it now."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Cool. Is that why you pension off humans, we're never good enough at anything?"

Permalink Mark Unread

" - a substantial portion of humans are not good enough at things that they can reliably earn enough money to support themselves and their families by doing those things unless we tamper aggressively with the markets, and if the desiderata is that they all have enough to live on it makes more sense to do that directly. Some of them don't do things. Lots of them do, just less constrained by putting food on the table."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Cool. What do they do till they're twenty-six?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Mostly the army. That's the other justification for pensioning them, it's safe work now but that could change very fast if the siege ends."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And you only want the younger ones in harm's way or something?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We want nobody in harm's way, but once they have kids it's particularly horrible. And we owe them for taking the risk, so generous pension policies."

Permalink Mark Unread

"In my world lots of people have kids younger than that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Army's set up to make it - difficult to pull off - and they're encouraged to wait. We found that older people have much lower rates of child abuse, neglect, medical complications during pregnancy..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh, okay."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Mind, I'm not the policy person, you could get more specific answers from them. I've met maybe a dozen humans and only because I showed up to pester them about their languages."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm getting that sense from you, yes. If I want visits do I have to make up neologisms?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think you have 'might save the world' privileges."

Permalink Mark Unread

Cor laughs.

Permalink Mark Unread

"But don't let that deter you from inventing neologisms."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I shall make a note if any come to me."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's very nice to meet you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You too!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Have anyone in mind to talk to? I don't want to rush you, the time-sensitive is all on your end, but..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know who, uh, exists. Besides that you have mentioned a king."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We have a king, we have a whole council of advisors to the King, we have regional governors who are the commanders of the relevant detachment of our army, we have ambassadors from the Dwarves - they don't have osanwë, though -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"How inconvenient of them. Uh, I'm going to cheat and attempt to derive information from who you suggest I meet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You should talk to the Dwarves, Dwarves are great, I can translate and value the integrity of my translation over any conceivable political consideration. You should probably talk to the King, I think this is the kind of thing Kings are for. I have no idea if talking to his advisors or subordinates is a good use of time, probably depends how good you are at people-skills-y things like drawing inferences from how people talk about their chain of command? It also matters here if you're trying to check for 'we're lying to you' or 'we're importantly wrong'."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not very people-skills-y but I'm - verbally intelligent in a way that might matter? And both."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Then you might as well talk to everybody, it's certainly important enough."

Permalink Mark Unread

"All right." He drinks the last of his soup.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Now? Tomorrow?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Now's fine."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Who first?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uh, I assume all these people are currently more scheduled than me."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Interdimensional visitors with world-endangering magic have a marvelous way of opening up peoples' schedules."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Fair enough. I've never met a king before."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We have the best one. All future kings will disappoint you." He stands.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Really."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I might be biased, he's my brother. But not very biased, he's not my favorite brother."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Who's your favorite?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Probably Tyelcormo. When our father died he spent several years reminding me to eat and sleep."

Permalink Mark Unread

Nod.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have six, so I'm rather spoiled for choice."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm an only child, am I missing much?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I value it. It's nice to have people who are just - yours."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not sure that part's automatic."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, fair. It's true for us."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Cool."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Shall we head over to the palace?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Lead the way. Is it far?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not especially." He opens the door. The guards outside are already melting out of the way.

Permalink Mark Unread

Follow follow.

Permalink Mark Unread

Palace is in the center of the city.

Permalink Mark Unread

Cor only trips twice.

Permalink Mark Unread

And he walks him past lots of uniformed people and -

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hello!" he says in Cor's language, not quite perfectly.

Permalink Mark Unread

He corrects his pronunciation. "Cor, this is Nelyafinwë Maitimo, King of the Noldor."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Pleased to meet you. I'd bow but I might break my nose."

Permalink Mark Unread

Spell side effect, or is it just you?

Permalink Mark Unread

"Just me - should I be talking aloud or doing the thoughts thing -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Talk aloud! I will talk where I can but -" I don't breathe in languages like some people, I haven't got it down yet.

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're still way ahead of where I would be, so."

Permalink Mark Unread

I can cheat at the memory part, I have a magic artifact that makes mine nearly perfect. I can't cheat the grammar. Or the pronunciation - Macalaurë and Curufinwë have a downright magical ear for that -

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, neat artifact."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's so useful. That's my favorite - that and attention, I having one for following lots of things at once -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Have one. You have an artifact for attentional capacity, you've been having a surprising day."

Permalink Mark Unread

"He can't be helping himself," he says to Cor.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can't help himself. I can't help myself, you can't help yourself, he can't help himself."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And a good thing he can't or I'd have had a less enthusiastic audience for my attempt at lessons in Senserke."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And this urgent project would be further delayed. Please sit down." It's a throne room, with conference tables sort of flanking the throne.

Permalink Mark Unread

Plop.

Permalink Mark Unread

"How can I be most helpful to you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...exhibit difficult-to-fake signals of trustworthiness and epistemic responsibility?"

Permalink Mark Unread

I'm optimistic on convincing you we're not mistaken. We have good information - we need to - and Melkor's never offered anything even resembling a defense of his actions and they're not really the kind that could be defensible in the right light.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I've been getting that impression, yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

The atrocities stopped when he was imprisoned last time. He has a few lieutenants who should also be destroyed, but it's not a distributed organization, and there's every reason to think that with Melkor dead it wouldn't be an organization. We anticipate and are prepared for some deadman's switch-type consequences of destroying him, but we don't think there's any meaningful respect in which the war would drag on, or some more important thing be destabilized.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can't really imprison anyone. My magic can do 'dead', 'burnt', 'erased from existence'... not really 'imprisoned'. And it's progressively harder to do more abstract things, I once annoyed my teachers by asking questions similar in character to 'but can I destroy somebody's freedom."

Permalink Mark Unread

If you could destroy someone's oaths then we could get orcs loose.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...oooooh."

Permalink Mark Unread

Easy to test without bothering any orcs, too, we could swear to minor things.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I like this plan. It does require me to either have a point here or use the one at home but it's worthwhile in its own right and also then you wouldn't have to kill the orcs to let me talk to 'em."

Permalink Mark Unread

If it works they might be perfectly tolerant of living among Elves but they also might, even once freed, want to help Melkor to protect their families or hate Elves because we murder their children or something, I can't guarantee that deoathed orcs can be safely sent off to live happy civilian lives. But maybe.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Possible I could send them home with messages, aren't any Elves there."

Permalink Mark Unread

- that'd work, yep. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Suddenly orcs appear in Gatesnest with letters for the moonshot people! 'Hello, moonshot people, here is confirmation that the weirdo's long shot worked!'"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Moonshot?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Next most plausible idea - well, from my opinion on plausibility rankings - was 'gate to the moon'. This has a lot of - secondary necessary steps, like 'figure out how to breathe on the moon long enough to hook into a point there' and 'figure out what to do after the moon has been eaten' and 'avoid horrible tide-related disasters' and so on, whereas if my thing worked it'd just work - wasn't anticipating that the place'd be inhabited but even that might be more beneficial on net than not - but if they figure it out they can buy time."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't think our moon is big enough to be at all useful for that but maybe your world has a very big moon? Anyway, getting the orcs out of here so they can't report to the Enemy that we have new unprecedented magic, inspiring him to try something, is a good solution."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Our moon is smaller than the planet - even than the planet is now - but still pretty big. I don't want to send many orcs, I'm hooked into the moonshot disappearance point but if something about their project changes and they need to stop using it I won't exactly get the memo, so I should use magic only very sparingly. A test on oath destruction, repeat on one or two orcs, send one or two orcs."

Permalink Mark Unread

Nod. "So you know, it will involve killing orcs to take one or two orc captives."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm assuming you do that all the time anyway. Am I wrong?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I just came out of a very ugly war zone. I would rather avoid personally killing anyone because supposedly doing so lowers some inhibitions but I'm not going to be really precious about it. Besides, I'm told they're recoverable."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Especially if we can erase their oaths. Does your magic system destroy chronic pain, by any chance."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I was working on that when the war hit, I hadn't quite got it. Unless it has a physical cause like a kidney stone, I can destroy the hell out of kidney stones."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know the cause. It might be physical." Orcs are created by raising successive generations of Elves in constant torturous pain; subsequently the pain is innate, so all orcs are being tortured all the time. Not in a way that makes them less functional, it's just -there.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...tricky, if not impossible, but maybe. Should save it for when I have leeway for experiments though."

Permalink Mark Unread

He nods. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can get underway on designing the spell for oath-busting once I know enough about oaths - any detail could be helpful in avoiding side effects."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hmm." You have to swear oaths by speaking aloud. You can swear them to a deity - Vala or Maia - which gives that deity the power to release you - or to a general audience, which means no one does. If you do not specify a time frame an oath is active forever. Ambiguity is resolved by the understanding and intent of the speaker, but a slightly strange understanding of 'intent': if I swear 'I will not lie to you', intending primarily to get you to give me magic instead of to bindingly commit myself to future honesty, I am absolutely bindingly committed to future honesty. I intended to make it understood to you that that was what was happening, and so that is what happens. If you swear in a language you don't know, then the oath will not affect you until you're apprised of its contents and the fact you made it. Same if you swear while barely lucid, which is why torturing people into oaths is only moderately effective, or if you swear as a young child, though I think the Enemy has you repeat it as you get older in order to avoid this problem somewhat.

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Cor writes this down in a bulleted list.

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You can swear to alter states of mind, with some constraints. Orcs swear to hate Elves and that mostly works; swearing to forget something happened doesn't usually work well; swearing to believe everything someone says has wildly unpredictable results from 'collapses in internal confusion' through 'just finds that person super trustworthy'. If you make an oath that absolutely proscribes a course of action, you'll find you just literally can't take it; your body won't move to complete the steps. If you make an oath that demands a course of action, you merely find it overwhelmingly, distractingly tempting, and gradually you lose the ability to have desires or preferences outside that course of action.

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"It is... possible I can't de-oath somebody without making them not an oathgiving creature any more."

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...huh. With orcs that's obviously worth it. With Elves... I can probably find a volunteer but I think they'd consider it a genuine sacrifice. We know how to be safe with them and they're useful for credibility.

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"I can try but - the way spell specifications work is more 'describing an aesthetic to the magic' than 'issuing complex specific instructions'. The destruction-only part is hard-wired or it'd be very... uh, it's kind of like writing an evocatively descriptive paragraph? You will get a thing that is metaphorically by the same artist of the same subject in the same color palette as what you had in mind, if you know what you're doing, but maybe from a different angle or with a different... paintbrush... I don't know anything about painting, that got away from me... uh, anyway, it makes it hard to leave precise exceptions, if you're weeding a farm you go 'imagine a farm with no weeds', not 'imagine a farm with only that one weed over there' because if you do the second thing the magic might go 'oh you mean those three weeds? we're doing a "some weeds" thing, right?' and - yeah."

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Nod. Will it consider marriage to be a weed? Elven marriage is a binding of two souls for all eternity.

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"That sounds aesthetically different, more 'leave the flowerboxes alone' than 'protect farmer's daughter's favorite specific dandelion that she named Sunbeam', yeah."

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Giggle. Okay. I'll ask around and find you somebody to try it on.

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"I can't guarantee the marriage thing, it's just somewhat likelier to survive than poor Sunbeam."

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"We'll try someone not married who will not be sad if it happens they can never marry."

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"Cool. I can get going on spell design now if there's nothing else I should know about oaths or aesthetically nearby things."

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He glances at Curufinwë.

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"I'm not sure what else might be relevant. Valar and Maiar and Elves and orcs can all make oaths. The state of having made an oath doesn't feel like anything. If you cannot progress towards achieving something you sworn to do you can pursue other things you care about normally. You can't derive new information by swearing oaths; I couldn't swear to hate traitors and thereby learn which person in a battalion was a traitor, or anything like that."

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"When I said any detail might matter I meant it, if I get it wrong by a little I spend a few hours knocked out and if I get it wrong by a lot I start harming the subject and/or losing toes."

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Nod. "You make an oath by saying 'I swear'. 'I promise' doesn't do it. It survives death and reembodiment."

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"What counts as 'cannot progress', how gradually is gradually, how are prospects for fooling oneself about whether a step advances a thing you swore not to do, are there any customary aesthetically-contributory rituals around swearing things, what's the thing where they can be released like, how good is the time limit thing can you use that to derive information if you don't have very good time sense..."

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"In general you cannot take any voluntary actions which progress something you've sworn not to do. Gradually - unless there's a narrow window of time in which the task has to be accomplished, years. If there is a narrow window it intensifies very fast. Never heard of anyone successfully fooling themself about that but it's not terribly safe to test. There are customs; you make oaths in public, loudly and clearly, Elves like them to be well-composed, sometimes you repeat previously-made ones at key moments, you might hold a sword or a pen or a work of art or a banner as appropriate. You can derive information from the time limit. Being released is - a Maia or Vala to whom an oath was addressed acknowledges that they're releasing you, no specific phrasing needed, and it doesn't affect you anymore. You could derive information about whether someone was really that particular Maia or Vala that way."

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"Are time limits about time or can they be about contingencies?"

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"You can do contingencies but then you need to know whether the contingency was met."

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"Can you be fooled?"

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"Yep. Oath is back in effect if you figure out that you were, though. And if you swear two incompatible things that are operative simultaneously you just collapse in horrible agony."

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"The horrible agony thing is very, ah, aesthetically important."

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"Good to know. Swearing to contradicting things results in horrible agony until they somehow cease to contradict or someone puts you out of your misery. - you might suffer while dead, actually, if the oaths made demands that were possible to act towards while dead."

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"Are there many things you can do while dead?"

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"Think things. Tell or refuse to tell Mandos, the Vala of the dead, things."

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"Fair enough. I'm thinking this is a two-sheeper. If you want the sheep to live. I can do it on one if you would like a dead sheep."

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"I'll have someone bring - probably cows, actually, we don't have a lot of sheep."

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"Never bled a cow myself, cow might survive! Cows're big."

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"We will hope for the best for the cow and the experiment."

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"Just don't send your favorite cow that some farmer's daughter has named, I have a terrible track record with things farmers' daughters have named."

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"I can ask the farmers if they have sentimental daughters! They probably do, our human birthrate's really high."

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"How high is really high from the perspective of a species that hasn't had any kids in centuries?"

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"All right, admittedly we'd think it was striking if they occasionally had one. But it's about six on average, the population doubles every twenty-four years."

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"Okay, yeah, six is a buncha kids, especially if they don't start till their late twenties."

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"Are there various social and cultural things in your world that produce lower birthrates, we could try changing some cultural conditions -"

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"I don't really know the causality on that? - Magic can be used for abortion and sterilization, I assume if you have those you do them some other way."

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" - we don't have those. Well, Elves do, humans don't."

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"...well, there you go, then, people who are more pregnant or fertile than they want to be at home go to a mage. Except now that everything is terrible, I suppose."

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"Having kids they don't want in a dying world."

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"Yeah I think I mentioned I did not come from a pleasant time and place."

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"Well, hopefully soon we can send orcs with the news that there's hope."

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"Hopefully. What else should I know about oaths?"

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They can both volunteer more trivia about oaths! 

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"Alrighty. I can work with this. Who's my proof of concept test subject?"

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Maitimo waves someone in. She's brown-haired and smiling nervously. "Lhinniel," he says, and then in a language that's not Quenya, this is Corbelan, who can perhaps erase oaths.

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"Hi, pleased to meet you."

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I haven't actually made any oaths, should I just swear not to eat apples for the rest of the day or something?

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"It might take me more than a day to compose and set up the spell, but that's the general idea. You're okay with maybe not being able to make oaths afterwards? I can probably leave it so you can get soul married but I can't guarantee that."

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Yes, the King said. I am not likely to marry anyway, it's fine.

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"Okay. So not eating apples or whatever else and give me a couple of days."

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She says something in a language he doesn't speak which is presumably an oath about apples. The King nods. 

A couple days, a couple cows, and do you need anything else?

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"Fine ash. Less-fine ash ground up is okay and it doesn't need to be ash from anything in particular."

Permalink Mark Unread

That's straightforward. Okay. I think you should change your - disappearance point - to here. We're going to use this to destroy Melkor, so there is going to be one in this world, and five years' less time for us to solve this problem in a millennium seems like a good trade for some more time for your world right now.

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"Okay. You have some place I can go to that you don't need for anything other than maybe garbage disposal which doesn't have anybody living on the far side?"

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As far as we know there's no one living anywhere on the far side but we don't have a way to be certain. We have places we don't need for anything.

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"Uh, why would there be nobody on an entire half a planet?"

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I don't think there are even plants on it, I don't think they ever got around to designing it. I'm not sure how gravity works there.

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"I'm confused."

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"I think before the disaster their planet was spherical, with gravity pointed inwards? Is that right?"

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"It still is sort of spherical it just has some space-warping puncture wounds. Gravity still points inwards."

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"Ours is flat. Gravity is, well, down. Does some weird things at the edges, we have no idea what it does on the bottom."

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"...huh. That shouldn't affect a disappearance point, I think, and is convenient for the nobody living on the other side thing."

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"The Valar have said no one lives on the other side, and aren't except Melkor in the habit of lying, but if there were a way to check I would like to, eventually."

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"About how thick is the planet? Me or a handful of people using the point would take a long time to get through a sphere of this gravity but if it's only a hundred feet thick or something..."

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"Much thicker than that but I couldn't give you numbers." He makes a face. "Melian would know."

The King sighs.

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"Do you have a lower bound?"

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"Dwarves have dug down about a mile."

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"...I will not singlehandedly eat a mile down from a good-size circle very quickly but if something disastrous happens when it does break through..."

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Might be safer to leave it in your world with fewer unknowns, yes.

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"Can you ask this Melian person? For reference the diameter of my planet when it's not riddled with holes is eight thousand miles ish."

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The complication is that were she fully informed Melian might try to have you assassinated and I can't think how to get an answer without offering some information. We can try.

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"I would rather not be assassinated. Why would she want to assassinate me?"

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Wouldn't trust us not to use the magic against her if we had it. We've never warred with them, it'd be grounded in - general paranoia rather than specific grievances. I am happy to swear we would not employ magic in such a way.

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"Possible I should hear out the general paranoia if there's a way to do that without being assassinated."

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Humans aren't allowed into Doriath but they'll sometimes entertain conversation at the borders. I don't expect they'd assassinate someone who came to talk but I don't, ah, very strongly expect that.

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"Is there a way to prevent that?"

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We can send you with security but honestly if Melian's willing to start a war over it she could kill you anywhere within range of the border.

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"...great."

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I can send some Dwarves with the question, but we won't have a timely answer that way and may not get one at all. 

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"And it'll have to go through translation." Sigh.

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Destroying oaths only works if they are a thing and work as described, right?

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"Uh, yes, I'm gambling here that if you wanted me dead you'd pick a different way to do it."

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So after the experiment you'll have confirmation on that point, and then I can swear not to withhold relevant information and answer questions you might have about Doriath. I know what they'd say if they were willing to talk to you, it'll be approximately as informative as going there yourself.

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"Okay, although that doesn't help with respect to the thickness of the planet. I'm not joking about this killing me if you're telling substantial falsehoods that I use to build a spell, by the way, that'd be a hell of a way to lose your only mage."

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Doesn't help with the thickness of the planet, no. I didn't think you were kidding.

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Cor sighs. He starts spreading out paper and sketching.

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Elves come in and out and have conversation in Quenya or telepathically. Eventually he is told there are cows available.

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"Won't need them till I have a design, but good to know."

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Elves continue to work and speak and plan and have meetings around him. They all have long braided hair. 

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"Dinner break?" he eventually wonders.

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"I'll have someone bring food right over."

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"Convenient."

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"I suppose. How does that work at home?"

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"Well, you can get food delivered but it's a luxury, most people cook for themselves or eat at restaurants." He has the habit of publicizing what he means to say.

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"In Tirion before the war there were food carts everywhere, you'd go for a stroll at lunchtime and pick up things. Here we have -" rationing often enough to be hard on enterprising food cart vendors.

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"That sucks. Is there rationing right now?"

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"This year's been all right."

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"If I'd come here for any other reason I'd offer to go fix blights or whatever." Sigh.

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"Doesn't sound worth it." Curufin thinks that if different worlds have different magic systems we shall be omnipotent sooner or later, we'll get the blights then.

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"Yeah. I just really miss being able to do magic casually. Some things are really elaborate - getting here was, the oath erasure will be - but I could also just - perfectly roast a chicken leg by dropping a little sheep blood on it and chanting, say. Since it does burning and you can just back off a little on how much burning."

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Maybe if it eats a whole planet nothing happens subsequently and once uninhabited worlds are found your world can return to casual use and we can employ it for disease control.

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"Maybe."

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I am a bit nervous about finding out but that's just all the more reason to have collected absurd amounts of magic by then.

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Nod. "Hopefully most forms of magic don't eat planets at all."

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Ours don't! They're very slow, though, not particularly human-suited.

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"Oh, does singing a magic song take all day?"

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"No, but writing them takes decades."

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"I don't sing especially well but it would be nice to have some magic I could use casually."

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I'd be happy to teach you a song - there's one for walking on water, one for making it rain or making it warmer or making it colder, one that causes the people around you to fall asleep, there are mood ones for therapeutic contexts...

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"...I'd probably better not try to walk on water. I'd trip and quit singing and drown probably. Temperature songs sound neat."

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Please don't trip and quit singing and drown, it'd be an awfully disappointing way for our one shot at interworld contact to end.

And he sings a song that makes the room warm.

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"That's really pretty."

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"Thank you!"

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"I will need to hear it a couple times to have any hope of reproducing the tune let alone the lyrics but oh well."

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I can sing it several more times. I suppose learning our musical notation is not the best use of your time.

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"Probably not. Does it do a fixed target temperature or just 'warmer', will you cook us if you sing it over and over?"

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"It's not strong enough, the heat would dissipate, but if we were in a sealed space maybe."

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"Gotcha."

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"We use song for war, though not that one specifically."

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"What kinds of war things do songs do?"

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"Make you stronger and less fatigued and luckier, better reflexes - or does the opposite for your enemy -"

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"And they don't just do the same thing? Or they do?"

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"There's a freeform way of competing for control of a song. It'd be easier to show than to explain. And Elves sing better than orcs."

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"I'd believe it!"

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"Orcs are - designed to be the opposite of us to a degree that is sometimes a strategic disadvantage."

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"Is it an advantage in any way?"

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They breed faster, and don't have control of it - that's an advantage for the Enemy, he can get thousands of them in a single Elven generation. They don't have osanwë, which is a disadvantage for coordination but means they can't spread accurate information easily or have interactions with each other outside the Enemy's control, I presume he did it on purpose for that or some related reason. The pain might make them more resilient when injured in battle, but I think that one is mostly just for its own sake. 

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"Bleah."

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"We don't go to war lightly."

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"What's the long term plan assuming all goes well - I buy a few millennia and kill a god and we find more magic which conveniently stops disappearance points from growing -"

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"I don't know how widely I want it distributed here, it seems rather catastrophic in the wrong hands, but we eradicate diseases and do good things for crop yields and offer humans sterilization and then we send delegates searching for more worlds and more magic systems and hopefully find some that complement each other well and handle their impending dooms if any and get a better picture of how many worlds there are and within what ranges they vary. Do something about the Valar, eventually."

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"Do something?"

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Depends substantially on what tools we have - I don't know whether to reverse all their edits or not, in cases where people didn't agree to editing but wouldn't agree now to have it reversed - depends whether we can make everybody safe from them without killing them, depends whether we have resurrection good enough that killing people becomes more - putting them aside until we're even more powerful -

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"I'd want to be very careful I didn't lose track of who was being put aside."

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He touches his necklace. I remember every subject of mine who has died in this war. I could remember another million, though it looks like perhaps I won't need to.

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Nod.

Was there going to be food?

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Food is brought!

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Mmm food.

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Elves are glad he likes it.

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And then he goes back to coming up with how to draw oathlessness in blood and ash.

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He is not interrupted.

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When he starts yawning he gathers up his papers and heads doorwards.

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Some people are waiting to escort him back to his house!

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"Are you here as bodyguards or to make sure I don't go skipping off?"

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So you don't get lost, actually; there shouldn't be danger inside the city, and you're free to go anywhere you like.

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"Okay, lead the way."

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They take him back.

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He sleeps! He wakes up! He solicits breakfast!

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He gets breakfast!

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And before lunch:

I think I've got a spell that will work. ...Does this thinking things in public thing work if no one was already paying attention to me.

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I caught that! You can aim at specific people if you want to make sure they're paying attention to you.

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Noted! Where is my cow and ash and workspace?

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He sends a mental map.

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I could get used to this telepathy thing. Off he goes. Okay, I need the cow restrained so it can't kick me for cutting it - this is why we mostly use sheep, you can breed sheep to be very docile and too small to ruin your day - and something to cut it with and something to catch blood in, other than that I don't strictly need anything other than the blood and the ash and the subject, but she might be more comfortable with my painting her if I did not have to do it with my bare hands, a sponge or rag or something is ideal.

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I can arrange all of those things! Osanwë is great, I'd get so much less done without it.

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The design I've got calls for marks around her mouth and neck, up to her what her tolerance for getting symbolic substances on her clothes is, I can be professional about it.

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Oh, Elves don't have the human taboo on nudity, if it's more convenient for her not to wear a shirt I am sure she won't mind.

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It is, yeah.

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I will let her know. 

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Thanks!

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And his supplies and cow-handlers and test subject arrive! She is topless and no one in fact seems to think anything of it.

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Convenient! "If this were a sheep I'd cut here," he says, pointing at a cow location, "does that seem right to you?"

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Cow-handler thinks so.

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He hefts the bowl to get an idea of what it weighs, cuts the cow, collects blood. Tells the subject where to stand, sponges designs on her, and then continues on the floor, spiraling out.

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They watch interestedly.

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He sits at the outer edge of the spiral and double checks everything against his paper sketches.

Then he closes his eyes.

"There is no oath. There are no oaths. I destroy. It is not; they are not. I annihilate. It is not; they are not. I erase. It is not; they are not. I void. It is not; they are not. I nullify. It is not; they are not. I extinguish. It is not; they are not. I shrink the world into one without this oath, without these oaths! I destroy, I destroy, I destroy!"

There is the opposite of a flash, a sudden blink of darkness - and Lhinniel can eat apples.

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She tries it. She giggles. 

       Check whether you can still make oaths, he instructs her.

She swears off apples again and then tries to eat one.

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She can still eat it!

Permalink Mark Unread

Looks like it does make them stop working, then. Marriage I can't conveniently test - do you happen to know, now that you've done it -

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"I don't get feedback exactly, but seeing as I'm still conscious I'd be surprised if I'd failed to except it."

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She smiles and eats another bite of her apple. I like your magic! It's very dramatic. And we can free orcs, that's really something.

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"It's got its drawbacks, among them 'sounding incredibly evil' and 'eating planets', but yep!"

Permalink Mark Unread

Maybe the Noldor'll find a way around those, they're good at that. Apple bite. It does sound kind of evil. You can't do it with gentler emphasis?

Permalink Mark Unread

"Alas no, it is very much about the 'I destroy' thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

Huh. What powers it, is it like there's - a personality?

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"There's not a person, but you could conceptualize it as having a personality. A really really destruction-happy personality."

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Giggle. So are you going to kill Morgoth?

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"Possibly!"

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Would you have to paint him in blood for that?

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"It'd help but not being able to do that isn't prohibitive."

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh good. I don't think he'd sit still for it. I'm not even sure he has a physical form.

       Sometimes he does, someone else says. Orcs sometimes think of him. All black and spiky and scary - he'd love destruction magic -

That would be a catastrophe.

       I am sure we have lots of precautions to prevent it.

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"I'd certainly hope so, given the givens."

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The King's good about that, she says, finishing her apple. Very paranoid. 

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"Good for him."

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It must be dangerous to be an important person in your world, if anyone can kill anyone from far away.

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"It's not that easy, and most people aren't mages, but yeah."

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Cow-handlers remove the cow.

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"Thank you!" Cor calls after them.

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Of course! 

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"Should I be cleaning up here or will someone else handle that -"

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They'll get it, says Lhinniel, you can get working on Melkor!

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not sure the two trade off directly but I have no janitorial yearnings."

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I wonder how they got janitors in Valinor, they didn't have money. Maybe they messed with some peoples' heads to make them want to be janitors.

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"Could not begin to speculate. Did you not use to live there?"

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Oh, no, I'm not Noldorin - black or red hair means they used to live in Valinor, brown or silver means we're descended from a different group of Elves who declined the invitation to Valinor in the first place. It seemed too good to be true, and we were right. Well, 'we' - I wasn't born back then - 

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"Ah, gotcha."

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Cleaning crews come.

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Cor goes back to his little house to await orc capture and have lunch.

Permalink Mark Unread

He stops by with lunch! That's impressive magic. The Valar can't do anything about oaths.

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"Thanks! It only does one thing but it does it pretty well."

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You don't say. I hear it didn't do marriage, but presumably it could, say, divorce people? If they wanted?

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"Uh, probably?"

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That might delight some people.

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"Yyyyes I can imagine. When I can be a little less circumspect with my magic use perhaps."

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Oh yes, definitely, it's waited centuries in most cases and isn't worth it at all until we have a renewable source. But - Elves can get married unwillingly -

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"What the fuck?"

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Ah?

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"How does that happen?"

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When Elves have sex they get married.

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"That is also stupid!"

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"I agree wholeheartedly!"

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Sigh. "Yeah once I can do nonessential magic I can figure out Elf divorce."

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"I have not forgotten there are higher priorities but it'll be appreciated."

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"Thanks for letting me know."

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"Sure thing. Do you have more questions now that you can confirm oaths work as described?"

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"Gonna want you to confirm orc translations - the language barrier probably means people who aren't you won't want to swear so I can understand -"

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"Not until they've picked it up, at least, yeah."

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"In theory, I could pretend words meant different things."

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"It's the sort of thing we warn little kids about. Never ever ever swear anything in a language you're not fluent in."

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"Yes, but as your sole source of information I could corrupt your understanding if I were an asshole."

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"I don't think you could get it past me, honestly."

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"Probably not. Etymology or something."

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"If Maitimo thought you were an asshole then I might be doublechecking my word roots. But he doesn't."

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"Based on what?"

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"Oh, he just has uncannily good instincts for that kind of thing."

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"Huh. Sounds useful."

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"I can only imagine how the civil war would've gone otherwise, yeah."

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"I am curious about the civil war."

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"This was four hundred years ago. Melkor'd been paroled for - nearly a thousand? And he spent the time making a study of everyone in Valinor and how to cause as much of a catastrophe as possible when he made his move. So he started - planting evidence, starting rumors, shapeshifting and having suspicious conversations in earshot of people, managed to convince some people that my father, who was the King's heir, was planning to have them killed when he took power. My father barely knew they existed and all he ever wanted with power was to get us out of Valinor. But I don't want to be entirely unfair to them, they had convincing evidence - they took it to the King who told them they were safe, warned the Valar something was up but didn't know what -

- so they started planning to kill my father before he assumed power or overthrow him once he did. And that it was arranged that we'd hear about, so then we genuinely were worried about them, and so the false rumors could subsequently be supplemented with true ones. And when the King was murdered one of the paranoid people declared himself King and had some force to back it up with - and he had my father assassinated and there was fighting in the streets -"

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"Did this person have some claim to the throne or just some followers?"

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"King's son by a different woman. Legally no claim, but - not just random."

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Nod.

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"Anyway it looked like Melkor was going to get exactly what he wanted, thousands and thousands of people dead and none of us in any state to get to Endorë. And then the next morning we woke up to peace and pardons all around and a restructured chain of command and orders to get moving and it was over. Maitimo killed a total of twelve people."

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"...surgical."

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"About the best you could do, under the circumstances. They might even be back by now."

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"Thought that was really rare?"

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"Twelve in four hundred years is about the right amount of rare."

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"Mkay."

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"We don't have channels of communication with Valinor, they might not, I don't know. But they might."

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"No channels at all?"

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"If we swear things before the Valar they become aware of them, and sometimes if you hang out at the seaside praying to Ulmo for six months he'll answer a question - Ulmo's the Vala of the seas. But no meaningful ones. We're not allowed back. For the crime of rebelling against the natural order and bringing disruption to Valinor."

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"Maybe I'm too used to gates."

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"They seem like they'd change things substantially, yeah."

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"Before the invention of gates we had carrier pigeons?"

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"When we send ships they sink them. We admittedly haven't tried carrier pigeons."

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"They kind of require more initial communication, you have to get them from where they'd be sent."

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"Tyelcormo might be able to make do without that but he'd do it by making them people. And then sending them off to get probably shot is more of a problem."

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"...he can make birds into people?"

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"He can talk to animals. And when he talks to specific animals for a while the way they structure their thoughts gets more - personlike."

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"How does he do that?"

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"I have no idea and find it very upsetting. No one else can do it."

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"Huh! A mystery."

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"Perhaps you'll be the one to sort it out."

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"I don't think I have any special advantages at that. When I started learning magic we were inducted into the mindset of working with subtraction-only power by listing things we'd want to destroy if we got good enough to do unprecedentedly abstracted things and 'ignorance' came up but that's really very very unprecedentedly abstract."

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"And might have disturbing side effects!"

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"Possibly, yes!"

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"I'd still go for it, but the King would glare at me very scoldingly."

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"Your mind as-is is a valuable resource for communicating with mindreading-squeamish aliens!"

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"But omniscience!"

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"I know, so tempting."

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"You wanted to meet with a bunch of people, did a chance to talk with orcs end up obviating that?"

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"Not completely but substantially. Might as well fill the time before meeting orcs though."

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"Okay! Who next?"

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"Dwarves sound neat!"

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"Dwarves are great!" And he leads him out.

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Follow follow.

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Dwarves are, it transpires, short and hairy and friendly; they start talking rapidly to Curufin as they approach. He translates over osanwë: they are concerned with market solutions to the tendency of magic to destroy the world. Also they're pleased to meet him, does he have opinions about market solutions to the tendency of his world's magic to destroy the world?

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"Uh, it seems like that depends very much on whether we actually have the correct math now of how much destruction individual acts of magic produce, which, we thought we did before and turned out no."

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How had they been trying to track it? 

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"We knew by looking at volcanoes and some non-empirical guesswork - I don't know the details - how far down the magma was supposed to be. We couldn't distinguish between upper magma and lower magma, though, so after the holes got that deep we were just assuming the same rate held until one went all the way through - no one looked at it during the period of time it must have hit the crust on the far side."

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"And the rate had been the same up to that point?"

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"Close enough that it could have been genuine variance in how thick the crust was in different places or undocumented uses of magic. Early on in a given disappearance point's use it does not noticeably grow on its own at all - if it's wide enough; there are some ancient narrow ones that weren't used very much, fell out of use, and weren't checked up on, which were discovered to have grown since then once we knew something was up and checked. Wide ones appear to just disappear things on a per-spell basis. We knew it wasn't a renewable resource but we thought we had a lot of it."

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They are sympathetic; pricing it right sounds really hard and enforcement even harder. They are curious about his world's technologies and its governments and how gates are used for trade.

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His world has the printing press and steam power and steel and clockwork and assembly lines! He knows a lot about gates for trade; he lived in Gatesnest, a sort of distributed city-state. There are horizontal gates to drop things through and vertical ones to walk or ride through, in all sizes - "although they'll get bigger eventually; they're based around disappearance points that are used in a very controlled fashion and then disconnected - but the rate will be tiny."

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Dwarves are fascinated and delighted and have followup questions as fast as Curufinwë can translate them. This one wants to know whether there's a universal trade language and how it developed and this one is curious how straightforward immigration affected governments and this one is really excited about steam power.

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"Gatetalk isn't universal but it's really common! People who grew up in Gatesnest or spent a lot of time there picked up bits of nine, ten, maybe eleven major languages and creoled them all together. Senserke, the one I'm speaking and am better at, was one of them, so there's some Senserke words in Gatetalk but it's not one of the more dominant contributors. Immigration seems to cause cultures to - speciate more on things that aren't directly relevant to trade? If you want to live in a cosmopolitan hodgepodge you live in Gatesnest itself, or a place like it, there's a few other nesty places; people who don't want that tend to wind up in places with personality or that are at least really inexpensive. More on a city level than a country level. Country politics is probably also affected in some way but I'm not sure how."

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Curufin is maybe favoring the Dwarf who wants to ask about the creole of eleven major languages, who now wants to know if he speaks any of them and if he knows which of a dozen different grammatical rules that sometimes supersede other ones in creoles behaved the same way on his planet and what made a language a dominant contributor and so on and on and on. The other Dwarves still get some questions translated: they now want to know how straightforwardly gates are made and whether their making is policed and by who and which city types thrived most. Steam power one has steam power questions.

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Cor can speak Gatetalk but doesn't know that much about it except by examining it via his own fluency. He doesn't speak any of the other ten contributors. He knows how to make gates; it involves traveling to both locations. There are rules about making them because having disappearance points in the sorts of places one may want to make gates is hazardous. He knows only vague things about steam power.

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Eventually the tide of questions will slow to a sprinkle of questions and the Dwarves will courteously offer to answer any questions he has.

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He would like to know things about Dwarves, and how these Dwarves came to be here among these Elves, and what they think of these and other Elves and orcs and Valar and whatnot.

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Dwarves live in underground cities and they vary from Elves and humans mostly in having a much wider variety of family structures and a much wider variety of governments and a general suspicion of governments and a fondness for things which can be achieved through trade and a intense dislike of mindreading and mind-altering magic which Dwarves are all thankfully immune to! They came to be here because they run businesses here, mostly shipping businesses, though they're also sort of ambassadors in that they are willing to sell predictions about how things will go over with their governments back home. Elves are all right and the Noldor are better than Doriath, which used to hunt Dwarves for sport. 

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Uh. Wow. On the hunting thing. What is there in the way of mind-altering magic?

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The Enemy does it to prisoners, supposedly. He doesn't try to take Dwarf prisoners, they only know that secondhand. Songs do it, some artifacts do it (Dwarves can't get the mind-enhancing artifacts either). Oaths can do it. Dwarves think oaths are kind of terrible. 

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"They seem like they could get that way, yes. Once I can do magic more freely I can get rid of them for anyone who wants them gone. What kinds of things do mind artifacts and songs do?"

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They think all kinds of things but they really aren't the people to ask, being immune.

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Fair enough.

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Dwarves get along fine with orcs though they're not reliable trade partners because they don't have fixed places to live except Angband. Dwarves disapprove of Angband and of the Enemy, obviously. 

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"It seems awkward to hang out with orcs while having this disapproval of their rather enforced supreme leader."

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Oh orcs don't like Melkor either because he keeps sending their children off to be pointlessly slaughtered by Elves.

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"I guess that would help, assuming they're allowed to talk about that socially."

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If there aren't any Elves around and they don't have orders to do anything in particular they're pretty much just normal people.

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"Cool. I'm planning to de-oath a couple."

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They approve. Oaths are such a terrible idea.

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"They then can't stick around, for intel reasons, but they can go to my world and bring 'em news."

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Dwarves are vaguely down on interworld kidnapping but it's better than executing them which is otherwise what the Elves would do.

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"It is not a perfect solution especially since my world is disintegrating but letting people know that getting out of it is a thing they can do is a big deal."

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Makes sense.

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Do the Dwarves have any advice on more people he should talk to?

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What is he trying to get out of talking to people?

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"Getting my bearings, hearing different perspectives ideally without being assassinated in the process."

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Dwarves won't assassinate him. Melian probably wouldn't? Maybe if he's obviously inclined to give the Noldor magic and she thinks it's a bad idea. Or if he looks himself inclined to bother Doriath. The Enemy would certainly not assassinate him.

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"The worldeating thing would, if nothing else happened, eventually bother Doriath."

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That seems like the kind of thing Melian would object to if she can't make it stop, which she might be able to.

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"Which would be useful but asking might get me assassinated if she decided that was safer, is the impression I get?"

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Yeah the Iathrim are really terrible at game theory that way. The Noldor are better at it.

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"Good to know."

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(Dwarves are the best at it). Curufin giggles translating this.

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"And how does that manifest?"

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Well if he wrote the Noldor and said that he had a question for them but it was only worth asking if he could be guaranteed he wouldn't be worse off for asking, then they'd swear to that and probably abide by it even if not sworn to it. Dwarves wouldn't swear to it because ewww but they'd totally abide by it, even more certainly so than the Noldor, who might be tempted if it were something really tempting to act on.

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"Whereas if Melian got a letter to this effect she'd..."

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The Dwarves debate this for a minute. The debate is between 'get confused and not answer' and 'respond saying that she will always do what is in Doriath's interests'. They can't really say very confidently, none of them have met her. They only know her by reputation.

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"Well, I suppose at least she wouldn't commit and renege. You don't happen to know how thick the planet is, do you?"

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They have dug a couple miles down. It is thicker than that. You could probably figure it out with math. They set to trying that. They conclude it's thousands of miles thick probably unless the Valar cheated with gravity.

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"Uh, they must have cheated at least a little."

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The edges are supposed to be weird but they don't know if the main part is.

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"Yeah that'd be the sticking point."

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They debate other methods of checking, but fruitlessly.

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"Are you sure you have dug below the lowest natural elevation?"

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They are sure of that!

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"Yeah then I don't have any other ideas besides 'ask somebody who'd know' or, like, 'gate to a vantage point where you could see it' which has sort of a bootstrapping problem."

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At least Melian finally learned to read so writing a letter is an option.

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"I suppose it's technically possible she would just consider it harmless trivia!"

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Did he hear about how Melian got her husband.

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"Hasn't come up."

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Her husband was King of the Lindar and had slipped away from his guards to meet his boyfriend and instead got lost in the woods and ran into Melian and that was the last anyone heard of him for two hundred years, when he reappeared totally enamored with her and has been her devoted husband ever since.

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"They take their editing away homosexuality thing really seriously, huh."

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Dwarves are confused. Curufin has to clarify. "They don't have gender," he says, "their telling didn't have gendered pronouns, I added them."

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"Oh. The comment stands but now I'm curious about the lack of gender thing!"

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Uh, about a third of Dwarves can get pregnant and if that's what you're looking for it's not rude to ask but asking in other contexts would be pretty weird really. They don't really understand what other species get out of having genders and they have no idea what the Valar get out of mindcontrolling people into having gender preferences in dating.

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"Eh, it's mostly cosmetic. - Not the Valar's thing, I don't know what their stake is either."

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"There are no activities between two men or two women that result in marriage and the Valar disapprove of intimacy outside marriage. It's not a rule here, but of course there aren't many of them, since if the Valar caught it they'd have edited it."

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"Do they care in species that don't have soul marriage or has it never come up?"

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"Hasn't come up, humans started existing after we left and Dwarves - well, one of the Valar made Dwarves so he at least can be assumed not to care when it comes to Dwarves."

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"You have to assume these things? There isn't a formal summary of Things Valar Think Are Their Business And Their Detailed Opinions?"

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"There's all kinds of formal writings but the Valar think weirdly, it takes effort to derive their opinions from their explanations."

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"Fun."

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"I just wish we'd gotten out sooner."

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Nod.

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"Anyway. Anyone else you want to meet -"

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"I... think I have no urgent conversational needs till orcs show up."

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A while later a guard tells them that orcs have been brought. 

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"Thanks. Is there any reason we shouldn't explain why I am going to paint substances on and around them and chant before I do it?"

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"Enemy could be reading their minds."

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"...he could also do that during or after the painting and chanting."

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"Yes but then all he'd know is that we have a way to break oaths, which involve speech in a foreign language, as opposed to having a full explanation. I suppose there's nothing to be lost by telling the orcs that we're going to free them of their oaths."

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"I mean, if I want them to actually deliver letters as opposed to appearing terrified and bewildered in downtown recently-war-torn Gatesnest to be promptly arrested for obstructing traffic, they will need an explanation."

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"The letters can't have the explanation?"

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"I have never been arrested but I don't think they make a habit of confiscating and reading people's papers, we'd be gambling on someone being curious about their spontaneous presence or what they look like enough to get intrusive. Also, like, the poor orcs, getting kidnapped by Elves is at least in the realm of possibility - I have to assume - but they're going to land in Gatesnest and everything's going to be weird and spacewarpy and human and absolutely no one will know their language."

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"I empathize but you should assume anything said in their presence while they are here may as well be said directly to the Enemy."

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"...what exactly do orcs actually look like, let me calibrate how alarming they're going to seem."

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He sends a mental image.

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...sigh. "Okay, I will settle for explaining that they're going to be de-oathed and then, uh, pleading after that to end the cycle of violence and hoping they get the hint when they land among people with whom they have no previously established cycle, and they can wear signs."

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"Thank you. Sounds good. I don't expect they'll be violent on arrival."

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"Hopefully they will also not destroy their signs or letters."

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"Harder to guess." 

 

The orcs are being held in a stone building. They are restrained and blindfolded. There are two.

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"Why the blindfolds, is what I look like a secret too?"

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What you draw on them and the floor.

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"They're going to feel what I draw on them. I suppose I could add extra stuff in a dummy substance."

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"And it'd be harder to guess the whole pattern from that. I assume bits aren't very useful."

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"Bits are almost totally useless. The whole spell would be if I hadn't already used it, I painted metaphorical oathlessness with the fanciful use of swirls and it was me enforcing the metaphor, it's a reproducible thing now but it wasn't the previous afternoon."

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"Huh. So the first casting requires a mental extension of the metaphor and then after that it's catalogued and just works?" We should be quiet, we're close enough now -

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It's sort of like very quickly establishing an artistic convention. What, is the Enemy as good at languages as you?

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No one alive is as good at languages as me but they can take the memory and play it over a million times and maybe that amounts to almost the same thing.

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Okay. I could try chanting over osanwë? It's not completely out of the question that thinking it works if there's telepathic protocol involved, although it doesn't normally.

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Does anything bad happen if it doesn't work?

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Nope. Unless I take so long trying it that the blood dries.

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Then go for it, I suppose.

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The dummy substance should be water, so it doesn't confuse anyone who's trying to copy the spell. At least for the dimension jump if not the oathbreaking.

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I'll have someone bring it.

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He nods. He sighs orcwards. Have they been told yet that we're going to break their oaths?

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No. I can do that now if you want.

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Yes please.

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So he tells the orcs that they are going to remove their oaths of servitude to Melkor.

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I was expecting more of a reaction.

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I doubt they believe us, and they're magically obliged to hate us.

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I suppose. Should we be set up to send them away as soon as the oathbreaking is done? Signs and letters and all, everything but painting the blood? Will the Enemy be able to distinguish vanished and dead?

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I doubt the Enemy could distinguish vanished and dead, no.

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I will want a little time to talk to them but can't make very good use of it with infosec concerns so giving the Enemy less opportunity to interrogate them as soon as this proves abruptly more interesting seems probably worth it.

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Agreed. What do you need to have that all set - materials for signs? Anything else?

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And maybe some people to make copies of the letter I want to write while I'm doing the spell paintings.

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On the way.

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Poor orcs. Cor writes fast.

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People can copy letters.

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And one sign per orc and then Cor takes up blood and soot and water and paints orcs and the floor for oathbreaking. They have to be put two diagram radii apart so he can do them separately; he doesn't have a combined version.

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Someone moves one tied orc across the room.

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Paint paint paint. He can at least chant for both at once. He destroys he destroys he destroys. Osanwë chanting works fine.

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Orcs - twitch. A bit confusedly. 

 

One of them starts crying.

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- what's the matter with that one are they sad or just stressed out or -

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I'm not actually reading their minds, would you like me to -

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No I was hoping you could read orc body language better than I can. I suppose you could ask them what's wrong.

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He asks that.

 

Sobbing orc pulls itself together but does not answer.

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...okay. Well. I hope they are okay in my world. He gets underway painting that, plus water on orcs so the design can't be derived.

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Elves watch. Some of them sing, quietly.

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Cor pins letters to signs. Puts signs on orcs.

Chants. It's different in details but still mostly the destroying/erasing/annihilating/etc. thing.

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When he's done chanting orcs vanish.

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And he fixed it so he doesn't fall unconscious!

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Elves sigh in relief when they vanish and someone sets to cleaning up.

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"With any luck I have now saved my world, thanks."

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"One down, unknown number to go!"

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Giggle.

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"The letters, which I think should get to the right people inside of a couple days, said to send someone to tell me if I need to stop using the point I'm attached to even for essential magic, and gave a general idea of what I might end up considering essential, so I can start reasonably thinking about how I can help you then."

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Nod. "Do you want to move up to the palace in the meantime? It doesn't have windows either but it does a better facsimile and you could wander around talking to people more easily."

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"...how do you facsimile windows?"

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"I'll show you!"

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"Lead on!"

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The palace has pretty glass windows with a few feet of space and then an exquisite landscape painting or tapestry on the other side; it takes very close inspection to determine that the window doesn't in fact open onto stunning valleys and forests. There's even a crisp wind if you open the glass - "enchanted, of course," Curufin says.

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"Wow."

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"We do whatever we can for morale. Hard to hold up for four hundred years of war even under the best conditions."

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"Yeah. One was bad enough."

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"In Valinor I think any of us would have traded our coercive safety for an endless war in a heartbeat. I still would, but - with more awareness that it's really one hell of a price."

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"It's not even though, if you die you go park with a Vala back there only you're disembodied or whatever."

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"- now that there are prospects of somehow getting our dead back I might agree. But being disembodied, unable to sense or interact with the world, for all eternity seems only slightly better than ceasing to exist."

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"...my point is they're in Valinor at the time, it is not an endless war traded for Valinor, it is a temporary change of pace followed by more, worse Valinor."

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"If we die, yeah."

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"Yes, I was assuming the war had casualties."

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"There are fates much worse than death. But yes."

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Nod.

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"King's free to talk with you if you'd like."

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"If he's the person with whom I should talk magic strategy, sure."

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"He'll probably bring in other people as well." He leads the way to a conference room.

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Follow follow.

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King! "I hear Gatesnest now has the good news."

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"Assuming the orcs make adequate news-bearers, yeah, which they should."

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"What's the plan when you get return word?"

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"Depends on what the word is. Maybe I can keep using the point - it's aimed at turning into a gate to the moon, it's not helping eat the planet - maybe I need to attach to a different one but they can find a good world to put it in, maybe none of their scouts come back and we have to put it here even if we don't know how thick the world is..."

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Nod. "And then how hard is it going to be to stop Melkor?"

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"I am assuming he will not let me paint him."

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"He's so uncooperative that way."

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"It's possible to destroy things without individually painting or it wouldn't work very well for weeding or pest control, just, more complicated. I will need to know things about him like I needed to know things about oaths."

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"I can have people compile comprehensive lists for you. Will it take a few days to develop, like the oaths?"

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"Longer, probably."

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"How much longer?"

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"Uh, month or two, longer if he's complicated in some way? Less if I'm suddenly inspired, this part is arty."

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"Maybe I can have Macalaurë come sing inspiring things. The Valar are slow-moving, I don't expect he'll react to the news we have new magic that quickly."

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"The real sticking point is the details thing, I have to work around the fact that you probably don't have perfect information on a guy you've been at war with for hundreds of years, even without me in the picture there's every reason to obfuscate."

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"We should maybe have some other people empowered to do magic before you attempt it. Or to attempt it instead, if you could teach them enough for that to work."

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"I see your point but we don't know how thick the planet is and destroying a god is going to be big - I guess I could send someone to Gatesnest to hook into the moon gate point, if word is good."

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"I am confident enough that there's no one on the other side to prefer risking it to risking being without magic. Unless you think it might be big enough to just eat our planet whole, in which case better wait on other worlds."

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"I don't think it'd eat the planet whole all at once but if it went down two miles and then started going sideways - a hole thousands of miles deep that begins to expand sideways can do so visible amounts over days -"

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"Better wait, then, yeah." Sigh. "We might want to evacuate even if we're using a disappearance point elsewhere, it wouldn't surprise me if he has something rigged to take the continent with him. Less Doriath."

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"Uh. Yeah, that's the sort of thing you'd want to avoid."

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"I don't know how to avoid it but we can send everyone nonessential south and have the ships ready for everyone else. I don't suppose 'any contingencies of Melkor's' is a thing you can destroy?"

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"Uh, probably not and even if I can it's vague enough that we're in losing toes territory."

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"I'd rather lose a toe than a continent but if it's not possible it's not possible. We could try to flip a Maia, get more information, but anything like that risks the Enemy finding out we're planning this."

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"How would you go about doing that?"

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"We've got Angband besieged, we're in range, we can talk to them. Find someone who isn't sworn to immediately tell Melkor anything of interest to him - some of his servants are more 'helping out whoever's the biggest guy around' than loyally devoted to the cause -"

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"If you can pull it off it might be worth it for the extra detail, not just because then I get to live but because if I get it wrong enough it won't work."

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"If it's likely to be lethal it should really be someone who can come back from being dead, rather than you, but the point still stands. I'll - think about how to pull that off."

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"It'll take longer for it to be someone else - they can't just be artistic generically they have to know the forms in use. Maybe you have a painter who's good at artistic conventions the way Curufinwë is at languages, I guess that would do it? I don't know how much of a problem taking longer will be."

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"The war's been going a very long time but I do expect he'll react to the sudden manifestation of new capabilities on our part, and Valar are slow to react but we can't rely on that to an arbitrary degree. How long would it take you to develop a way to do the oaths thing remotely, now that you can do it at all?"

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"A few weeks maybe. It'd represent a greater expenditure of power."

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"So. We need enough information to kill Melkor, ideally without killing whoever does it - I'd trade a life to have him gone a week sooner but there are additional complications involved in making the risk fall to someone who's agreed to let me make those trades with their safety, and most things which decrease the risk to the caster also increase the odds of success. - there's additional reason not to have you be the caster, though, if a lethal failure occurs we need someone around knowledgeable enough to try again. Melian could answer questions, but giving her enough information to make her likely to answer also runs a substantial risk of tipping her off that we're doing something which endangers Doriath. Melian can usefully be thought of as a safety-of-Doriath maximizer with unclear beliefs about how much of a risk the Enemy poses her and excessively pessimistic beliefs about how much of a risk we pose. Alternatively, we could try to convince some of Melkor's hangers-on who are there for convenience to join us in exchange for sparing them. But we don't know what oaths they're under, and it'd take valuable spell invention time to develop a way to deoath them remotely."

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"- in case it affects any of this I am not sure that even an Elf mage who died doing a bad spell could come back. If I died of this I would not leave a corpse - or at least not a whole one."

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" - that does affect it. If it eats the soul we're presumably gone as thoroughly as you. We could use humans who aren't also needed for spell consulting, though. Maybe elderly ones. I suppose they'd learn more slowly. Can you make confident predictions about whether you have enough information to not die before you cast the spell?"

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"Not especially, as long as there could be something substantial enough missing or wrong."

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"All right. Are there additional considerations to balance here."

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"Maybe but I won't know about them till I get a messenger. Or don't."

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"I think my preferred way to balance the considerations raised up to this point is to have you rush a version of Melkor-killing based on everything we presently know - that'd take a month, right? - to have for use if the Enemy decides to make a move and suddenly everything for a hundred miles around catches magic fire."

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"If he can do that why, uh, doesn't he?"

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"I don't know. Candidates include 'this is more fun', 'he's worried that'd inspire the Valar to intervene', 'he is building up to it', 'it wouldn't be aesthetically satisfying', or 'there are things he anticipates being unable to do once he controls the world and that we're making substantial progress on'."

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"You've been having a war with this guy for hundreds of years and do not have an idea of how he strategizes?"

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"Since we besieged Angband his strategy has been to occasionally send orcs in easily-overcome numbers, to have a lieutenant go get the humans to start a religion and hunt down and exterminate nomadic Elf tribes, to occasionally use his Maiar in small precision operations to try to take Elf prisoners, to release fucked-up Elf prisoners, to offer us a parley, and to breed bigger scarier monsters. That is a complete list of all of the things he has done."

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"Huh."

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"I know that 'he seems to just be trying to be evil' is a simplistic view of one's enemies popular in many contexts where it's inappropriate, but."

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"Yyyyeah that's weird."

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"We sent some people to the parley. He was offering us a year to evacuate the continent and a Silmaril to hold the position we evacuated to, and this was the week we besieged Angband and before we had any expectation of successfully holding it. He betrayed the parley and tried to take them prisoner and ended up killing them all, of course. I shouldn't have let anyone die for additional confirmation that he was terrible but - it is sometimes useful to have a concrete example in persuading other Elf and human nations that whatever terms he offered them he does not mean."

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"A Silmaril?"

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"The delay in leaving Valinor was caused by a nasty little trick of the Valar's, which is that Elves who live there long enough become partially dependent on the magic that sustains the continent. And by a separate concern that I'm inclined to call incompetence rather than a trick, which is that they hadn't invented the Sun and Moon yet and Endorë was entirely dark. So my father invented a way of containing Valinor's magical light and restructuring it for our own use. It would have sufficed as a light source for the continent and prevented our gradual decay-by-way-of-dependence. They are three gemstones called the Silmarils, and they were a rather extraordinary undertaking and have many other uses. Melkor stole them; he wears them on his head, apparently, despite the fact they burn evil things and are probably singeing him constantly."

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"Melkor is a weirdo."

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"A competent enemy with his capabilities would probably have destroyed us, so I've never really thought to complain. But - yup."

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"Why isn't he competent?"

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"Maybe I should say 'a competent enemy who wanted to destroy us, and had his capabilities, would have destroyed us'. The Valar in general are - extraordinarily indifferent about how long things take, and I think Melkor, given his conduct in Valinor, prefers fomenting internal strife and chaos and evil which then bring about his desired ends to directly going about them, and most of his magic takes a long time to build up to flexible, powerful use."

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"So he's killing time as evilly as possible before - something?"

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"Probably, yes."

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"Eugh."

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"I won't look back on these four centuries very fondly. But - I think we can do this. I think we can end it."

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"Uh, anyway, there's a small manageable risk in a rushed spell that I'll get too artistically accustomed to using certain metaphors or something and won't be able to do as good a non-rushed version but that seems like a reasonable tradeoff."

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"I think so. While you work on that we'll work on avenues of getting more information."

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"Okay. What should I know to start out?"

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"I'm having a dozen different people write down everything they know and then compile you a list."

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"Snazzy."

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"Anything we can do for you in the meantime? I realize it's terribly unfair to ask for this much of your time when your own world is so very recently saved even presuming the news is good when it arrives."

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"I wasn't going to complain," he says. "I don't have anything I urgently need to get back to."

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"Nonetheless."

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"I have very little idea what to do with the offer, honestly, I don't have expensive tastes or whatever."

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Nod. "And is there anything else you wanted confirmation on before you do it -"

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"...nothing from you folks, no. I would really like a way to talk to other people safely but I appreciate that even if you're completely on the up and up that doesn't imply good diplomatic channels with everybody else that I can casually use."

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"We have channels with Doriath for urgent tactical information. With Valinor not even that. Relations are good with all the Dwarves, but I take it you've already had the chance to speak to some of them."

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"Yeah, they were great."

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"Dwarves are great. Aulë has if nothing else good taste in designed species. It makes me wonder how much of the standards they held us to in Valinor they didn't even believe in themselves."

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"How do they make group decisions?"

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"They'd have debates but then claim decisions, once made, as unanimous."

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"...huh."

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"Valinor was all right for a certain kind of person. If they'd let people leave, and given them a viable way to do that, then it'd have just ended up collecting the people who didn't mind it and everything would have been fine."

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Nod.

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Someone comes in with the compiled lists. The King hands them to Cor.

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Aaaaand are they legible?

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Yep, looks like Curufin wrote them out. Very neatly. The Valar have this much attention and form physical bodies like this and can be harmed like this and interact in these ways; Melkor's history is as follows, things Valar have been seen to do are all of the following, known limitations are these, Melkor is in approximately this location and leaves this often and uses his magic ongoingly in these ways...

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"This is great, thanks."

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"Of course. It seems we got very lucky in interdimensional visitors."

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"I like to think if someone needs to land unexpectedly on a place I'm a good one."

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"I know a lot of people. I can't think of any I'd send off in your stead if unexpectedly landing was anticipated."

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"I'm flattered!"

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"Keep yourself alive and you can do it again for some more places!"

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"I'm looking forward to that. Corbelan, serial worldsaver."

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"My brother is gleeful in anticipation of finding magic somewhere that speeds up the development process for our magic. These look like very exciting times."

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"It's going to be great!"

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"I can make 'worldsaver' an official imperial title!"

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"Oooh."

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"I should check first that I won't be inspiring anyone to go save worlds which don't require it. It's a risk, if you get too excitable with imperial titles."

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"I can see how that would be a problem."

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"When we started issuing titles for major improvements to productivity or resource use or health and wellness, Dwarves asked me if these were transferrable; they wanted to sell them."

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"I feel like that would make them less valuable."

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"That's what I said! What's the use of a category for 'people whose research saved hundreds of thousands of lives and people who bought something from one of them!'"

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Giggle. "What'd the Dwarves say?"

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"The Dwarves said that the benefit was that it would create incentive for people to save hundreds of thousands of lives who weren't moved by that in itself and who had no idea what to do with a noble title. They said that being an Elf I would probably look up my nose at such people but being a King I'd probably want them working on lifesaving anyway, whatever I thought of them personally. They said that a noble title, if well-designed, is of far more value to the sort of people who ought to have it, so I shouldn't fear that letting them be sold would mean they accrued to those poorly suited to them. They felt that the sort of people who'd end up buying them would be ones who'd created lots of value through, say, lowering the price of spices."

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"Huh. That's a reasonably cogent argument, it just kind of wrecks the information value of the title. Maybe titles should come with money or something, there's monetary prizes for things at home."

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"We have a pretty constrained budget, wars being expensive. Ended up having modified titles for 'by sale or inheritance', so it's allowed but the information value still attaches to the correct thing."

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"These are heritable too? I guess it's only the Elves in particular who aren't having kids..."

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"Many of my humans get upset if you give them titles that aren't heritable, it defeats what local human custom conceived of as the point of titles, which is securing a place for your family."

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"We have that with titles that involve owning land but I would not expect it with titles involving saving so many lives or whatever."

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"Distinguishing the inherited ones rather satisfies everyone, so that's what we have now."

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"Tidy." Snort. "Your humans."

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"I don't want to presume the same is true of humans of a different background! Or were you commenting on the possessive? My subjects are mine and I will accordingly scour a thousand worlds for the magical powers I need to fully do right by them."

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"It was the possessive, yes, as opposed to some other demonym."

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"The circumstances under which I ended up with the crown were horrible but I like it ever so much."

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"I can tell!"

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"Should we let you get to work with that list of Melkor's traits, then?"

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"Guess so."

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"Take care."

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Cor reads. Sketches. Wanders around the palace when he needs a break. Enjoys delivery food.

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Elves are friendly and answer any questions he has and sing and run their country. 

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Two days after the orcs were sent a woman covered in soot and blood appears in the same place Cor did and waves cheerfully at the nearest Elf.

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- nearest Elf only startles a bit and then waves cheerfully back. What's she thinking -

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She's trying to do private thoughts! It's shaky; when it flickers she is thinking about finding Cor.

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Hello. Welcome to Himring.

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Hi! Can you tell me where to find Cor?

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I think he's in the palace. He might be working, is it urgent?

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Not terribly! I can wait till he breaks for whatever meal is next in this time zone. And then they will need to switch him to the empty world's new point and then she can congratulate him and maaaaybe finally go in for a kiss? If he isn't into it it can have been the excitement of the moment. Whoopsie private thoughts Elves don't need to be bothered about that.

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Elves are maybe bothered about that.

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Okay! I'll find you somewhere to wait until he breaks.

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Thanks!

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Maitimo frowns consideringly at the letter he's reviewing and then arranges a place for her to wait. There is an Elf there. Topless. Painting a ridiculously neat portrait and singing.

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Um, hi.

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He puts the brush down.

Hi! Welcome to Beleriand! All these alien visitors, it's so exciting! Has an empty planet been found so something can be done for your world?

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We're not totally positive it's empty everywhere but it looks like it probably is.

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And then are you going to find a separate one to evacuate to, or what's the plan there?

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Yeah, there are scouts looking for those now!

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You're all so amazingly brave. I can't imagine how awful the whole mess must have been -

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She smiles weakly. Yeah it was lousy.

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I don't know that we could fit everybody but if people wanted to come live here while you're looking for something better, I'm sure we'll take as many as we can. - I'm Elon.

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Ranary. Pleased to meet you. How many do you think that would be, we've got refugees coming out our ears -

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Uh, there's a war on here but it might be over really soon in which case millions.

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That's less useful than if you could take them now, but maybe it'll help.

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We could take them now, if it's desperate, but they wouldn't be entirely free of danger. Who's coordinating that, we could compare desperateness of various situations...

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Uh, I guess I'd go to what's left of the settlement association.

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I'll make a note of it. He does, with a flourish. Can I get you anything while you're waiting?

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I made sure I was fed and everything before I arrived. I guess a bath and clothes would be good. She's in underthings but is pretty much at peace with that.

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Do you mind the public baths? They're right across the way but I can have someone bring us one here if that'd be too strange.

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It'd be a little weird but I can cope. 'Nother planet.

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Yeah. When we first met your species we were so terribly confused. Baths are this way.

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Confused about what? She follows him.

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All kinds of things! We'd never met a species that got old and died before, we - sort of didn't believe the first humans who told us it happened? And then it did, to humans who we knew and loved, and we were so bewildered - and they were a bit impatient, of course, since we should have known in the first place.

 

Elf bathhouse is all frosted glass and excessive water features. There are some Elves, bathing nude but with hair braided and singing.

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Oh wow, she thinks of the singing. Also wow they're pretty whoops private thoughts. Yeah, we do that. When me and Cor and our batch started magic lessons we were all supposed to think of things we wanted to destroy, sort of to get into the spirit of being - er, constructive - he said 'death'.

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Our magic should be able to do that! The problem is that our magic is really slow and we've been so focused on the war. 

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How slow?

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If the war ends soon we'll have it before you die, he reassures her, and strips and wades in. But possibly a little narrowly, it could easily take forty years.

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She sets her clothes down near his but not close enough to get gunk on them - It's okay to get in the same bath as everyone else all bloody and ashy?

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Oh, I can sing it clean! We have magic music and cleaning water is one of the things it does.

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Oh! Ours can do that too but we're trying to cut down even now that we've got the new point on the probably empty planet.

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As far as we know ours has no long-term catastrophic effects, though I guess we should be a bit less sure of ourselves than we were before we met you.

 

And he sings something.

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It's pretty. She scrubs magical symbolism off.

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He smiles at her and sings magical symbolism away and washes. How'd you get chosen for interdimensional emissary?

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I'm friends with Cor and didn't want to scout.

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Scouting sounds dangerous, yeah.

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Most people haven't come back. They might just be delayed, but...

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Most places one could land aren't safe. If your friend had landed here, a hundred miles north...

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Would've been bad?

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This whole world would probably be gone by now. Not that I think that's happened to people, more likely they just landed places without air, but...

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Yeah.

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I'm sorry.

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We can salvage something, now. It's better than it was before.

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The King thinks we can develop resurrection with different worlds' magic. That one might take a really long time, but - we don't forget. We'll get it sorted.

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That would be wonderful.

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It's promising that our worlds have different kinds of magic. He sings up a little blizzard; the snowflakes melt instantly in the warm air. Suggests that others might, too. 

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I know, it's exciting! I bet Cor is delighted.

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He's seemed mostly stressed out about trying to decide whether to help with the war. If you're coming to confirm about orcs maybe that'll help him be less conflicted.

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The language barrier was pretty bad but a bunch of us are good at drawing and they corroborated what of it we're sure we got across.

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Oh good. Your magic might have scary side effects but it's kind of perfect for destroying an evil god. - I should have them bring you clothes, do you have preferences about kinds of clothes -

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Um, I don't know what you tend to have - red, long-skirted, warm?

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That's definitely doable. He's singing the water into little rainbow eddies, now.

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Ooooh.

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Do you want to learn? It's a pretty straightforward song!

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Sure!

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He sings the melody a couple times over, slowly and clearly. The rainbow eddies form more slowly.

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She hums along a bit. I'm not sure I can pronounce all those sounds.

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There are rules for substitutions - you might get different colors but the whole would still work - but I don't know them, I'd have to track down Prince Canafinwë. He could probably come up with a version in your language, just like that. He sighs regretfully and smiles at her. You carry a tune well!

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Aw, thank you!

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Did you say you draw?

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Yeah, lots of mages pick that up outside of magic.

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I like drawing. Apparently it'll be a couple hours before they're out of work, want to go up a tower and do sketches?

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Sure, why not. She wrings out her hair.

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He dries himself off. They get dressed. Mind if I sing something else? It's supposed to make you light as a feather, though actually that's really inconvenient so most people don't do it at full strength.

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Oh, I've had enough of being too light, it's nice to be on a planet with a good planet-amount of gravity again.

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It had gotten that bad? Yikes. How long do you think you have -

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Math people think if everyone goes cold turkey on using points on our planet we have months, even a couple years, before we can't breathe there any more. Of course that whole time cities will be disappearing and so on, it's not a reason to stick around that long.

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Yeah. I talked to the settlement person, he says they'd recommend refugees land on the south continent, which is empty and not having a war, but you might have to figure out how to feed yourselves. 

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There's shortages of random specific things - I haven't had garlic in months - but we're not starving, we could bring seeds.

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Then it's all yours. Not guaranteed safe in the war but way safer. We really can't have magic here, though, no one has any idea how thick the world is and it might be really thin.

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Cor's letter said. I must have really bad timing if he's going to be hours. Has she got the red dress she ordered?

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She has!! Super pretty. 

 

He's been working on the evil god spell in a hurry, I think he's mostly taking breaks for meals.

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He's really dedicated.

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He seems nice. The Prince Curufinwë likes him. More than he likes anyone who'll teach him new languages, I mean.

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Oh good, I sometimes wonder why he doesn't have more friends - I guess I don't really wonder, I know, so introverted, so picky, he likes me though -

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He didn't mention friends but I suppose he might not have wanted us to know how he planned to verify things.

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He knows a bunch of moonshot project people but I'm the only one I think he sees one on one for social reasons.

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I will let his grace know he's in rarified company. Smile.

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Smile.

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Tower! It looks out on villages and farms and the mountains in the distance.

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Nice. She will happily sketch.

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He will too! He's remarkable at it. He compliments her frequently. He sings. 

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Ranary peers at his drawing and asks how he does certain bits of it occasionally.

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He's happy to describe the process! 

 

After a while - your friend's done! I can take you there now.

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Great, thanks!

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Of course! And would you like to get dinner afterwards, once you two are all caught up?

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I'll probably be hungry by then!

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...I am sure they'd also bring food to your quarters, if you'd rather not go out with me. Though the King'll be annoyed. 

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- oh were you - Private thoughts flicker; wasn't he just being hospitable? Maybe he's actually just that impressed with the drawing? She's not as pretty as any of those Elf girls in the baths. I'm sorry, I'm a little oblivious.

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I haven't the faintest idea how to be forward enough to make sense on another world! I, ah, all the girls I've liked have been human, it's something about the ambition and the priorities -

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Do Elves not... have... that?

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Some do! Elves are - more willing to sit on something for a thousand years. In general. 

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Well, yeah, I guess humans wouldn't be willing to do that, kind of impractical. I would be happy to get dinner with you. Cor can wait on one date, she's been on dates since school.

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He beams at her. He escorts her to Cor.

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"Ranary! Hi!" There is a hug. ...they switch to Gatetalk which Cor hasn't taught anyone and chatter rapidly.

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He takes notes!

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It has some Senserke vocabulary here and there but totally unrelated grammatical habits. Ranary's accent is markedly different from his.

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He's having a marvellous time. And presumably the orcs can corroborate Melkor sucking.

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She says something presumably about how she is going out to dinner with Elon, based on the pointing. Cor is congratulatory.

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Elon waves.

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Hi! It would've been okay to interrupt me with Ranary but thanks for keeping her company anyway.

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Okay! We'd have interrupted if it'd have been urgent. She was great company, she has a great eye for drawing. This is addressed to Ranary also. 

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Yes she does, Cor says, winking at Ranary. She giggles.

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I think I promised to be around for dinner but I'll let you catch up until then!

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Cor nods. He and Ranary gatetalk to each other happily.

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They are left alone until dinner, though there is always an Elf within earshot for Curufin's notes, which get steadily less patchy.

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They're not really trying to supply translations of anything, but there is the occasional Senserke word or proper noun to anchor on! And then Ranary goes to dinner with Elon.

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He's so curious about her world and her life and hobbies and so on.

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And Cor supposes he should also have dinner.

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The King would love to have him, if convenient!

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Sure. He will go have dinner with the King.

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"I heard the good news. Congratulations."

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"Thanks!"

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"No Worldsaver title yet, though, with all these worlds apparently out there I think it's reasonable to demand the salvation of two."

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"Can't have people saving one piddly world and demanding titles. Anyway it's still doomed they can just evac now."

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"Elon asked if we could take them in. South continent's all theirs but it's not entirely safe until the war's over and we can't help supply it much until then either."

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"It'd be good to have a place to put some people while scouts look for safer locations and spare empty planets even if they don't stay. Anyway, Ranary's going to take me to the empty planet to hook into that point soonish, before I do any more magic."

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"Makes perfect sense. Buy your world a bit more time. How are the orcs doing?"

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"Ranary thought they seemed stressed but okay. They'll probably go to the south continent, don't want them to have any trouble being soul-harvested or whatever when there's a way to do that."

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"Yes, easier to keep everyone with a soul in one place for that. What share of scouts are making it back safely -"

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"So far just the one with the empty planet. As of Ranary's departure. That could mean dead but it could also mean landed among hostiles, separated from materials..."

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"i rarely find occasion to thank Eru for anything but you could have landed a hundred miles farther north..."

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"Yeah."

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"Can you and Ranary take a few people with you to set disappearance points?"

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"Yeah, we can. I'll want to talk to them and see if they seem mage-y, first, usually there's tests and interviews but we can cut it down a little under the circumstances."

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"It's an aptitude thing?"

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"Kind of, yeah."

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"If you give me a feel for what the necessary traits are I can probably make sure you mostly get people who'll be good at it."

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"Sure. So, you have to walk a fine line between working with the artistic conventions and establishing new ones that work with that canon, but not accidentally trying to use them as straight-up symbols or words. And you have to be able to slip into the, uh, 'I destroy I destroy I destroy' mindset at will and not at random times - people contain blood, see -"

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Nod. 

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"And the painting is really annoying if you don't have steady hands and a decent sense of composition."

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"That I expect Elves will possess in abundance. I'll send you some suitable people to vet."

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"Weren't you going to pick humans on the principle that we die dead anyway?"

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"For exceptionally risky stuff, yeah. Maybe ones who don't have very long. For more routine work it makes sense to just pick the most suitable candidates. Unless you think we should be doing something else, you're the expert."

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"The risk is low with established spells but it's not like it's zero. Up to them if they want to volunteer, I suppose."

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"What is the risk like?"

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"I was quoted one percent 'if you don't do anything fancy' rates of 'doing something sufficiently stupid to die' when I started school. Rates are lower among fanciness-doers but that's because it's more heavily filtered for competence; people who just decide to do fanciness on their own are not overwhelmingly likely to live through that. And more than one percent lose toes. - When you hook into a disappearance point you usually make a point of expressly designating what you want to lose first and that is generally toes."

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"I'll make sure everyone who might consider it is fully informed about the risks to their toes and their immortal souls."

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"Oh, and Ranary says someone speculates that when the points are out of stuff to eat they might eat whoever's attached, so, if that turns out to be true they may have to keep finding new points forever."

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"Once we destroy Angband there will be suicidal Elves. The wanting-to-stop-existing kind of suicidal, not the wanting-to-be-disembodied. I don't think they'll be of sound enough mind to be mages, though."

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"...yeah, iffy. I guess they could just jump in a point."

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"Tempted to make them wait a year but maybe that's cruel." He sighs. 

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Nod.

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"On a cheerfuller note I have a present for you!" He fishes it out; it's a little metal ring. "Grace and balance."

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"...oooooh."

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"In theory you can go flitting across treetops now but perhaps restrain yourself to ice skating and ballroom dancing, there still being worlds to save."

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"I will be very restrained." He puts it on.

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When he's sitting the effect isn't noticeable. "We could go out if you'd like to try it out."

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He puts away the last bite of dinner. "Sure."

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"Have you found your way around the gardens yet?"

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"Not yet!"

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"Oh good. It'd be so disappointing if there were nowhere in the city left to show off - this way -"

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Follow follow. At a brisk careless walk!

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He will not trip! The gardens are dense and three stories tall with stairways winding through them and waterfalls winding along the stairways and flowers and ferns and soft grass everywhere. Some of the plants are edible; the King picks them for him.

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"We just had dinner."

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"Just to taste! They're more like dessert, anyway."

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"Okay." Nibble.

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They are sweet and light and sometimes tart. There's a great tree with a little staircase winding around it; Maitimo climbs it and pauses at the top, staring out on Angband.

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Cor experiments with trotting briskly up the stairs.

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He can do this safely! Maitimo beams at him.

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"Nice ring."

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"Thank you! I'm excited about what our magic can do with more breathing room and even more excited about what it can do in combination with other magics. There are some engineers busying themselves with something that'll let people survive arbitrary conditions for a couple minutes, make scouting safer. Regrettably it'll be years, but once they have it we can find worlds at less terrible a cost. And Curufin has started bothering me to pay his team to figure out human immortality."

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"That's nice of him."

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"I didn't take much persuading. We're so tired of losing people, so tired of - compromising -"

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Nod. "It'd be nice to live forever."

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"It would be nice to have you forever. I think we'll get there."

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He takes his hand and look at the ring. "Does it work all right for you?"

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"I haven't tried ice skating or ballroom dancing yet but it does seem to help a lot!"

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"Oh good." He squeezes his hand and lets go. "We are so delighted you fell on us."

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"I feel very appreciated."

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"Even without any royal titles yet?"

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"I'll live. Forever, even."

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"I shudder to think how many titles I will have to invent for an immortal you with lots of worlds to go adventure in."

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"Oh, I'm sure there are finite titleworthy classes of things I can get up to."

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"I will have to check if there are any loopholes by which one can accumulate so many titles they acquire the government!"

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"Ooh."

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"I would tell you it's not as much fun as it sounds but I'd be lying, it's exactly as much fun as it sounds."

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"Don't worry, I won't steal your government, if I ever want one I'll go form my own."

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"All these lovely worlds to go and do it in!"

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"Precisely!"

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He hops down from the perch looking up on Angband. This lands him very close to Cor. "Sounds like a better hobby than collecting astonishing titles, if you ask me, but if there happen to be too many worlds to save to carve out the time to rule any you can always drop by here."

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...Cor has to crane his neck a bit to make eye contact but doesn't step back. "That's good to know."

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He smiles at him. He sits down. 

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This makes it substantially easier to look at him.

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That was the idea, yes. 

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"...so, why are the flowers here edible?"

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"In Valinor all the flowers were edible! It was one of the genuinely nice things, actually, if for whatever reason civilization wasn't working out for you you could easily wander and get enough to eat. Not many of the plants survived the destruction of Valinor's lighting system and our subsequent efforts to transfer them to Endorē, which also didn't have lighting yet, and then once the sun rose it turned out Valian edible plants don't tend to compete well with local, non-edible plants. So no luck in having a 'abandon civilization and eat flowers' backup option here, but if you're going to take care to cultivate them then they come out fine. Eventually we were going to see about songs to aid them in growing in a wider variety of environments, but - after the war."

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"Makes sense."

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"There are a lot of things we've been putting off until after the war."

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"It's the sort of thing that displaces long term plans."

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"Yes." Sigh. "Or consumes them."

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"Uh?"

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"You have things you can't abandon for the duration of the war, so you go ahead, but they still end up - war-shaped."

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"I can't say my more limited war related experience included much of that."

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"It might be a problem with the centuries. Or with my species. Or maybe you're just particularly hard to budge in who you are."

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"Or all of the above, we'd need more information to be sure."

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"I am very curious but perhaps not curious enough to put a kingdom of immortal humans through four centuries of endless war. They would be so very annoyed with me afterwards."

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"And throughout, I assume."

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"Maybe that's Eru's mysterious unclear motivation, maybe he's a startlingly unethical social scientist."

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"....wow."

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"I've been idly wondering if he could reach other worlds. Yours seems vaguely his style, if we take his style to be 'horrible tragedy carefully orchestrated over the course of millenia and redeemed at the last by great heroism', which - seems mostly right."

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"I don't like the sound of that."

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"Me neither."

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"...no obvious angle to find out or fix it if so though."

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"Not yet, no. And it's not really a reason to have different expectations about how trying to kill Melkor will go."

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"I guess unless it can be done especially heroically somehow."

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"I've occasionally wondered if he could be distracted from causing global tragedies by sufficiently compelling personal tragedy but you'd have to, uh, orchestrate personal tragedies to find out, and that seems like a bit much off the strength of idle speculation."

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"A bit, yeah."

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"He does seem to be pretty hands-off. I wouldn't bring it up otherwise." Sigh. "But if we find too many worlds of a similar theme I will probably worry in addition to handing out prizes for saving them."

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"You think he's orchestrating them all?"

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"I have no idea. If they all feature - millennia of buildup to horrible disasters involving mass death, and then some costly heroics to buy some hope - then I'd conclude he is. If they're mostly nice varied places with problems but not the kind of problem that is 'the magic we use to treat disease and travel freely slowly eats our planet alive' then probably he's restricted in scope and we can just leave this place and work on the problem from outside his reach."

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Nod.

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"Or maybe the answer to 'why does the world have an omnipotent god and look like this is that it doesn't and the Valar lied."

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"Have they got a motive for that?"

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"Not really. They were usually honest as far as they went, and they certainly believed themselves to be doing Eru's will. Asking them why Eru cared who people married, or whether they prayed, never got anywhere."

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"Never got anywhere how?"

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"They weren't very good at explanations and they still held to the rules in contexts where they agreed their explanations implied there was no concern."

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"Ugh."

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"It was obnoxious. I think I avoided having my head toyed with but I'd give a lot to be sure."

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"You don't even know?"

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Sigh. "So there were things I knew they'd tamper with - my opinion of them, for one - and whenever it might come up I would swear myself into an entirely different and I think unobjectionable set of beliefs, temporarily, and have my head back intact when it wore off. But doing that is so profoundly confusing that if they still found something worth fixing I don't know if they fixed it or how it would have withstood, uh, reverting into my ordinary head. And I'm only mostly sure I never slipped up with phrasing."

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"Yikes. I'm sorry you had to go through that."

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"I certainly don't miss it. Maybe somewhere there'll be magic to check and to reverse things for anyone who wants them reversed."

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"Maybe so. And then you can be however you want to be."

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"You are very however you want to be, it's one of the remarkable things about you."

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"I'm very proud of that!"

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"You should be!"

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Chuckle.

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"And I should let you get back to work."

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"Sounds like a plan. Thanks for the edible flowers, they were tasty."

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"My pleasure."

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"And the ring. I really like the ring." He traipses down the stairs.

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He waves and remains.

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I thought you'd decided it was a good idea to wait until after the war.

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I only hit on him a little.

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And someone else might get him and that would be intolerable.

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Going to keep ordering people to seduce all your competition?

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If I need to.

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He likes you. If he found out about that he wouldn't. I don't think it's in your interests to risk it. 

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I don't think I trust you have my interests at heart here. Are you getting attached to my Cor? You I might share him with. It doesn't feel like sharing because you belong to me.

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Please don't do that.

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Not your type?

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Is that the only reason you can conceive of why I'd resent being ordered to fuck someone.

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Maitimo goes downstairs and back to work.

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Cor works on things and in the morning he meets Ranary for breakfast and afterwards she paints them both and chants in yet a third language and they disappear.

They both come back a couple hours later, chilly; it's cold in the hypothesized-empty world.

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"All set up so you can use magic now?"

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"Yup. I will still not be roasting chicken legs with it though."

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"Don't blame you."

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"It was really upsetting to discover that I had helped to eat the world!"

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"I can imagine, yeah. In a couple years I guess we'll know what happens once the world's all eaten."

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"We'll be out of safe vantage points from which to observe. I guess if we have a way to survive on the moon we could go there."

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"If you could send a Maia they could check safely. Huan might agree to scout, too, if it works for people who aren't natively of your world."

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"Maia scouts could be useful, although they'd have to be mages themselves, so they can make a round trip."

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"Or we'd have to figure out a way to yank people from other worlds, yes."

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"Be a lot harder. I guess if they didn't need to be in wherever they were scouting for long they could be painted for a round trip in advance, that'd help."

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"I know a Maia I'd trust to be a mage. If scouting has a very high mortality rate it might be worth trying."

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"Who is it?"

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"Tyelcormo has a close friend Maia whose preferred physical form is that of a large dog. Maiar vary a lot, that's not an unusual sort of preference for one to have."

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"I feel like being a dog might make it hard to paint, even though osanwë chanting turns out to work."

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"He could maybe apply blood to places with magic, I would have to ask him."

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Nod.

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"If either of you are the person to talk to about, or can put us in touch with the person to talk about, refugee resettlement, the King's appointed some people to work on that."

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"Travel is expensive enough that I don't think people are going to make a lot of trips just to chat; is there something to talk about besides the offer of the south continent?"

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"How many people to expect there, what they need, how to make sure none of them put a disappearance point here -"

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"They're going to send a couple hundred to set up while people less equipped to help with that scavenge for more supplies and so on. They're not expecting care packages and will make sure all mages in the group are hooked in to the empty world so they aren't tempted."

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"Plans for if we're wrong about the continent being uninhabited, do they know or want to know our magic - songs might be useful - are they adequately warned about not trying to get to Valinor and definitely not trying to gate to it -"

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"I have warned them about Valinor, they have plans for friendly locals and hostile locals, if it's actually convenient to translate songs into my world's musical notation I'm sure someone could make use of that."

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"Enemy might stop by in various guises to ask mages to teach him magic, they should probably categorically not teach anyone they meet there any magic no matter how good a reason."

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"That they don't have warning about, I'll make sure they know."

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"I'll check if there was anything else on the agenda." Pause. "In addition to friendly natives and unfriendly natives there might well be Maia natives who do things like 'optimize the wellbeing of this one tree' or 'sing to geese'; best to accommodate them, the scope of their interest is usually pretty small."

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"...sing to geese."

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He makes a frustrated hand gesture. "The defining feature of my worlds' deities is that they suck."

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"That's just such a weird way to suck!"

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"Weirder than caring who people marry?"

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"Caring who people marry is like... it involves failing at the right thing?"

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" - okay, fair."

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"Singing to geese. I suppose that's at least harmless until someone gets hungry and wants a goose."

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"Whereupon it stops being harmless. We usually go out and check an area before we hunt in it, so anyone with objections can let us know."

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"Are they generally courteous and competent enough to do that, if you wander through saying 'attention Maiar, geese are tasty'?"

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"Yes. Not always, but at that point we're talking about a risk comparable to the risk of being struck by lightning."

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Nod. He takes notes.

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He conveys a couple other minor concerns - has magic been tried with disappearance points two worlds away yet, the following plants are poisonous - and that's all.

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It seems to work fine (Ranary was hooked into the new point when she took Cor there) and the notes on poisonousness are appreciated!

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"Then you're all set. Or - not, but there's nothing else we can presently add."

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"Ranary will probably take the messages but I think she's planning to mostly loiter around here in case I suddenly die or something. Spare mage."

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"A useful thing to have."

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"Please do not take it as encouragement to push me down the stairs."

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"I have met lots of people who didn't even teach me two languages and I have managed never to push any down stairs."

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"Two? You got Gatetalk already?"

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"Oh, Elves have really good hearing and I work across the hall from you and tried guessing whenever I heard it, should I not have done that? I'd have to leave the city, languages are just way too tempting."

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"Eh, initially I was holding on to it for paranoia reasons but I'm pretty sold now, it's fine. Ranary's other language is Quima, you should get her to teach you."

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"I would be delighted." He turns eagerly to Ranary.

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Ranary will teach him Quima!

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Yay!

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Cor does sketches! And chats with Ranary! And sends her off with messages! And does more sketches! And takes breaks now and then!

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Maitimo invites Cor to play elaborate strategy games with him. "If it relevantly qualifies as downtime, of course, it'd be hard to excuse drawing you away from work this urgent just because I want to see how you do at it."

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"...I mean, as long as the elaborate strategy games are fun and don't involve assigning properties of Melkor to curlicues and triangles, we're probably good on it counting as downtime."

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"Oh good. That's not how it's played at all -" And he explains!

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"Sounds fun!"

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"It is!" And he sets it up.

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Cor has never played this game before but he likes it a lot.

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It is Maitimo's favorite game. He can be horrifyingly ruthless without anyone worrying he might be like that in real life, too.

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Oooh.

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He's having so much fun!

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Cor can do fictional ruthlessness too!

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Otherwise it would be no fun!

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Indeed not.

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Maitimo's city is scoured of its livestock by a plague and he retaliates by conquering a nearby township and handing its citizens over to his mages to use as needed in place of their lost sheep and a series of political shenanigans unravel with thirty people dead and he is having so much fun.

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Suiciding mages can do a lot of things; the memetic convention of "your own blood still in your own body" is for historical reasons incredibly dramatic and destructive!

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Maitimo finds this very dramatically satisfying and resists giggling and reroutes supplies around some gaping craters in the landscape and eventually regretfully observes to Cor that he's kept him up too late.

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"Ah, sorry. Yeah I should sleep too."

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"It's been lovely. I will keep a better eye on the clock next time."

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"Later," Cor agrees.

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He goes up to his room. He tells his boyfriend to be waiting for him there. His boyfriend is, of course.

He's so clever!

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Yep. It sounds like irritating him would be a catastrophically bad idea.

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You've made your point.

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He stands up and crosses the room and kisses him. Don't be stupid, Maitimo. We can't afford for you to be stupid.

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It's just a game.

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Lean. Kiss. We're almost there. The war's almost over. After that you can do whatever you want.

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And if someone else gets him first then he's gone. 

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Just be careful.

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He kisses him. He nearly beat me at the game, it was really hot.

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Sympathetic murmur. Not worth risking the war, not worth risking the war...

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You made your point, now shut up.

 

And of course he gets what he wants.

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They pick up the game the next time Cor needs a break! He has had more cunning ideas.

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He might kind of notice Maitimo staring at him longingly in between moves.

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...he does notice that! He is not sure what to do about it but he does not stop making clever moves.

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That would be the wrong thing to do about it! Maitimo occasionally shakes his head distractedly but can otherwise keep up just fine.

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Cor winds up boxed in. Perhaps predictably he has one of his mages try something weird and experimental, risky and underdetermined enough to be settled by a die roll. Cor loses.

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"You are delightful," Maitimo pronounces. "If that had worked I don't know what I'd have done."

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"Lost?" suggests Cor.

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"I never lose! ...but maybe."

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"Never is a strong word."

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"Is that a challenge to a rematch sometime?"

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"Sure! I like this game."

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"I've been having a lovely time."

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"Me too. Thanks for introducing me to the game."

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"Of course!"

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Cor is not sure if the king is hitting on him or just, like, cultivating him as a magical asset/ally, but it would be kind of fun if it was the first thing.

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(This is fairly legible to Maitimo from Cor's face and far away someone sighs exasperatedly.)

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He does not sigh exasperatedly. He beams at Cor. "The inconvenient thing about relocating you to the palace is that I cannot offer to walk you home. - I would, in fact, put this much work just into cultivating an extraordinarily useful ally. But it'd be less fun."

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"The palace is pretty big, if you want to walk me somewhere there's at least a block's worth of walking to do."

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"I can probably think of places to walk, in that case."

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"Let's see 'em."

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Different little garden, lit in silver with mirrors everywhere. "I was going to wait until after the war," he says. "But you are very very exceptional and that doesn't look likely to work unless I avoid you until the end of the war. And I don't want to avoid you - I want you -"

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...Cor giggles. "So I wasn't imagining it, huh."

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"I apologize for being ambiguous? You were not imagining it. Your ambitions are fascinating and your thought processes are fascinating - you haven't slipped with the privacy, I just notice that kind of thing anyway - and you're lovely and I want lots of rematches."

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"You can have all the rematches you like. What are you noticing about the thought processes?"

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" - ah, highly adaptable, good at not lingering on things it isn't constructive to linger on, very stubborn, very internally constructed - you're obviously someone who'd have independently derived that there was something wrong in paradise - careful without being paralyzed, when it came to intervening in a war -"

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"...all right, you may continue to observe my thought processes."

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"Oh good." Mine mine mine mine mine mine. "You're terrifyingly smart, too - that was such a close game -"

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"We gave my die roll one in thirty odds, that's not very likely."

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"Usually doesn't come to chance at all."

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"Aha. I will be smug accordingly."

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"Oh, are you collecting reasons for smugness? I have twice in my life met someone I wanted so badly it was worth everyone being stupid about the gender thing. And I have met whole kingdomsfull of people."

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"Twice?"

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"He knows about you, I have been talking excitably about you nonstop for a week now."

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"I'm not sure about that part."

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"It'd be an unusual arrangement here, I couldn't guess about Gatesnest custom. Aesthetic reservations or pragmatic ones?"

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"Gatesnest is customarily monogamous. I'm not sure aesthetics or pragmatics would be how to describe it..."

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"Oh?"

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"...I have not actually had reason to unpack my opinions on monogamy before so I will have to do so in real time or I can just get back to you later."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have confessed deep enjoyment of witnessing your thought processes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Fair enough. Okay, uh, I expect I would thrive on - being sufficient and central in a way that I think successful monogamous couples do with each other, and I'm not keen to abandon the ideal? ...I'm also not thrilled about the local stigma thing, how bad actually is that among people who have rejected the Valar's tutelage -"

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"I think some couples still deal with unfriendly neighbors. We'd get 'well, the King can do whatever he likes', which in your place I'd find fairly missing-the-point. I think when people start having children again it'll mostly go away, it's that socially speaking we're rather frozen in time since we left Valinor."

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"Yes, that does miss the point. My world has stigma of its own but Gatesnest was very liberal."

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"Good for it. I've been hesitant - maybe too hesitant - I could order them all to never say a thing about it and they would but that seems entirely the wrong instrument. Do you care very much what stupid strangers think or is it about missing out on chances to be - publicly and openly living the life you want -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have approximately the same reaction I do to people misspelling things or acting on misconceptions about magic except with more personal urgency, it's irritating."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds it. I expect you'd have to put up with an idiot every month, but not more than that, and - for all we know the next planet to need saving is going to take issue with men in positions of authority, or with your hair color, or with people who don't have walnut allergies."

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"The walnut one sounds unlikely."

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"There was a human tribe here who had that custom! For mundane reasons, admittedly - they were all allergic and a tribe they'd been warring with liked them."

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"Huh. Anyway I could live with occasional bigots, I guess, but remain uncertain about the nonmonogamy thing, I don't feel strongly inclined to collect plurals myself..."

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(No, of course not, that wouldn't be acceptable at all.) He grins at him. "I'm still planning to have you made immortal."

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"Okay, maybe in a hundred years the flexibility would be useful."

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"Or a thousand! Or ten thousand! Human lifespans are appalling and I will be so pleased when they're a horrifying footnote in the history books and that's it."

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Giggle. "I suppose you're optimistic that I'll get along with unobtrusive boyfriend on some level or another?"

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"I suspect you'll like each other very well." They would if there weren't any complications and ordering Findekáno cooperative shouldn't make it worse.

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"Why's he so unobtrusive?"

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"Politics. His family led the other side of the civil war and for a while in the aftermath it'd have been destabilizing and then we'd just settled into an arrangement where he does most of the behind-the-scenes domestic policy work and it suited and we left it."

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"Huh. I do think I want to check if I like him enough to share with him, before -" handwave.

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"That makes sense. I can suggest to him he meet you for lunch tomorrow."

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"That works. He got a name?"

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"Findekáno," he says very fondly.

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"...how sure are you that you want to drop me into this centuries-long thing. Or am I reading too much into this and you actually just want to fool around with me for some shortish period of time and then go back to your centuries-long thing."

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"I am sure of what I want, and what I want is to have you for as long as I can make you happy and give you leverage to do interesting things."

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"You think you can pull off the 'sufficient, central' thing?"

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"Yes."

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"Okay. I'll have lunch with Findekáno."

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He beams at him again. He opens a mirrored garden door. They're outside his rooms. "Good night, Cor."

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"Good night!"

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He goes back to his rooms.

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It's not very like you to work really hard for trust you intend to be betraying.

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I'm not planning on hurting him.

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And you weren't planning on hurting me. Finding out will hurt him, and eventually he'll find out.

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I suppose he'd better not.

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I would enjoy nothing more than getting lunch with him. He seems like an extraordinary young man.

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I wasn't born yesterday. You're going to swear to take all my goals as your own, now, or something would slip. 

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For the next day? Or the next hundred years?

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I like you, I don't want you erased for a century. No, just tomorrow. Once he's mine it won't be in your interests to let anything slip, it'll just make things worse for him.

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Maitimo, don't do this. I know it's complicated, I know you're under a lot of pressure, I know that you genuinely think after the war given enough space you can somehow - straighten out the ship you are currently steering straight into a cliff -

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See, this is why I don't want to erase you for a hundred years, sometimes you say things that make me feel like you care about me.

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Is that the appeal? Someone smart and idealistic and ambitious and capable enough who could also love you?

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I told you what I want you to swear.

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He closes his eyes. "I swear until tomorrow is over to swear no more oaths and to take all your ends as my own, and serve them faithfully."

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Maitimo ruffles his hair and holds him close and eventually falls asleep.

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And the next day he visits Cor for lunch.

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"Hi!"

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"Hi! How goes symbolically representing 'fuck this one god in particular'?"

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"Goes pretty well. Lots of triangles."

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"Triangles?"

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"Triangles! A specific variety of triangle without a common prior use."

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"Huh. What's the artistic convention for, like, eradicating disease -"

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"Paisleys and long sort of ribbony shapes -" He grabs a spare bit of paper and doodles it.

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"It's pretty. Is there an explainable logic to it or is that just the first thing someone got to work -"

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"Pretty much that. Sometimes we know what they were thinking but if you get too explicit about it the artistic convention gets too symbolic."

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Nod. "It's nice to properly meet you."

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"You too! So you do domestic policy stuff?"

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"Mostly! Maitimo does people, you know, and he's very nearly perfect at it, but once you're operating on a larger scale than a slow-paced peacetime Elf kingdom in Valinor you need systems for the people to work within and places where the systems are flexible and feedback mechanisms and when we got here and were overstretched I took that up."

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"Cool. What have you done that you're proud of there?"

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"The local Elves were all nomadic when we met them. Well, recently ex-nomadic, they'd fled into hastily-constructed cities when the orcs took the continent, but they coped very poorly with it. Set up a nice Elf-paced integration program for people who wanted to learn to read and write and help with the war and function in groups of more than twenty without feeling like they'd shot and buried everything about their lives before the war.

Then we met humans who were for different reasons also illiterate and innumerate and interested in integrating, and we tried the same setup but they found it too Elf-paced, so we just sped it up until it seemed like a miserably breakneck pace and then they were happy."

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"How fast is miserably breakneck?"

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"Two years - I know, I know, but the Elves take eighty."

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"I'm twenty, ten percent of my life is a long time!"

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"And reading and writing and math and a new language and how to use currency and how to interact with a centrally administered country is a lot to learn!!"

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"I guess. I can't remember before I could read. In two languages. But I wasn't doing it age two."

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"I was born around when Elves invented writing, I didn't learn until I was fifteen or so. It goes faster when you're older."

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"Makes sense. Attention span, motor control."

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"Yep. We did try an even faster human program, just in case we were still underestimating them, but people found it awfully stressful and lots dropped out."

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"That's how you know you adjusted right."

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"That's the idea! Lately I've been working on reconstruction and disaster relief."

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"Lot of disasters to relieve?"

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"Kingdom's big enough there's usually a drought or famine or flood or blizzard somewhere."

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"You got anything applicable to evacuating a punctured planet?"

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"Maybe. How many can a mage move at a time, how's information primarily disseminated -'

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"Fastest painters can only get ten done before the blood's too dry, most people more like five or six. Couriers; used to have a good mail system but no more."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Elves can do broadcast with ten miles of range among strangers, if that'd help with coordination. Does the humidity and so forth affect how fast blood dries or is it a magical phenomenon independent of the physical one -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"How much that would help depends a lot on how it reacts to gates, Gatesnest is scattered all over the planet. Humidity does affect it, do you have a humidity song? Normally for complicated spells we just, like, boil some water in the same room, but fuel's a little harder to come by lately. I'm not actually sure there's much time to be saved by increasing batch size, though, you still have to paint everybody even if you only chant half as much."

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"Weather songs would do humidity. I can't think how to make the painting faster, one assumes it's cheating to have - rivulets in the floor you can pour the blood into, or something -"

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"It's not cheating, but the spell doesn't get rid of the blood so you have to clean it up every time unless you do more magic to disappear it."

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"Doesn't get rid of it but keeps track and disapproves of reuse?"

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"I guess if it didn't dry you could reuse it. You can reuse ash parts. But you still have to paint everyone who's being transported."

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He nods thoughtfully. "How are you checking if they're mages?"

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"- oh, mages can identify each other by looking."

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"- huh. What does it look like, that's interesting..."

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"It's... looking is the thing we have to do to tell, it is not visually sensed. It's a weird thing."

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"If I think of anything that might help I'll let you know about it. People can't bring any stuff? Or has a version been developed that allows for that?"

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"People can bring stuff! I arrived less than stark naked, the orcs had letters. It's more complicated to bring cargo that isn't on somebody's person but they figured it out."

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"Oh good, that'll help. We could send care packages but risks drawing Enemy attention."

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"How so?"

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"He probably has sources on what our scouts and boats and shipping is up to, and if we were sending things to the south continent he'd look around there sooner. As it stands we might just squeeze these things by him and win before he's finished figuring out how to react."

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"If they're ever really desperate you could send it through the empty world, but they should be okay. Except for direct war damage and the first city on the far side of the puncture - the points were always out of the way, people don't like to live that close to lava for the most part, so they've had time to get out of the way as they grow."

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"What does war damage look like in a world where wars are presumably fought with magic?"

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"Stuff goes - missing. Or is on fire, there's also 'on fire'. Occasionally someone goes after the food supply, kills it all, but that's less common, widely considered a war crime."

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Nod. "I'm not clear why anyone went to war over the catastrophe with the hole in the planet -"

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"Took a while to be sure it was a puncture. It just looked like the city disappearing, there wasn't even lava left, it was just gone. It would have been a hell of an act of magic, but it could've been done. And they were having some problems with a neighbor."

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"Ah." Sigh.

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"And then everybody else was up in arms over that neighbor's supposed willingness and ability to do that, and some people allied with them because they were scared of that level of power - that's insane, you would have to paint so fast and know so much about the city or have incredible abstracting skill and at that scale you'd probably need a vacuum pump too - and so there was some internal division about whether to even deny it, because their enemies wouldn't believe them but their allies might -"

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"Uh huh." Deeper sigh. 

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"And the war used a ton of magic. And another point broke through, not even at a city, just some forest, half a dozen casualties in travelers. And then they finally explained that it wasn't them. And a ceasefire was called while everyone tried to redirect their attention to solving that."

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"Is that still in place?"

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"The ceasefire? There's an actual peace treaty now."

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"Good for them." He frowns and rubs his eyes. "Our magic can't do human resurrection unless it turns out able to do time travel."

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"That would have its own troubling implications." Sigh. "Maybe somewhere can."

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"Yeah. Maitimo's optimistic and I wouldn't call him an optimist by nature."

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"If anything ought to make one optimistic, 'worldsful of potentially unlimited kinds of magic' is such a thing."

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"Indeed." He smiles.

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"Once things are a little more settled - refugees refuged, evil god deleted from existence, couple backup planets found - oh, aside, it just occurred to me to ask if you have a good way to create vacuum here, soot and blood are easy but adding vacuum helps a lot - what was I saying - once things are more settled it'll be incredible even just to see what exploits we can get between songs and destruction, or magic items and destruction, but it seems like that might require exhaustive attention of experts who can't so much be spared right this minute."

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"I'm really excited about that, but yeah, don't want to pull teams off war stuff until the war is actually over and on your end I imagine it's the same with evacuation efforts."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah. They're spreading people between as many different points on the empty planet as possible, so they don't start accelerating their growth from overuse soon, and they still think they're going to all hit lava over the course of evacuating people."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And how long between lava and puncture, or do we not really know -"

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"Lava isn't actually that far down. There's places where it surfaces naturally, volcanoes and stuff. It's just the point after which we can't keep track."

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Nod. "I have no idea if we can make vacuum with our magic."

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"It's doable with nonmagical apparatus, but it's dangerous to do that because if there's a flaw in it and the vacuum isn't as perfect as you think it is it's the same as dried blood, doesn't work, lost toes is best case scenario. You can also do it by making a very strong container and destroying what's in it, but the spell for that requires you to have vacuum available in the first place."

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"Can you get more out than you put in?"

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"In the sense that the vacuum you use in the spell isn't consumed any more than soot drawings are, sure."

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"Right. Hmm. A Vala could do it - they'd be so useful if they weren't so incompetent -"

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"And yet. I'm reluctant to try to get some from home, they're using it in the cargo version of the world hopping spell."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's important. Maybe the Maia Maitimo's planning to try to convince to help us can do it."

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"The dog one? That'd be convenient."

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"Huan couldn't, not his - style. I think Maitimo means to try to get one out of Angband if he can, get their help for a better spell aimed at Melkor."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Aha."

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"Risky but I take it so are the alternatives."

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"Yep. Well, I guess the fast sloppy version can continue not to incorporate vacuum."

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"I'm sure you'll hear about it if we think of a way to pull it off."

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"I should hope so. Is there some informational channel I should be hooked into that's more formal than 'occasionally hang out with Curufinwë and Maitimo and you and chat' -"

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"Sensitive stuff is all coordinated over osanwë, harder to spy on. You could ask to be looped in but it's kind of distracting - you could get Maitimo to make you a necklace like his and then ask to be looped in -"

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"Ooh, I didn't realize those were accessible like that, want."

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"Someone might have to make one but it's possible there's a backup somewhere or a loaned one to call in. You'll like it, it's remarkable."

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"Sounded it."

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He doesn't himself seem to have one. "Until you have that set up I'm sure you're getting forwarded everything you need."

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"You don't have one?"

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"They give me headaches for some reason, no one can figure it out. That's a very rare problem to have, though."

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"Wow, that sucks. - I have so many bad instincts, I need to stop automatically going 'I was a healer before shit happened, I can destroy headaches!', that would require a lot of maintenance and be nonessential magic, no nonessential magic, bad Cor."

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"I am very sad not to have fancy mental enhancements but it's indeed not worth any planets being eaten over."

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"Oh well."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can't imagine not being able to casually do magic anymore, you must miss it."

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"So much. I'll buckle down and pick up some songs once I'm not spending all my time on god-killing, I guess."

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"I bet you'll pick them up pretty quickly, memory boost should help."

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"I bet it will!"

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He eats lunch.

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Lunch! "So do you have opinions on boyfriend-sharing?"

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"He is utterly fascinated with you, it's been a long time since I've seen him even the slightest bit carried away - it's like winding back time fifteen hundred years - I suppose it's inevitable if you notice so much about people and then meet a really remarkable one -"

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"It's a little fast but not in the - shallow way I normally associate with sudden infatuation? - But that's not really what I was asking you."

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"If you two were to have the sort of relationship that he understands you to want, that would make me very, very happy."

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"Aww."

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He giggles.

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"Thanks for coming to lunch."

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"Of course! It's nice to meet you."

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"You too!"

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"Thank you for saving us all!"

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"I assure you I feel appropriately egotistical about, uh, landing on you in a last-ditch effort to save my own planet."

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"Well, you could've done that and then not arranged to save our world."

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"I guess in theory but no not really."

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"I hope most worlds are in less dire straits than these ones, we'll be stretched pretty thin if they're all in terrible peril."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Be fairly catastrophic timing. Fifty years ago my world would have seemed fine! Even three years!"

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"Were you starting to think about other sources, or did you think you had lots more time?"

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"People were starting to think about getting to other planets. Someday. In a long time. I'm not sure how far off the technology would have been or if the other planets would have been hospitable."

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"Can they be gated to, or is that impossible without getting there in the first place?"

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"You have to physically travel to both ends of a gate. And the timing's a little delicate, too, they work by having a disappearance point on an object and peeling it apart at the right moment."

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Nod. "Can they be interdimensional?"

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"I guess that's not impossible, but I kind of don't want any gates in any locations the Enemy might at need choose to visit that lead anywhere not that."

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"Oh, absolutely not while he's still alive."

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"But yeah later on it would be fantastic. And the surfaces the gates are on are still mobile afterwards, I mean usually you install them permanently somewhere but you could pry them off and move them, so they wouldn't eat wherever they were when they grew."

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"Those you must have a better sense of how fast they grow?"

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"Oh yeah, it's really slow, we never noticed it at all, but if you're worrying on a scale of millennia."

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"Which we should be, can't count on finding useful magic to reverse it before then. That'll be really nice, once we have it."

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"So nice!"

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"Gatesnest sounds amazing."

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"I'm - really going to miss it. It was fantastic. Maybe there'll be similar places one day. Gates at least have the virtue that they're right where we can see them, they won't go out of control..."

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"I am sure there'll be similar places someday. Given the chance to connect and trade and meet each other, people just - do. We'll find a way to do it safely."

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"It's not that it was a city, or even that it was a cosmopolitan city. It was always awake. It was all over the world. You could turn the right corner and night would be day, summer would be winter."

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Nod. "And when it stretches worlds you'll turn corners and get seasons we haven't named. it does sound incredible, I really do think we can build it again."

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"Can't wait."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Anything else I can answer for you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I didn't actually mean to turn this into an interview, just a, 'should we be sharing a boyfriend'."

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"It would surprise me if that were a bad idea because we didn't get along."

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"I'm getting that."

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He stands up. "Pleasure to meet you."

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"You too! I'll see you around."

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He leaves. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cor goes back to work.

Permalink Mark Unread

Maitimo stops by for dinner. "Hey! How's it going -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Going great! I assume I shouldn't slow down in anticipation of scrapping all my work to account for the availability of vacuum."

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"We can't think how to achieve that but if we come up with something we'll let you know."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Full speed ahead then."

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"Findekáno thinks highly of you."

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"I think he's great too! How self-aggrandizing would it be to compliment your taste?"

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"I have excellent taste."

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Giggle.

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"Did you want a rematch at Governor?"

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"I would love one."

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"Oh good, me too."

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Governor rematch! Cor loses fast trying something daring.

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Maitimo only looks a tiny bit smug. "Good game."

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"Would've been better if that'd worked. Think we have time to start another?"

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"If that's how you'd like to spend the rest of the evening."

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"Oh, are there other ideas on the table?"

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"If pressed I could come up with one or two." He pushes the table aside.

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"I would be fascinated to hear your ideas. Or be shown, depending."

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Then Maitimo will scoop him up and kiss him.

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Eee!

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He will laugh delightedly and do it again!

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Kisses turn out to be great.

Nobody's told him about the hair thing, which might be relevant when he attempts to steady himself with a hand behind Maitimo's neck.

Permalink Mark Unread

Maitimo will totally have a surprisingly strong reaction to that! He will find nearby furniture to collapse on rather than try to hold Cor while that is going on.

Permalink Mark Unread

"- are you okay?"

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"Elves wear our hair braided because it's - erotically sensitive - get easily distracted -"

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"...Oh. So was that a 'do that again' collapsing or a 'too soon' collapsing?"

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"Again but no complaining if I drop you." Kiss.

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Kiss. I will make sure I am stable before I touch your hair again. He settles himself on a safe-seeming combination of Maitimo and furniture. And pets his hair.

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Maitimo wriggles and giggles delightedly.

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That's so cute. Calls for kisses.

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Yes good. Kisses and he'll unbraid his hair.

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How does this affect reactions to petting?

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Stronger! Significantly!

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Well that's fun. Pet pet pet giggle.

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Helpless delighted very distracted king.

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Awwwwww. Lemme know if it gets boring or whatever.

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Doesn't get boring but I will let you know when I'd like to do something else. Lean.

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Cor is not going to get bored of getting such reactions via petting soft hair any time soon himself. Also kisses. Those too.

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That sounds lovely.

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Great.

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Cor's hair won't be the same but can he get Cor thoroughly distracted if he experiments enough with kissing.

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He can get a hell of a result from the back of Cor's neck.

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Oh good then he can do that! Lots!

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Squirming whimpery Cor!

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What a delightful evening. 

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It iiiiiiis.

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Eventually he says very regretfully that he should not keep his essential mage up all night until the war is over.

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"I suppose that makes sense."

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"It makes perfect sense and yet I nearly talked myself out of it." Sigh.

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"I'm flattered."

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He will reluctantly carry Cor off to bed.

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Being carried is fun.

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"Good night!"

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"Good night!" Kiss.

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Happy King retires.

Going to comment?

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I'm not sure what to say. It was a bad idea. I hope it works. I do want you to be happy, and not just because as long as you're satisfied you won't hurt him.

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We didn't always get along, before, and I didn't -

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Couldn't have gotten away with it.

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That's part of it.

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What's the rest?

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There are costs to crossing the line in the first place? At this point there's not - at this point it doesn't matter whether I leave you alone one night or not, unless I'm going to swear it off forever, but in the first place - you trusted me -

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Yes, I did.

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Maitimo sleeps.

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Cor gets back to work the next morning.

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He has a necklace for Cor the next evening! "Borrowed it off somebody until the one I commissioned is finished. I have no idea if it will help you work but I'm sure you'll like it."

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"They won't miss it?"

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"I am sure they'll eagerly await having it back, but if it might hasten the end of the war it's an easy call, and a few months really isn't long without it, not for Elves."

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"Fair enough. Thanks." On it goes.

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Improved recall and working memory! Improved attentional capacity!

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"Ooooooh."

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"Isn't it lovely? 

 

Maybe now you can beat me at Governor."

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"We could check."

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"Oooooh." Kiss.

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The necklace or possibly just experience does improve his Governor performance.

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Oooooohh.

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Whether it will suffice remains to be seen.

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It won't possibly suffice if he has anything to say about it!

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Oh really.

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Oh, definitely.

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How definitely?

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Comes down to a dice roll again, this time at substantially better odds.

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Oooh.

Cor rolls a twelve.

"Gosh," he says.

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"Well."

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"Well."

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...Maitimo steps neatly around the table and picks Cor right up and kisses him. "Do you think you're very clever?"

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"Yes I do. Also lucky, mostly clever."

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"So clever." If he holds Cor like this he can nibble on the back of his neck.

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"Mmmm~"

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So so clever. He nudges the door open with his foot and carries Cor out.

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Squirmy laughter. "Where are we going?"

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"Gosh. If that were a complaining sound I could drop you off at your rooms but it didn't sound like one and so I was headed for mine."

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"I'm not complaining."

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NIbble nibble he does not change directions.

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Eeeeeeee.

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His rooms are terribly spacious. He drops Cor on the bed. "You're brilliant," he says, "and I find you thoroughly addictive and I am on so many levels so glad you landed on us."

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"Addictive? Should I be limiting your dose?"

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"That sounds like a terrible idea." They are both wearing too many clothes. "How would you even do it? Let me win at Governor sometimes? Say unambitious things if I'm staring too longingly?"

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"- that tickles -" Squirm. "What are things unambitious people say, I can't even come up with any."

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"I have saved enough worlds and after this one I will retire to the coast!" Unclothing. "I don't want power, it sounds frightening to have so many peoples' lives affected by my decisions!"

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Cor shrugs off his gifted Elfy robe thing. "I helped eat a planet, I can't be trusted with anything more complicated than a fishtank!"

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Maitimo laughs delightedly and pins him to the bed and shakes his hair loose. "It's very important not to second-guess other people who are older and wiser and say we shouldn't do anything differently!"

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"Says the older possibly wiser person who seems inclined to tell me to keep doing exactly what I'm already doing."

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"I might be biased." Kiss kiss kiss.

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Well there's all this unbraided hair, Cor had better make sure it's still soft.

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So soft!

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"This is so cute."

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"When we first met humans we were horrified - all naked and mostly mutilated -"

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"Mutilated?"

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Lean. "Elves practically never have it short, definitely never cut it - Findekáno doesn't mind it and I think it's wonderfully appealing but the first time people encountered it it was like meeting people who voluntarily cut off their toes..."

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"So he - got the idea from them?"

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"Was curious if it helped with the headaches. It didn't, but he liked it, so he kept it. There are a few others now but it's awfully rare. Some people find it hurts."

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"Huh. Fun facts." ...scritch.

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Wiggle whimper.

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Giggle.

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Retaliatory neck-kissing.

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And now Cor will have a harder time scritching effectively, although he can reach behind himself and try.

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That calls for retaliation beyond neck-kissing! Convenient how they're undressed.

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Okay yep now Cor is insufficiently coordinated to carry on good job Maitimo.

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He is awfully pleased with himself indeed.

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What is he going to do with his armful of moaning human?

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All kinds of things!!

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Eeeeeeeeeee~

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He will not snuggle up to sleep with his Cor until his Cor is very very tired, importance of ongoing projects be damned.

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Cor does not call a halt early. He gets very very tired and then flops on Maitimo and sleeps.

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Maitimo happily sleeps beside him.

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Cozy.

Cor talks in his sleep.

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Awwwww.

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Many random nouns later he yawns awake. "G'morning."

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"Morning." Hug. 

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"That was awesome but if you're like that all the time I may need occasional breaks."

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"I would be kind of an appallingly bad person if I exhausted you too much for you to kill my god." Kiss. "All the breaks you need."

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"Is that what Findekáno's for? Or am I how he gets breaks?"

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"Yes, see, for the last several thousand years I refused him any breaks but now that I've you he can occasionally have the night off."

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Cor laughs and kisses him.

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Kisses are lovely!!

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And Cor gets back into his clothes. Breakfast. Work.

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Governor in the evenings! Maitimo in the evenings! Maitimo sometimes with exaggerated reluctance gives him breaks.

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It's so cute.

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"You're amazing."

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"What've I done now?"

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"Existed!!"

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"As opposed to the rest of the time, when I've gotten too deeply into my work or something..."

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"Maybe I am jealous of your flirtations with nonexistence."

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"I've been assuming that if nonexistence winks at me I can wink back, only fair, yeah?"

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"It would be terribly unprincipled of me to object but I might still get jealous and wish to remind you all of the ways in which I'm a better companion."

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"For example, you exist!" Kiss.

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Kiss kiss. "I do! And I compliment you."

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"I noticed. Nonexistence never does, except implicitly by obligingly doing my destructive bidding."

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"I will also do your destructive bidding, presuming good reasons!"

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"Nonexistence never questions my reasons! Only occasionally my metaphors."

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"I'll take your metaphors for what they're worth but I have to tell the troops something, 'he's so pretty and I want to impress him' doesn't really cut it."

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"Fair enough."

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"I know you were just dying to leverage your newfound political power for unexplained wanton destruction!"

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"That's me, yep, you can tell from the ominous chanting."

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"It really is pretty ominous!!"

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"I know, right? We get kind of used to it but it's objectively pretty spooky."

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"Blood and ash and chanting, I feel like if we tell people from more worlds 'also this magic eats planets' they will be like 'you don't say'."

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"They will ask 'how did you not guess' and we will shrug and go 'it just wasn't obvious!'."

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Squeeze. "I can't imagine letting people die when you had the cure, just because who knows how much lava's gone really..."

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"Yeah. That was - yeah."

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Sigh. Snuggle. "Someday we will never compromise on anything."

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"I hope so." Snuggle.

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They proceed with efforts to learn more about the Enemy for the less hurried second attempt. "How hard would it be to deoath someone remotely -"

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"Not that bad? - Probably especially not if they're a Maia, I think, I can sort of make the artistic argument that the specific physical form isn't relevant and doesn't need painting, I'm doing a lot of that with the Melkor-zapping spell."

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"Once you have a version of that that's the best we can do with current intel I have a Maia I want deoathed."

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"All right, I'll start ruminating on that in the background."

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Nod.

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"Who's the Maia?"

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He sends the name; it's long and unpronounceable. "Spoken version is 'Thuringwethil'. Does the Enemy miscellaneous favors but not one of his exactly. I think it'd be tolerable to spare her in exchange for cooperation, I don't expect she'd take that as license for any particular atrocities."

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"Sounds good. Why does she do him favors?"

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"I have no idea. Maia motivations are deeply strange - could be that he agreed to make the interior of Angband purple - or something equivalently mundane and irrelevant to us - if she'd occasionally torture people for him, could be that she finds it thrilling, could be that she swore she would a very long time ago..."

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"...purple. Why are Maiar like that?"

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"I assume we make as little sense to them." Sigh. "There are lots of Maiar, some have practically ordinary desires and preferences. Melkor's lieutenant is the worst person I can possibly imagine but he makes perfect sense. He really enjoys horribly torturing people and manipulating them into mass murder. He's evil but he cares about the same things as I do..."

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"How do you come by this information?"

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"Enemy doesn't teach orcs how to keep private thoughts, presumably so he can read them as much as he wants, but it means if we're close enough we can also."

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"...great."

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"I know. Over soon."

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Nod.

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"We actually always figured he'd just teach 'em privacy, once he caught on, but he seems not to have thought it worth it."

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"No way to teach them privacy-except-for-him? Or verify when they're keeping things from him and punish them?"

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"Could do that. He'd have to admit he's reading them but they're slaves, I don't know why he'd worry about that. I've wondered if orcs would actually have osanwë if taught about it properly, since it's strange in the first place that they don't. If that's the reason I can see why he'd want to avoid it."

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"And none of 'em think about it properly?"

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Shrug. "Just guesswork. We can see if deoathed ones can pick it up."

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"I didn't warn anybody back home about the possibility, I'll put it in the next letter."

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"I don't think they spontaneously will. Not that it's not worth a mention."

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"I was assuming they had the same facts you were using to speculate."

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"I don't know if your typical orc knows that orcs are descended from Elves or anything about how Elf osanwë works and they certainly don't know the mental practices involved in employing it, or they'd know the privacy thing."

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"Gotcha."

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"But the information should be available on your world anyway, there are probably Maiar on the south continent."

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"And they might read minds to find out people's intentions toward their geese!"

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"I am sure they would think nothing of it!"

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"Bleh."

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"Osanwë's a great tool when everyone knows how to engage with it. We'll get there."

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"Oh yeah it's dead useful, just, wrong defaults."

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"A thing it has in common with lots of Elf features!"

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"Lots of them?"

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"Marriage is useful but with lousy defaults, oaths..."

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Nod.

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"We were very carefully designed but I'm not sure it was with our wellbeing in mind." Sigh.

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"I wonder what was."

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"Maybe someday we'll find out. Have they had any other successful scouting missions -"

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"Last I heard one guy made it back from a place he jumped a week ago, he landed in a sea and was injured and dehydrated by the time he washed up on land but then managed to find space to paint."

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"That's something - inhabited?"

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"Don't know yet. He didn't meet anyone or see anything artificial but you have to check more places than one random beach."

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Nod.

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"We can't even be completely sure about the one we're already using but everywhere on it we've landed is frigid, just barely breathable, and devoid of even plants, so probably fine."

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"Elves could maybe scout faster, better vision."

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"The problem is more 'you might have landed on an undiscovered island or a pole' - these have been round planets, far as we can tell, I'm not sure even Elf vision would mean we wouldn't have to land in a dozen places around the globe to be sure."

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"We have no power to see through planets, no. You can presumably check off the stars how far apart the landing sites are-"

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"Yes. Although they've also managed pretty decent aiming precision with the world travel spell."

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"It's incredibly impressive how well they've coordinated under the circumstances."

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"There's a pretty good mage network and it recovered surprisingly well post-war."

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"Good for them."

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"I like the mage network. I'm glad it's coming through even now."

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"Panic brings out the worst in lots of people. They have a lot to be proud of."

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"Honestly I think some of it is 'whoops we ate the world we'd better be differently indispensable right away'."

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"- fair. Do we need to be worried about people getting it into their heads to stop mages -"

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"Hasn't come up so far but maybe once people are a little less imminently afraid, and no longer relying on mages to get them evacuated, somebody will be like, 'okay, time to go cold turkey, via stabbing'."

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"You are very thoroughly safe against stabbing but I'm not sure of protection against magic assassination."

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"Mages are harder to kill by magic. Not impossible but they'd have to know a lot about me."

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"I'm much more worried about the Enemy but I don't care to miss something just because it's unlikely."

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"Yeah. I don't think I'm likely to be singled out by any mages but there's no foolproof defense, unfortunately. When I landed here I knew what a king was but for this exact reason my world's governments tended to be kind of decentralized and obfuscated."

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"That would do it, yeah." Hug. "If you die I will find a world that can resurrect you."

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"Aww." Snuggle.

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Snuggle! 

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"In the meantime we can avoid giving me any titles with a lot of fanfare likely to reach mages who don't know me personally."

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"Awwww, I like thinking up titles for you."

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"Oh yeah, what've you got?"

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"World-saver! World-builder! Oath unmaker, godkiller, blood-mage-in-chief - to distinguish from extant and yet undiscovered kinds of magery, you know - interdimensional magic advisor-"

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Giggle.

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Kiss!

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Oooh kisses.

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And other delightful activities.

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So delightful.

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He is in fact steering towards a cliff and hoping the space to straighten course will present itself. But he's so happy and Cor is his and he's not going to hurt him, won't need to, it shouldn't even come up, and it's been so long since he was happy that he is starving for it.

He works on getting more information with which to kill a god.

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Cor has a quick and dirty version within his time estimate.

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"Could anyone cast it but you?"

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"Uh, they'd need to rework it but they could use it as a template especially if they're familiar with my compositions."

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"But maging, say, an elderly or terminally ill person to try it wouldn't be very informative."

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"Not really."

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Nod. "Then let's remotely free a Maia."

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"What do we know about her?"

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Preferred appearance is like this! Interactions orcs have remembered are these! Maiar in general are like so!

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"Okay then."

Spelldrafting.

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With enjoyable breaks.

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Enjoyable breaks are great.

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He occasionally bounces Cor more information about their target and he arranges for evacuation should the destruction of Melkor be bad for surrounding areas and he is very paranoid about Cor's safety and access to information.

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Cor appreciates the attention to his safety and if Maitimo is very careful neither he nor Ranary (who is sticking around and dating Elon but hanging out with Cor a lot) will notice restricted information.

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Maitimo is exceptionally careful.

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Cor suspects nothing.

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Someday there will be nothing to suspect and some day long after that when he's figured out how to sell it he can arrange for Cor to find out in a less worrying way.

In the meantime he has Cor and is very happy.

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Cor has remote Maia deoathing! It will probably work! It helps that she has this really clear aesthetic to her with bats and stuff. There are batty shapes in the painting.

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Maitimo kisses his toes and sternly instructs him not to lose them and waits for the right moment and gives him the go-ahead.

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Cor doesn't lose any toes. He does faint for a few minutes.

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And someone informs Thuringwethil that they've done her a favor and want one in return, and she distracts every Elf within range with gleeful giggling.

 

And the next day she is perched on Cor's balcony, preening.

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Thuringwethil, I presume?

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Good guessing! You must be Cor!

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Yep. Why are you on my balcony?

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I wanted to return the favor where it was owed. I know they'd have told you what they thought you needed to know anyway but it's the wrong aesthetic, you know?

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Oh. Sure, I'll go get paper. He has paper. He gets some.

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She's waiting.

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Go ahead.

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Melkor! Melkor before the world, Melkor in the music, Melkor as divine plan and rebellion against divine plan, serving only in Eru's eyes to improve it - Melkor delighted by his orcs, by their misery and fear and his absolute power over them, Melkor fascinated by his enemies and the shapes into which they buckle under pressure, Melkor who wants a universe full of unimaginable suffering only interrupted when the interruption will make it worse later. Angband, which is as much a part of his body as his body is. The Silmarils, blazing painfully on his crown - Melkor jealous, Melkor aware that civilizations uninterrupted will reach greater heights from which he can topple them - the civil war Melkor arranged in Valinor and how pleased he was with its effects - a flash of a memory of a man dragged through the streets and thrown at Maitimo's feet - Melkor obsessed with defying fate, Melkor desperate for the magic that was used to rip his orcs  free and simultaneously furious about it -

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Okay that's really useful wow.

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Any time, sweetheart. You need a ride out of here?

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Uh, I live here.

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And lotsa people live in Angband. 

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Am I unbeknownst to myself being held prisoner, that would be a trick.

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They say you don't know if you're a prisoner until you try leaving.

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I've left since I've been here, though, went to another world.

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She shrugs elaborately. If you're happy I've got nothing to say about it.

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Uh, I think I'm fine but I'm curious why you thought I wasn't.

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The various rulers of Beleriand are not as a rule great for the men they collect. It's alllllll men, too, even if I wanted to hand someone a leash in exchange for glamour and power there's no one to hand it to. Pout.

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I can't really speak to the sexual preference ratio. Uh, I'm fine and Findekáno seems fine...

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I can't actually get into this city unless they're expecting me, I don't get things firsthand. Maybe he grew out of it.

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Grew out of what?

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Another flash of the thing that had Melkor so pleased at the outcome of the civil war - a man dragged through the streets and thrown at Maitimo's feet - 

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That all you've got? he wonders.

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I think we're even in favors, little magician.

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Uh, do you need anything?

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I wanna burn the world with blood and ash.

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I'll, uh, keep that in mind next time we recruit a new batch of mages.

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She spreads her wings and stands.

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Thank you? he says uncertainly.

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She disappears in a puff of black smoke.

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Hey, Findekáno, is this a good time?

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Cor? Yeah, sure - what do you need -

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Thuringwethil dropped by. Sent me a bunch of Melkor stuff and... a... rumor?

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About the Enemy?

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Tangentially.

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He's supposed to inform Maitimo if Cor talks to him. But he can delay doing that. At least for a little while. 

Well, I'm not in the middle of anything essential.

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She showed me, uh -

Findekáno, long-haired, thrown to the ground in front of Maitimo.

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Oh. Yeah. 

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What's the deal?

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If there were a deal would that affect how quickly we figure out killing Melkor.

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...what?

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I have a fair bit of experience of evil Maiar spreading rumors. Last time they did it to create internal divisions and start a civil war and get most of our leadership killed so we could fight them less effectively. That seems like a possible motive this time, too. 

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It will not affect that except insofar as I guess it could call into question whether I should be killing Melkor at all?

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It really shouldn't do that.

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What is the deal.

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He he has a headache by now, and feels numb, and is twitching. But -

 - be careful -

- he sends the rest of the memory.

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I can fix that -

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Can you fix it right now because I have to tell him if you try to talk to me

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- if you come here now and give me a few minutes before you do that yes.

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Don't have freedom of movement. Can give you a couple minutes but only a couple.

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Where are you -

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He sends a mental map. Pretty little suite of rooms with a door to Maitimo's rooms and a view of half the city. Enough space an Elf who is used to it can manage for a week. I don't know if the door's locked.

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Hold on.

He can run now. He runs.

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People stare but none of them stop him. 

 

The door isn't locked.

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Good.

He goes in and opens his kit and nicks his wrist and holds his sponge to the wound - hang on, hang on - starts painting around Findekáno's neck, mentally designing a semicircle version that will compensate for the fact that he is chained to the wall.

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The door opens again.

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Cor is smearing blood across Findekáno's lips.

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He slaps Findekáno and smears the blood everywhere and picks Cor up and pulls him away and against the opposite wall. 

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"Maitimo what the fuck."

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"What are you doing?"

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"What am I doing?"

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Maitimo tugs the brush out of his hand and examines the wrist injury and decides to instead demand his explanation of the person who has to give it to him. 

Immediately and completely explain what happened. 

And when Findekáno sends it -

Without saying anything else aloud or over osanwë, immediately without any delay swear not to leave this room until I physically drag you out of it. 

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"I swear not to leave this room until you physically drag me out of it," he says evenly.

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Without saying anything else aloud or over osanwë, immediately without any delay swear to go immediately downstairs and wait for me in the courtyard.

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He looks at Maitimo. 

"I swear to go immediately downstairs and wait for you in the courtyard," he says, a bit less levelly. 

 

These of course contradict. 

 

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Maitimo closes the door so no one will wonder about the screaming.

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"I - wh- no -"

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Maitimo lets go of Cor. Walks over to the window and leans his head against the glass and watches Cor patiently.

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Cor manages to land on his feet. Is there any blood on the chain -

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Little bit. 

 

Don't move, he says. And don't be stupid. He'll be fine.

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Stop it.

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Are you going to help us kill the Enemy?

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You are making a really shit case for it.

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I think very highly of you, Cor, and if I didn't expect that we'll need you to kill Melkor I could not possibly justify keeping you alive.

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Curufinwë, I need you to tell Ranary to run home and not come back. It's important. Please.

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- Maitimo told everyone about fifteen minutes ago that Thuringwethil seems to have done mind-affecting magic to you and you've been erratic and paranoid and they're trying to fix it. Ranary's fine.

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He is literally torturing Findekáno in front of me right this very second.

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Do you recognize that that seems from an outside perspective kind of unlikely.

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Would mind-affecting magic let me bounce you the image or should I not bother.

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- it might but it'd be less likely you had normal sense-memories if it were magic compared to if it were actually happening, so it would be slightly informative. - is this a helpful approach to take -

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He is being extremely ominous, I would no longer put it past him to hurt Ranary to coerce me, and I want her out. This is not the time to be precious about privacy Curufinwë can have a complete memory set from when he met Thuringwethil.

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He doesn't respond.  

 

Maitimo what are you doing.

 

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Thuringwethil -

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No, I have all of the facts about what you are doing, I should have been more precise and asked what you are trying to achieve and how your actions have been advancing that.

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Doesn't help anything I just need him to on the whole regret having not lied to Cor.

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Well if we manage to lose our mages and the war then he will definitely regret it but Melkor won't regret a thing.

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We're not going to lose our mages.

 

"- oh," Elon says to Ranary, "King says that Thuringwethil - the Maia we loosed for information - is hanging around the city and he's concerned a Maia observing magic could possibly figure out how to imitate it, until we get the all-clear he asks that you please avoid it or if absolutely necessary do it in a secured area."

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"I'm not doing unnecessary magic anyway," Ranary says.

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"Yeah, you'd think they'd know that. Uh, secured areas are a set of rooms under the north tower and a set in the palace, in case necessary magic comes up."

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"Okay."

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Maitimo meticulously mops up all of the blood in the room.

 

I reassured my brother that I'm not torturing anybody. If Ranary gets panicked enough to try something we're set up to stop her but that'll make this much scarier for her than it needs to be.

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- Curufinwë -

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Yes?

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Can you help me keep my friend safe or not.

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That depends what she's in danger from. If Maitimo wants to prevent her from fleeing so we have at least one mage to stop Melkor, I, uh, share that priority.

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I'm not going anywhere, I want him to be limited by not being able to make me wish I was dead.

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Spell could backfire, right?

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I can send messages in advance.

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In that case I don't mind trying to ensure Ranary is safe so I can assure you of that. But if Maitimo were actually evil and wanted to prevent me from doing so he wouldn't have a very hard time.

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It would be very convenient to be able to swear oaths right now.

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It frequently is. Do you want me to check on Ranary? Where are you imagining she should go, south continent?

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Home. Help with checking planets, maybe.

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I'd be happy to go check on her for you, and tell her that you thought she should do that.

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Thanks.

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When all of the blood is cleared up Maitimo unchains Findekáno from the wall and lets him fall twitching to the floor. Come here.

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Or what.

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Once you come here I am going to take him outside so the oaths stop contradicting.

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You will want to be very careful about precedent establishment here.

But he goes over to him.

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And Maitimo chains him to the wall like someone who has a lot of practice at that and then he picks Findekáno up and carries him outside. Where Findekáno stops screaming and stops moving. 

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Could you bounce me what Thuringwethil had to say about Melkor, please.

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I seem to be chained to the wall.

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...yes.

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I have a problem with that. Maybe after we have addressed my problem we can talk about yours.

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All right. 

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I can't help but notice I am still chained to the wall.

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Maitimo sighs. It won't be helpful to mention that I really like you and think you're adorable, will it.

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Would I be getting more mileage on the CHAINED TO THE WALL thing if I displayed less personality.

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Not really. 

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If you bounce me everything Thuringwethil said about Melkor I'll unchain you.

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I can tell the difference between a temporary and a permanent concession.

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Findekáno wouldn't have done this if he thought it'd end with you refusing to help kill the Enemy. Though he could have been wrong about you.

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We can talk about my willingness to do that once Ranary is out of the way.

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Mage a couple Elves and then sure. 

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Fuck you.

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Maitimo sits down and leans against the wall and sings. 

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After a while Findekáno stirs. 

Maitimo stops singing. "You okay?"

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"That crossed a line, Maitimo."

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"Yes, I realize that. Are you okay."

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Sigh. "Yeah. I was right, you know."

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"You made yourself right by blowing everything up, you could have just not done that and then I would have been right."

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"I find it really - unattractive - the thing where you blame other people in situations where they had no reason to do what you wanted and you held all the cards."

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"Is this a typical conversation."

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"Pretty much. Sometimes I'm not this angry with him. Sometimes he listens."

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"Great."

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"I was gonna fix it."

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"I know you were."

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"So why'd you -"

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Sigh. "Cor would you rather I'd have lied to you?"

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"No."

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"There you go, then."

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"Will you tell him that we need to kill Melkor."

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"I didn't mean to call that into question."

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"You didn't. I want Ranary out of the way."

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"I need more than one mage. Not even for leverage, because this might kill him. We can send Ranary away if we can have a couple Elf mages."

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"Fuck you."

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Maitimo sighs.

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"If you want to solve the stated problem I can help you with that. If you want to inexorably sink your hooks ever deeper the answer is fuck you."

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"I want a couple Elf mages. I'm willing to swear to use them responsibly."

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"Do you think I'm stupid?"

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"If I thought that this whole mess would have been avoided!"

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"I should have left you alone. I'm sorry."

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"Can't help but notice I'm still chained to the fucking wall, Maitimo."

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"If you weren't chained to the wall would you behave yourself in such a way that I'll immediately regret unchaining you?"

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"Now what might cause you to regret that."

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"Don't use magic."

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"Chaining me to the wall won't stop me if you leave me under the impression this is what my life looks like now and I might as well go out with a bang."

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"I am well aware of that."

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"Let. Me. Go."

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Maitimo tosses Findekáno the key.

 

His hands are kind of trembley but he gets it after a little while.

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Cor squeezes Findekáno's hand, once, then heads for the door.

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Maitimo does not stop him.

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Out he goes, looking for Ranary.

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Guards stop him at the palace doors. "You're supposed to stay here, sorry."

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"Oh, why's that?"

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"Security concerns."

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"Oh?"

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"Is there anything I can get you?"

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"I'm looking for Ranary."

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"I'll pass the message on if I get a chance."

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"I want to see her in person immediately. I don't think she's ten miles away. Perhaps you could let her know right now."

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"I can't do that. Security reasons."

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"What security reasons prevent you from osanwëing my friend asking her to meet me?"

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"Our orders are to not startle you, try to avoid needing to confront you, not let you out of the palace, not let you talk to Thuringwethil or any mages or anyone who seems to intensely upset you, and prevent you from doing magic. If you need something we can't help you with you can take it up with the King."

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"That's not really going to work."

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"I'm sorry to hear that."

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"Don't patronize me."

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"...I apologize, sir?" he says uncertainly.

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"Do you know anything about why these orders are in place or do they just sort of happen to you."

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"Sometimes the King puts special orders in place for diplomatic visits or high-uncertainty situations or to confuse the Enemy or as a drill or a test. Who gets to access the palace isn't the sort of order you get a detailed justification for."

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Cor turns to go back to his rooms, expecting to find that someone has already snatched up the notes he took on Thuringwethil's data dump.

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Yep.

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He writes in charcoal.

That paper is going to be on fire now.

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Maitimo stops by a few minutes later.

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"Can we talk?"

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"I don't seem to be chained to the wall, that's a great start."

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He sits down. "I'm sorry."

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"Sure."

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"Do you have the notes memorized or did you just destroy a significant share of what we need to win the war to spite me."

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"This conversation will go a lot better if you can attribute me more sophistication than 'spite'."

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"- yeah, all right, that wasn't fair. I am going to work really hard to make sure you are never worse off for anything you do that increases our prospects of winning the war."

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"So if I rewrite them they won't be stolen? I find having my notes stolen terribly distressing. That's why I make sure I can set them on fire."

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"If you rewrite the notes no one will look at them."

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"Then maybe I will find myself moved to do that. Is that all you have to say?"

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"Yes."

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"How long do you feel like stalemating over Ranary?"

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"You don't get to strip this world of mages aside from you. I would be seriously negligent if I let you do that."

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"Like I said, if you want help solving the problem as stated, I can help you with that."

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"Go ahead."

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"If you feel like threatening random people to get cooperation you can do that and I can't really stop you short of blowing up myself and as much as I've got blood to reach. Ranary is a problem because she's my friend. If she's out of the way someone I don't know personally can be a backup mage. They can do this from outside the world, if they drop somewhere a few osanwë relays away periodically to check if I have died. Minimize your machination opportunities."

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"I am not replacing someone I know to be competent and benevolently-inclined with an unknown quantity's periodic drop-ins which they could forget about or get distracted from or get elsewise killed without having been careful about lining up a replacement. I'm not sending Ranary home save for something that improves our prospects of winning the war over having her, not counting changes to our prospects from you making conditions. I swear to that."

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"Does that Elf she's with even like her or is he just keeping tabs on her for you?"

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"He likes her but I did ask he introduce himself in the first place. - I asked him in particular because I thought they'd get along."

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"We have a problem, as long as I can't talk to her."

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"If you tip her off that she should leave then we'll stop her while she's trying and then she'll be a prisoner and unhappy about it instead of a backup plan and perfectly happy about it."

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"That's not the whole problem."

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"Are you presently so miserable that if not for Ranary's wellbeing you would kill yourself."

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"Missing the point."

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Sigh. "If you want her boyfriend to break up with her I can arrange that."

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"I sort of hope you really are this dense but then again you might stop being so at a moment's notice."

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Maitimo leaves.

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"Seriously," says Cor as he walks away. "She could make Elf mages too and I have no way to tell her not to except by leaving a distinctive crater, is that how you want it?"

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"So set some conditions under which we can have Elf mages, instead of trying to make yourself more and more the single point of failure."

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"You should not command a magic that eats worlds. Demonstrate to me that she has not yet been convinced to mage any Elves, now, before she could easily be done painting having started half an hour ago, or I won't give myself time to get cold feet before I obliterate a messy radius."

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"I swear that I haven't arranged to mage Elves and that next time you threaten suicide I'll let you do it."

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"You should really stop swearing things."

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"You should really stop threatening to let millions of people die in order to delay our getting magic by a year or two."

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"What's the plan for in a year or two?"

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"We'll have lots of mage neighbors. Or are you crossing your fingers that the planet with one clear beach turns out to be uninhabited and that they can evacuate people there instead? Thirty scouts, two survivors, I don't think they're going to keep doing it when they've got a continent right here and people already scouting and preparing it. I don't think even a demonstrative crater would accomplish that - though it'd kill me, I suppose, there is that. Is your objection to me in particular, if I die will you help my successor win the war."

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"Don't know, who is it?"

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"Macalaurë, you haven't met him."

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"Does he torture people too?"

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"No."

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"Maybe we'd get along fine."

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"I'll ask him to come here as quickly as he can - if it was Curufin -"

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"I like him but he didn't exactly materialize the cavalry."

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Sigh. "Macalaurë can get here tomorrow."

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"Also didn't materialize the cavalry, I'm not sure how many points to award him for not having been expressly asked. Findekáno doesn't just happen to like having short hair, does he, everyone knew."

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Sigh.

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"Go away."

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He does.

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Thuringwethil are you still in range please still be in range.

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Hey Cor. Recruiting mages?

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Is there anything else less world-eating you might want.

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I won't eat worlds. Promise. It's just so aesthetic. I can make matter, I can cancel the disadvantages.

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It destroys space, not just matter. Maybe when we're surer of our math. Is there anything else.

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I could go put my mage point in a star.

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I don't even know what that would do.

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Me neither!

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I just need an osanwë relay.

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I trade favors for sex sometimes but I'm not getting back into that city unless they want me there.

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And you were right that I can't leave.

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Uh huh.

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Appreciate the tipoff, anyway.

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Do you? Back home it's a shit thing to do to someone, tipping them off that things aren't nice when you can't get them out.

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Better to know. Not pleasanter, just better.

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Uh huh. I really super promise not to eat any planets people are living on, you know.

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Not here. Can't have any points here.

If you help me get Ranary out I can suggest she fetch you and you can make your case to them. Tell them you'll scout.

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Yeah, all right. 

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Thanks.

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Who's Ranary and what does she need to know?

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She's another mage. I would ideally like to have the conversation in real time in military code.

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That's no fun. Fine.

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There ensues a conversation in military code.

Ranary frowns at her Quenya alphabet notes. She goes to draw herself a bath.

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Elon goes with her.

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"I'm trying to relax, not get wound up," she says, "shoo."

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"Awww, okay." 

 

Someone else has gone ahead of her to draw up the bath.

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"Shoo, shoo!"

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"Is something the matter?"

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"I just want to have a normal bath by myself, I don't need help."

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"I'm not supposed to leave you alone but I can sit in the corner?"

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"You can't leave me alone to take a bath? No! Out!"

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"It's orders, I'm sorry. If you'd rather someone else -"

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"No, I don't want anyone, I want to take a bath alone!"

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"We're concerned for your safety."

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"I am not going to drown. Get out!"

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"That's - not the concern -" she wavers uncertainly at the door.

 

A couple more people come up the stairs, less uncertainly.

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"What is with you all -"

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"The King thinks Cor is trying to arrange to be the only mage on this planet. He also thinks this'll resolve inside a few days, for some reason. So for the next few days we're supposed to make sure no mages blow up everything, and unfortunately that requires watching you. I'm sorry. We don't want to scare you."

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"Well, let me talk to Cor."

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"- let me ask -

 

 

 

Yeah, okay."

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She puts her shoes back on, having failed to get any farther what with the bathroom being Elf-infested.

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She can get walked to the palace.

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Where Cor is parked rewriting Melkor Facts in inscrutable cipher.

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He's in the middle of writing notes about Melkor, does Ranary think they should interrupt?

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"Yes," she growls.

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They let Cor know she's here.

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"Oh, I can see her now?"

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"Yes."

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"Fancy that. I'd like to see her."

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Ranary can come in.

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He hugs her.

"They wouldn't let me take a bath without supervision," she murmurs.

"Figures."

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They are not leaving them unsupervised now either.

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They noticed. They don't say much.

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Eventually someone says that the visit's over.

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"Why?" wonders Cor.

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"Orders."

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"I feel kind of bad about not having noticed how creepily dictatorial this place was before today."

"I'm not visiting," says Ranary, "I live here now, I don't want to live with a guy who was going to spy on me in the bath for a king -"

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"We can find you somewhere else to stay, but not here."

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"I want to stay here with Cor," insists Ranary.

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"We could do a room elsewhere in the palace."

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"I'll settle for next door."

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"Those are taken. There's one over a little ways."

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"I'll move somewhere there's two adjacent," says Cor.

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"King says your choices are here or his rooms."

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"Perhaps one of my neighbors will be kind enough to move."

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They are not.

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Ranary doesn't get up. She sits next to Cor and clings to his hand.

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Someone picks Ranary up.

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She bites them.

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This does not deter them from dragging her away though they check carefully if she broke the skin.

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Not quite.

Cor drops his head into his hands.

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Cor is unobtrusively supervised.

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He writes down the rest of the notes in his cipher.

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He is brought meals.

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He's not feeling very artistic today. He writes. In cipher.

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No one bothers him.

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It's a good thing he's an introvert or being prevented access to anyone who doesn't creepy levels of work for his asshole ex would be even worse. ...Is Maitimo aware that "fuck you" also means "you're dumped" and would it be productive to check? Probably not till he comes and bothers Cor again.

He includes little "Curufinwë if you're deciphering this" tidbits in the notes.

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Maitimo does not come and bother Cor again. Ranary can visit every day for lunch if she likes.

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She likes. They lunch. They murmur to each other in a combination of Gatetalk and military code.

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If this is being conveyed to anyone who can get anything out of it they give no indications that they have.

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He doesn't make much artistic progress.

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Eventually someone mentions that the King would like to visit if it wouldn't interrupt.

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Cor doesn't say anything.

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Then no visit.

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Eventually Cor asks Findekáno, Are you okay?

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Are you?

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Got to see Ranary. Not injured or anything.

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Good.

I should maybe have waited until after the war but once I had a choice I couldn't. 

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Not your fault.

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 You don't say.

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Are you okay.

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Been having some arguments with my boyfriend but other than that everything's great.

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Mmhm.

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Do you need anything?

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Lots of things. I don't know if you can give me any of them.

Maybe you can tell me what to expect.

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- last week's been uncharacteristic, he's usually way less self-destructive. I am hoping he'll calm down and grieve and get over it and then be back to normal - normal is fairly pragmatic, if you truthfully tell him he's going to make it harder for you to be artistically inspired he might just leave you alone. 

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These aren't fantastic conditions for that even if he does continue to leave me alone.

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I should probably have waited until the war was over and we had room to maneuver. I'm sorry.

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I don't blame you.

He shouldn't command world-eating magic. I'm glad I know that, I'm glad I found out before I just maged whoever he suggested.

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I just hope it doesn't lose us the war.

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I hope so too. But I absolutely can't give him the backups he wants.

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I'm hardly going to try to talk you into it but your world is evacuating here.

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They're not sending mages. And they'll probably know to worry if they don't hear from me or Ranary.

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Are there conditions the backups could swear to?

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Deoathing makes that suspect as a method.

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You could maybe swear to not arranging that but it's certainly more complicated.

 

He's - trustworthy is the wrong word but I'd expect him to honor an agreement he made with you. 

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Spirit, not letter, is the important thing, so oaths wouldn't be great for that anyway.

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He had been consistent about that with me but had less incentive to break his word.

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Yeah. Also I can't necessarily assume things you tell me are true.

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I realize. 

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Should I leave you be? It's just that as far as I know everyone is working for him and you at least have some more reasonable set of feelings about that and everyone else kind of...

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He's had a long time to work on them and they need very badly to believe in him. I don't mind talking if you don't mind that he'll probably have me tell him about it. I - very much wish I could have kept you out of this.

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It wouldn't be better for him to have Elf mages and no check on their use.

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Sigh. Yeah. If he keeps avoiding you what's the plan?

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Thuringwethil gave me a lot to work with, I'll come up with something eventually when I'm less preoccupied.

I don't know what happens after that.

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After you have a way to kill the Enemy, you mean?

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After I do it. Presumably if it doesn't work it's not my problem any more.

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It would astonish me if he wouldn't agree to whatever terms you want to have him gone.

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Really.

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Within some bounds, and presentation matters, but if you have a wishlist I bet you can get everything on the wishlist.

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It's kind of hard to believe that. I mean - he walked in on me trying to de-oath you and immediately decided the way to handle this situation was to torture you in front of me and tell everyone I was compromised.

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Would it be worth discussing with him?

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Maybe.

I don't want him to have mages. I want to de-oath you. I want me and Ranary to leave.

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Mages will be a sticking point presuming it extends to all kinds of access to other worlds.

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We haven't even found anything interesting yet besides here. Maybe there's some other world with harmless magic he can have.

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There's probably a way to get it but it's a whole lot harder than the other two.

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I take it you've had to learn how to get stuff from him.

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Yeah.

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Tips?

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Sigh. 

He makes mistakes when he's not in control of a situation. It's - not usually useful for him to make mistakes, usually they make things worse, it's good to know how to do that if you're positioned to take advantage of the mistakes but otherwise it's better to leave him in control of things. He likes being obeyed. He likes being trusted, including in very narrow and restricted capacities. He'd like it if you cared about him in any sense but faking it is worse than nothing and I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to self-modify in that direction.

I got there mostly by concluding that it's - so sharp a disconnect from what he is in other capacities, and we were all doing dangerous mind-altering stuff in Valinor in self-defense, that I think he broke something. And someday we'll find the way to reverse it all and he'll be so horrified. I don't know if that's true. But caring for the person who he really ought to be is close enough to work. 

He's easily convinced to do something that's actually better for the country than what he's currently doing, with the honestly bizarre exception of 'stop keeping captive boyfriends'. Moral arguments are better made as personal sensibility ones - you hate mindreading and he'll accommodate, you think mindreading is morally objectionable and he'll ignore you. That one's related to all the Vala editing for ethicalness, back in the day. 

I have sex with him. That one depends - almost entirely on how you're going to feel about it, strategic unhappy obedience makes him happy and contempt makes him angry. If I'm in an acceptable mood it works really well, though. He will sometimes respect a no but not reliably. Pragmatic arguments work better than moral ones, again - 'that would make it a lot harder for me to feel comfortable around you' works better than 'has anyone explained that rape is bad'. 

When he makes mistakes he'll regret them and usually be agreeable about concessions to make up for them, not that the concessions will be sized to match the mistakes. 

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It is going to be super hard not to attempt to explain that rape is bad. Has anyone explained that rape is bad in part for pragmatic reasons?

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I really haven't tried and I'm not sure who else would have.

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Nobody gives a fuck, do they.

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There was a war and he won. He'd have been universally agreed to be within his rights to kill me. I think people might object more on your behalf, not that they'll know what to do about it.

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Do you happen to know if it's still going around that I'm mind-magicked?

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I have no idea. I'm sorry.

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You have nothing to apologize for.

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I sympathize, then, if you like that better.

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I kinda do. Mental sigh.

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He could get away with the whole truth, even, lots of these people are sworn to obey him, it's not as simple as screaming at the city 'your king is a rapist and torturer -'

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You kind of go around with a sign on your head that says 'your king is a rapist and torturer'.

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Yep.

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I have actually met someone who got fewer headaches once he cut his hair. I'm still sorry I bought it.

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You also don't have anything to be sorry for.

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I guess you're entitled to say so.

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I am, he says smugly. 

Maitimo's very charming when he wants to be and he could arrange that not a single conversation occurred that didn't suit him, I don't think it would have been rational to go around with the level of paranoia that would have been necessary to figure it out.

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It's very unsettling that he - knew what to hide, and hid it so well. It's like there's an entire nice Maitimo in there who isn't allowed input on certain decisions.

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That's why I think something broke when we were doing defensive self-mind-control, it - he knows who he would be if he were a good person -

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Sigh. You think I can get my wishlist, or that we're going to go in circles around whether he can have mages?

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I think there's probably a way to get your wishlist but the mages will be the sticking point.

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He could have salvaged - not all of my goodwill but some of it - if he'd done anything other than storm in and immediately commit domestic abuse and follow it up with that - thing -

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He did tell me later he deeply regretted doing that in front of you!

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Not doing it at all, of course.

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I mean, I fully expected him to do - not that specifically, he's never done that before, but something to cause it not to have been a good idea for me to tell you.

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Sigh.

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There's a knock on his door.

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Somebody's knocking.

He answers.

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"Is it a good time?"

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"You could do worse."

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He lets himself in. The guards leave. 

"Last conversation just turned into lots of brinksmanship, I really want to avoid that this time. You're safe, Ranary's safe, I want to figure out how to win the war. Does that work?"

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"Maybe."

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He nods. He sits down. "What do you need?"

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"I would like to, in addition to being safe from - I'm not actually sure what you're saying I'm safe from - from whatever you had in mind, be safe from being held against my will and coerced into doing things. Ranary too."

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"And how does that help get Melkor killed."

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"My reservations about you don't point at it being less of a good idea to kill him. My reservations about you do suggest that I might not like what happens after you don't strictly need me alive and not suicidal any more. Also I don't seem to find imprisonment inspiring."

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"If we can have a copy of the notes on Melkor and a couple people who can kill him if you fail or if the Enemy kills you as soon as you're outside our walls, you're both free to go with whatever resources you might require."

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"I don't know that the notes will actually be useful to you. They're reminders of components of an aesthetic."

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"The notes on relevant facts about Melkor, not the notes on your progress. I'm happy to swear not to get deoathed and not to use the mages for anything you wouldn't approve of."

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"The notes on the facts about Melkor are reminders of components of an aesthetic because that's what I will actually use in spell composition."

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"Then write them in some other format, I doubt that's how Thuringwethil provided them."

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"They weren't especially writeable."

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"It is plausible to me that the Enemy told you this specifically to get you to leave approximately the one place outside Valinor where he can't capture or kill you. Given that, I want a backup plan. Do you think there are possible backup plans, or are you the only person who can possibly accomplish this in however much time we have before the Enemy escalates?"

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"I would like recognition that answering that question constitutes a concession."

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Nod. 

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"Thuringwethil osanwëd me a bunch of stuff; I could osanwë it to someone else for artistic reinterpretation - they could bounce it to Ranary, or another mage."

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"Would you be willing to do that?"

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"It would not thrill me and it would make me even less willing to get you more mages, especially any who are creepily sworn to obedience."

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"I was thinking Findekáno's sister, who cannot stand me and has definitely never sworn me anything. And Findekáno if we can agree on a way for you to de-oath him without you doing other things."

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"You know what de-oathing paint looks like. If you're willing to let me de-oath him why didn't you?"

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"I - don't endorse anything I did that day, and I can fix some of it."

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"You know what the paint looks like. You can stop me if I try to do something else."

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"All right."

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"Can I do that now?"

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"Yes."

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"Nobody gave back my kit after I left it the other day."

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"I'll have them bring it."

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Sigh. "Where?"

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"He's upstairs."

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Cor heads upstairs. "Are you going to do horrible things to him once he's de-oathed?"

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"I was going to stop anyway."

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"The war was going to be over. We were going to have resurrection. There were other worlds out there, other magic systems - it was insane -"

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"So you were going to stop but you didn't care for my timing?"

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"I panicked. Thuringwethil walks right up here and wants to talk with you and we can't refuse her, that was the whole idea, but I don't trust her at all and then you're fleeing through the palace on her word to do magic and then it turns out she told you the truth which doesn't change the - spread over possible motives of hers - very much but does mean that the war ending is now in the hands of someone who justifiably hates me and everything else is just gone -"

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"I checked with Findekáno before I ran down to de-oath him, I don't typically go smearing blood on people without their permission."

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"Findekáno said to me earlier today that maybe I was so afraid of having all prospects of ending the war in your hands because I secretly think everyone is like me. I don't - think I think that - but I will confess it took far longer than it should have for it to occur to me that you'd have had permission."

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"...it did not even occur to me that maybe you thought I was doing random undesired magic to Findekáno and doesn't make that much sense as an explanation in retrospect either considering you felt the need to torture him which is a genuinely insane response to the situation 'he was helplessly chained to the wall and a madman burst in to paint him'."

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"After I asked you for an explanation and you said 'what am doing' I asked him and he explained. At that point I had all relevant information and haven't even the most tenuous of excuses."

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"After that is when you escalated from domestic abuse to - I don't even have a word."

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"Yes."

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He opens the door.

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Cor goes in.

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Findekáno is not chained to the wall. He's just sitting there. He looks mildly surprised. He mostly looks at Maitimo.

- hi, he says to Cor.

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Hi. He says I can de-oath you.

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How generous. Do I need to do anything -

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Nope.

"Is there a cow on the way -"

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"Can they just bring the blood if they're timely about it? Cow doesn't fit."

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"Yeah."

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Blood is delivered.

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Cor paints.

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He holds still.

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When the painting is done Cor chants, out loud.

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And there is a flash of dark and Findekáno is de-oathed.

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He blinks.

 

He shivers. 

 

"Thank you."

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"I won't stop you if you leave but what I wanted was for you to be a mage so if Cor and Ranary get killed it's not over."

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"I can do that."

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"You realize to do that we have to take him to another world."

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"He'll come back."

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"Do you care if it's me or Ranary?"

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"Can't be both of you, but if you want to take the chance to send her off, fine."

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"She's miserable."

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"I did -"

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"Don't," he says firmly. Maitimo does not finish the sentence.

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"You did what?"

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"I said to you, '"If you tip her off that she should leave then we'll stop her while she's trying and then she'll be a prisoner and unhappy about it instead of a backup plan and perfectly happy about it.'"

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"I think I'll pretend I didn't ask."

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"I'll have someone get her."

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"How about I go get her, so she doesn't feel compelled to bite anyone today."

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"Sure."

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He goes and gets Ranary.

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And they can have another bucket of cow's blood.

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Ranary paints herself and Findekáno, a little shakily.

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No one stops her.

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"Cor -"

"Go," he murmurs.

"Are you all right -"

"So far, more or less. I'll feel better if you're off safe somewhere."

She purses her lips, nods, chants.

There is a flash of dark and she and Findekáno are somewhere terribly cold.

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He isn't allowed outside much. He shivers. "This is the uninhabited planet?"

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"Yeah," says Ranary, brushing away a tear. "I don't know if you can see it, there's a little camp over there, with blankets and stuff -" She heads for it.

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He follows her.

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There is a tent and blankets and boots and a few sacks of ash and a firepit. "Don't have aim good enough to land right in here. Are you going to be okay for maybe twenty minutes or should I warm it up in here?"

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"I'll be fine."

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Nod. "You'll watch out for Cor, won't you?"

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"Of course."

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She takes a deep breath. "Okay. There's a point a ways this way, blanket up and we'll go." She pulls on some boots and wraps herself in a fur.

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He tries fitting himself into human cold-weather clothes. 

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It's blankets and not coats expressly to avoid sizing issues!

She picks up a sack of ash and a sponge and leads him down a slope.

At the bottom is -

At the bottom isn't. It isn't night-sky void it isn't thin air it isn't bright or dark or -

It hurts to look at.

"Don't look right at it, you'll feel sick," she says. "That goes away, after. Do you know about the thing where you designate what the nothingness should take first, if you mess up a spell?"

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"I know toes are conventional. How do you designate -"

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"You put ash on parts, in order." She's missing a pinky toe, if he checks. "I can do it for you if you want to make sure you don't get any on your hands."

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"- I think I'll chance it, actually, if that's okay with you -"

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"You can start over, if you mess up, you just have to have done it right before you hook to the point." She gives him the sponge.

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He meticulously designates body parts.

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"Done?"

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"Yeah."

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"Okay. You're pretty sure you can avoid accidentally wanting to destroy things?"

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"That can destroy them?"

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"It's more like an impulse than an accident."

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"I am confident I can avoid that."

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"Okay. Now's the part where you have to look at it. And repeat after me."

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He looks at it.

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It's horrible.

"By fire I will burn and by death I will kill and by void I will annihilate," she recites.

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He looks at the horrible thing. 

"By fire I will burn and by death I will kill and by void I will annihilate."

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"I will erase. I will void. I will nullify. I will extinguish. That which is, I will cast here, and it will not."

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He dutifully recites and wonders how they didn't realize that their magic system would eat the world.

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"I destroy. I destroy. I destroy," she finishes.

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"I destroy, I destroy, I destroy."

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The disappearance point isn't horrible any more. It's still bizarre, but in a fascinating, inviting way, somewhere between scenery and puzzle.

He can tell Ranary is a mage, if he looks. She's invitingly puzzling in the same way.

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" - huh. Thank you."

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"You're welcome. - you do want to go back? I should have asked you before I hooked you in."

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"I'll go back - we should have a backup mage -"

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She looks out at the point, then gets up and tromps back to the camp.

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He follows. "I'm not sure I can replicate the transit ritual from memory."

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"I'll send you, then myself. Cor can teach you. He's - he's really - make sure he's okay."

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"Yeah."

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"I'm going to bleed you for your spell - we can't keep sheep here and I don't think I have enough for two."

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"Of course." He extends his arm.

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She nicks him, it barely hurts at all. Sponges up some blood, paints, chants.

In a flash of dark he lands outside the palace.

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When they vanish Maitimo leans against the wall and shivers. He does not look at Cor.

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Cor goes back to his rooms.

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I have magic, he reports a little while later. And I think Ranary's okay - I was probably not the most reassuring, it's been a long time since I interacted with people.

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Okay.

If I'm teaching you magic before I go risking my life that affects timeline, it's a few years of curriculum. I can cut it down and accelerate it but it'll still take longer than inventing the Melkor-killing spell would unless I am in a really astonishing slump.

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I don't think we need that, if I just know the dimensional travel spell then if you die we can go get someone who knows the rest.

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Yeah, I can teach you that in like an hour.

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Does the additional information about Melkor help you guess whether the fast-and-dirty version is likely to work -

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Uh, yes, but in this case not usefully, I'm in "probably it'd work but maybe not" and that's how I'd have described it before too, it's just that different information could have yielded "yeah good enough" or "definitely not".

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Okay. And are there things I should know about Melkor -

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Yeah.

He bounces what he's got left from what Thuringwethil sent.

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All right. Let me know if you need anything which I am in a position to do anything about.

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Might ask you to be a second pair of eyes on my art as long as you know what I'm working with.

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Sure. Did you talk with Maitimo about after the Enemy's dead -

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Not really.

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Okay. You could probably have someone relay messages if you just find him particularly irritating to be around.

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Irritating isn't usually the thing.

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What's the thing?

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I mean, I suppose it's not that different. Just seems sort of trivializing.

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Scraping one's fork against the dinner plates so it screeches is irritating, torturing people chained to your wall and then expecting them to behave like nothing happened doesn't seem summed up by 'super irritating'?

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Yeah.

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I'm inclined to go back to him right now but if you think we should do something else -

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What do you get out of going back to him?

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His current emotional state is not a complete mystery up until he sees fit to drop in on me and I have some chance to nip things in the bud if it's a counterproductive one and he feels rewarded for doing the right thing.

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I have no substantive argument against.

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And he promised Ranary he'd protect Cor. Okay. Take care.

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I'm gonna take a nap and see if I wake up arty. Good luck.

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You too. 

 

Maitimo is still in his rooms. Findekáno washes soot off himself and then crawls into bed. "Place was cold."

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"And I was good, so I get a present?"

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"I thought about asking you for a guest room. I'd - just be sitting there spinning my wheels, scared. Even if you promised to leave us both alone I'd be scared. So this is better. Are you happy to have that kind of romantic arrangement -"

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"I was going to change it."

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"I'm still cold."

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He joins him. "What do you want?"

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"Uh, something sufficiently within-normal-parameters that I stop feeling terrified, which that question is not."

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"I can do that."

 

He can. 

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His boyfriend snuggles him. "Are you going to let us go?"

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"You're already gone."

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"Not an answer."

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"I did mean to eventually."

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"Also not an answer."

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"Yes."

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"And don't do this again, not to anyone."

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"You're not sworn not to hurt me anymore, I should tie you up to sleep."

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He appears to briefly consider whether he wants this to require calling guards and to decide that he does not.

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Cor naps.

He wakes up.

He doodles, then -

"Whoever's lurking to make sure I don't run amok, I have an idea I can't sketch out, requires liquid medium. Is the bucket of cow blood still in that room?"

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"It probably dried," lurking Elf says uncertainly.

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"It was a whole bucketful. It's not fresh enough to work any more, sure, but... maybe it clotted. Can I have some blood to try a draft of an idea. If you need to stop me doing unauthorized magic it can be chicken blood or something."

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"I don't know enough about your magic system to know if chicken blood works. Why not ink."

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"Viscosity matters. I'm sure I specified mammal blood long before I knew this place was a creepy hive of abuse and dictatorship, ask Curufinwë, it might have been him."

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"- okay, someone'll bring chicken blood. We're not - a hive of anything we're just trying to get through the war alive."

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"Are you under orders to have this argument or do you just feel like it?"

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"Orders are not to bother you I just think you're wrong."

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"Do you know why I might have this opinion or is that a mystery."

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"Because the King fucks men. It's definitely horrible of him, but there's nothing wrong with the rest of us."

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"You have totally and utterly failed to model my thought process on even the most rudimentary level, congratulations."

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Lurking Elf falls silent. Chicken blood is brought.

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"There somewhere I should go to draft? I need a wall."

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"I can find you a wall."

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"Good for you."

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Lurking Elf, looking flustered, finds a wall.

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Cor doodles in soot along the bottom edge, but that's not the point and he doesn't get it very precise.

And then he slathers an arc of blood over it, and more, and more, and more, and more, until it's dripping through the soot and pooling on the floor.

He tsks and repeats himself a little to the right, adjusts the arc shape, manages to avoid pooling.

Nods at it. Goes back to his room.

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He is followed.

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Of course he is.

He sketches.

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Don't interrupt him. He'll get out of his - creative mindset -

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Twitch. I know. But - I'm never going to see him again after -

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Maybe somewhere out there in the universe there's someone you'll do right by.

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The next morning after breakfast Cor asks Maitimo, What happens after this works, if it works?

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We're still planning to scout worlds and combine magic systems and figure out resurrection. Is there a way to structure that so you don't object.

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Probably. What happens to me? I get a ticket south and a souvenir? I want the blue glass thingy hanging in my window, it's pretty.

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Is that what you want?

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It'd be faster to get back to my people with the world hop spell but, y'know, frivolous magic.

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The only thing I want that I can have is Melkor dead. After that you can do what you want.

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What about Findekáno?

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It's good for the country for there to be someone around who will tell me when I'm being stupid.

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What purpose does the evasiveness serve?

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I don't like thinking about this.

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I will stop asking about it sooner given a straight answer.

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You're both going to leave.

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Cor stops asking.

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Cor is not bothered.

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He wants to do another chicken blood draft later.

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A different Elf-on-duty confirms allowed-ness and then arranges this.

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He's more elaborate with the sketch. Tries a few techniques for aiming the drippings that descend from the arc so they hit the right spots.

Goes back to sketching.

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They refine plans for evacuating if destroying Melkor destroys other things. 

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"Think I've got it," Cor says, when he's been working on dripping-blood-themed art for a couple weeks.

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Okay. We're going to change the footing of some deployed personnel so they have a better chance of getting out if there's retaliation. And then you can try it.

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Okay.

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They get to work on that. Elves scurry around Cor more. Occasionally they even leave him alone.

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That's nice, sort of. "Am I actually unsupervised when I think I am or are you just enforcing my house arrest and watching my every move more unobtrusively?"

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Elf jumps when addressed. "I - don't think I'm allowed to answer that sir."

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"Of course you're not."

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Apologetic shuffle.

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"How does he get from 'I have a charming smile and know everybody's name' to 'if I say "keep my completely innocent ex-boyfriend under closely scrutinized house arrest, drag his completely innocent friend kicking and screaming out of his room, etcetera"' - Findekáno was covered under the thin centuries-old veneer of 'lost a war', not that I think that's much excuse -"

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"Wars don't work if everyone is second-guessing their generals based on incomplete information and doing whatever seems best to them. Where you're from do they not make arrests without the arresting officer and all the prison wardens fully informed about the circumstances and allowed to let the prisoner go if they happen to disagree with the government?"

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"Where I'm from they do not arrest foreign nationals except to evict them without a treaty saying they can do that. Where I'm from charges are public. Where I'm from - admittedly for other reasons - no single person holds absolute power such that it doesn't matter if they do horrible things and there's no way to stop them."

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"Well. I can resign my commission in sixteen years if I don't like the things I'm ordered to do."

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"Where I'm from it's customary but legally optional to give six weeks' notice."

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"After the war there'll be less justification for asking people to swear for a term."

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"You're sworn to this? I guess that's more encouraging in some ways than him running this entire shitshow on personal charisma."

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"Can't disobey orders for no reason."

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"He forced Findekáno into contradictory oaths and has admitted to having no excuse, is that not a reason?"

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Shiver. "The - the reasons are if I think my orders aren't really coming from the King, if I think the King has been compromised by the Enemy, or if I have more information and am out of range to convey it and get updated orders. That's - that would be horrible if it were true but unless it's the Enemy doing it it's not a reason."

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"Do you realize that's fucked up."

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" - I mean no one's ever accused the King of something like that before so it hasn't really seemed like a problem."

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"Findekáno goes around with hair as short as mine, I suppose that doesn't seem like a big deal, it's only if he's being tortured more than a certain amount?"

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"The King should marry like a decent person but it'd be insane to overthrow him over that. But forcing oaths is evil."

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"Yours is a fascinating lens into the variety of possible ways someone might convince themselves they were doing moral reasoning."

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Awkward shuffle.

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"Do you actually think that's the problem - and if you do actually think that's the problem, do you actually think that I think so too?"

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"That is the problem," he says confidently. "Humans are just different, which is why you wouldn't have realized."

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"Given that, obviously, I have now realized there is a problem, what do you think I think it is?"

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"You don't like how the King handles his consort. You thought it was like a normal relationship with a woman and then you found out that it wasn't."

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"I didn't care for how Elon treated Ranary either."

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"Well, I don't think Elves should have human women either but it's not nearly as bad."

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"Ugh," concludes Cor.

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His guard returns to watching him. The city is being evacuated down to essential personnel.

 

A while later - 

Corbelan?

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Who is this?

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Uh, we haven't met, just - my friend told me something you said and I wondered if it was true.

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Uh, it probably was, but I don't want to take responsibility for your friend's interpretation without knowing what they told you.

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King forced someone into contradicting oaths?

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Yeah.

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Oh.

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It wasn't permanent even then and I've de-oathed him now.

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If he did it openly it seems likely probably not the first time.

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As far as I know it was the first time with that particular victim, although he's been mistreated in various lesser ways for centuries.

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Everyone knows the King keeps him, but - forcing oaths is the thing we're fighting the Enemy over.

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For some reason I thought it was all the torture.

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Forcing contradictory oaths is torture. 

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Yeah. So's cutting off an Elf's hair.

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The King runs his hand through his consort's hair in public sometimes and he doesn't flinch, I think we sort of told ourselves it probably wasn't as bad as it looks like.

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I can see that.

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And if I were to say something to him apparently he might just order me into oaths -

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I'm not sure if he's set up to do that with you, is he?

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I - we're sworn to obey orders for the duration of our term of service, unless we have information the people giving orders don't have or we think they're compromised or we think their orders haven't been accurately conveyed. If I thought it were Enemy action I could ignore him - and yesterday if the King told me to swear something I'd have thought it was Enemy action -

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I guess I didn't exactly do you a favor confirming that he did it, then.

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I could have not asked but I needed to know.

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Yeah.

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How do you deoath people?

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I paint them and the floor around them. Chant a bit.

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How long does it take?

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A few minutes if I'm quick.

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If I were the Elf on duty watching you -

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Yeah. I could do it then. I'd have to use your blood if you can't bring me any.

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Would you?

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Yeah.

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The next day his guard is a solemn grey-eyed girl in a uniform slightly too big for her. Couldn't figure out how to bring blood.

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That's okay. I shouldn't use mine, I did that too recently, but yours'll work. Do you want to nick yourself or shall I?

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She has a knife. She nicks herself.

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He sponges up the blood and starts painting.

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Halfway through someone else walks in. "- you're not supposed to let him do that -"

" - it's chicken blood, for practice -"

" - doesn't look it -" He frowns and reaches for her arm -

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- Cor throws the sponge at him.

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- he knows enough about how this magic system works to know being splattered in blood is bad. He freezes. 

"I'm sorry," she says hurriedly, "I need to be deoathed it's important I'm not going to betray us I just found a way I could get contradicted -"

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Cor picks up the sponge and keeps going, keeping an eye on the splattered guard.

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He starts wiping off the blood.

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Cor's nearly done. "Better make sure you don't miss a spot."

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"Do you even know which pattern means what," he says to her. 

      "It's deoathing -"

"You don't know that, you lunatic -" he checks for blood, he scuffs the pattern on the floor with his shoe -

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"I'll do the chant aloud." He finishes the section he's on, throws the sponge at the male guard again, dives to smear the blood to fill in the pattern. "Interrupting me could kill me and then who's going to kill your god? There is no oath. There are no oaths -"

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The guard does not interrupt him.

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"I destroy. It is not; they are not. I annihilate. It is not; they are not. I erase. It is not; they are not. I void. It is not; they are not. I nullify. It is not; they are not. I extinguish. It is not; they are not. I shrink the world into one without this oath, without these oaths! I destroy, I destroy, I destroy!"

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There are six guards by this point. 

 

She shivers. I - I'm so sorry -

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It's okay. Be free.

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"They're both under arrest," says one of the guards. "We're to take her downstairs and him to the King."

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She goes with them quietly.

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He doesn't bother trying to run away. Or throw the sponge at anyone else. Although he does hold onto it.

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"Why don't you put that down."

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"Is that a rhetorical question?"

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"I suggest that you put that down."

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"What if I don't?"

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One of the Elves steps forward and rips it out of his hands and then closes his eyes as if expecting his hands to explode on him.

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Nope. Cor sighs.

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What with it established that Cor can safely be manhandled they take him upstairs.

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He doesn't even bite anyone.

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Even when they're obviously going to Maitimo's private rooms rather than conference rooms?

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Biting them wouldn't help.

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"Cor!" he says pleasantly. "Thank you, you can leave him here."

 

Guards leave.

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"I've been trying to balance security concerns with your flexibility and space and happiness. It really does not seem in my interests to do that at this point."

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"Once you give the go-ahead to do my spell you won't have to deal with me any more. For that matter you could send me south now, I can do it from there."

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"Oh, it's not remotely that I want to be rid of you."

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"I'm sure if you double up the guards or something you can stop me from rescuing any more of them."

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Maitimo stands up. Walks over to him and runs his hand through his hair. "Or I could keep you here," he says thoughtfully. "just until we've evacuated everyone we can, then you can still cast your spell and go."

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"Don't pet me."

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"Don't threaten my guards and splatter blood all over my palace and do world-destroying magic on the word of anyone who smiles endearingly!"

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"I know you aren't that disingenuous."

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Maitimo slaps him.

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- Cor lets out a little almost-sob.

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"I've missed you," Maitimo says, and scoops him off his feet.

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"- wh- no you have not crossed this line with me yet you don't have to do it now no -"

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"Yes, we were cooperating nicely, and then you stopped cooperating nicely and I miss you -"

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"Please -"

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Pet. "You'll be all right."

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"Maitimo don't please no -"

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He sets him down on the bed and puts a hand on his neck - not choking him, just holding him there - and undoes buttons with the other. He kisses Cor. "Look at me."

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"Or what, you'll rape me?"

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Hand squeezes slightly. "If there is still any regard at all for me to lose I might decide I'd rather keep it."

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Twitch. "You're making that into a really hard project - let me go -"

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He doesn't do that. He doesn't do that an hour later, either, just puts an arm around him and curls up beside him as if asleep.

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Cor tries to get out from under the arm.

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No.

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Curufinwë?

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Yeah?

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Would you be in a position to notice if Maitimo were stalling on evacuation? He just found an excuse to wring more entertainment out of time before he has agreed to let me go free.

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Orders around evacuation have not changed since - four days ago, when they were adjusted because of new information about the Enemy's spying out east.

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So you'd notice, if that changed.

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Yes.

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Keep an eye out maybe. I'll stop bothering you now.

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Good skill.

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Maitimo doesn't change the evacuation orders. He does make the most of the remaining week.

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Cor is past expecting anyone to care about him.

 

"I want you to swear I can go, when he's dead."

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"I'll let you go. I don't want to swear to it. I want to choose it."

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"Being the one with the spell is the only leverage I have and it's already doing me very little good."

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"If I showed an inclination to keep you forever you'd kill us. That's not why I'm going to let you go but it'd be sufficient."

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"I hereby threaten suicide via exposure on the empty planet."

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Maitimo stiffens. Shivers. "I said I'd let you kill yourself, I don't have to let you pick your method."

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"You clearly attempted to communicate something with that oath and it's impossible to deny me suicide generically."

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"We both know what I communicated, that if you said 'do this or I'll kill myself' I would be unable to do that. 'let you' is ambiguous enough that if I thought you meant it I might be stuck but I have this strange feeling once you're on the empty planet you'll reconsider."

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"Where should we send the immortality, once we've got it worked out?"

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"I am not planning to have a role that interfaces with you at all, so you should figure that out with whoever's in charge of the south continent colony."

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He nods. "I swear that when the war's over I will let you and anyone else who'd like to leave here leave unimpeded, make no efforts to arrange that anyone else impede you or that you ever need interact with us again, and never take innocent prisoners again."

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Sigh. "Thanks."

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Squeeze. "Goodbye."

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Cor still shudders when Maitimo touches him.

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Elves evacuate.

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You okay?

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I've been better.

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I have extra guards and I know we're short-staffed. Did something happen?

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Awhile ago somebody wanted to be de-oathed.

She is now.

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I really wonder why he likes good people.

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It's hard to maintain an understanding that this is a form of liking.

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It's - collecting interesting things, it's not an affectionate thing. But it's about - seeing value in - something that he rejects at every turn. Osanwë-sigh.

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You going to be okay when I leave?

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I have some political reforms I want and then I'll leave too. I don't actually like being away from him, it feels dangerous, but - in a way I'm grateful he ended up burning bridges so thoroughly, if it'd ended differently I might have stayed.

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Well. That's something. He said he'd never take innocent prisoners again, too, which I suppose doesn't stop him from keeping someone who interferes with the postal service for a thousand years but it's something.

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- yeah, I asked about that and he wouldn't promise. - I'd been - idly wishing we could de-oath him just in case the thing that's wrong with him is from that, but it's really not worth the risk -

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As long as oaths are what makes him a relatively predictable sort of monster...

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Yeah. We might get a perfectly nice, deeply horrified person out of it or we might get someone just as bad who we couldn't trust.

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I'd consider it your prerogative, I'm going to run off and find something else to do.

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Yeah. Good skill.

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Thanks.

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"We have everyone nonessential out," he says to Cor the next day.

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"I'll do the painting whenever."

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"They have everything set up for you downstairs."

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Cor goes downstairs.

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They've bled a cow for him.

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He draws in soot first.

He draws - Arda, stylized, tiny, almost cute.

And over it an arc of blood, painted to look like one sweep of red but carefully managed so the blood drips into the ash just so, a little here, a little there, a lot in a few places.

He crowns the arc in three fire-motif shapes in ash.

And he sits and he stares at it and he says:

"As though Melkor has never been, I end him. He is not. As though Melkor has never been, I annihilate him -"

It goes on like that, culminates in the standard final "I destroy, I destroy, I destroy".

Darkness pulses through the city and past it.

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And Melkor isn't. And Angband crumbles. The sound is audible from Himring, if you're an Elf. 

People go still with apprehension. Nothing happens. They start crying.

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Cor hugs his knees.

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There are a few more minutes of cautious silence and then there's shouting and singing in the streets. 

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Cor reaches for the brush, shrugs off his shirt.

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"You're not supposed to do unauthorized magic," says a guard automatically, eyes fixed to the north.

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"I killed Melkor. I'm leaving."

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"There's still Sauron, war's not over - talk with the King -"

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"I - I don't even have details on -"

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"All I know is we're not supposed to drop all our precautions until he's gone too."

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"I am leaving he said I could leave!"

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"Then talk to him!"

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"He also said he wouldn't arrange for me to ever interact with him again!"

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"Maybe we'll get new orders in a little while but we haven't yet."

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Cor starts painting himself anyway.

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Guard kicks the bucket over. "Are we really going to do this again?"

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"You talk to the king if you can't do anything without hearing from him I want to leave I killed your fucking god for you let me go!"

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The door opens. He looks distracted. (He's watching Angband from six angles and Utumno from two and notifying Doriath and notifying Círdan and notifying the relay to the south continent and he wasn't going to watch Cor go -)

"Don't we still have to kill Sauron, your grace," says the guard. 

"Yes but it'll go quicker, lot of the orcs know him."

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Cor snarls.

He doesn't even have to chant aloud for someone to be able to clap a hand over his mouth, no, osanwë works, all strung together -

ThereisnothingthereandsobeginsmydestructionthereisnothingthereIdestroyIdestroyIdestroy -

- a spot of Maitimo's forehead is suddenly terrible to look upon.

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The guard makes an alarmed sound. Maitimo looks confused, catches perhaps an osanwë glimpse - 

- goes very still -

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"Oh look. I'm suddenly completely useless to you until you let Findekáno send me to the empty planet."

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" - but you were leaving anyway -"

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"Funny, that's what I thought, but apparently the war isn't over."

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" - I don't want the soldiers to all go celebrate and get drunk, I wasn't trying to -" he looks at the guard - "he's permitted to leave -"

       "Seemed easier to reverse not-letting-him-leave than letting-him-leave, when it was unclear -" he wilts. He scampers away.

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Where are you, I need you to send me to the empty planet.

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He sends his location. - why do you -

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The disappearance point I'm hooked into now is on Maitimo's forehead and apparently it was a misunderstanding and he doesn't actually mean to keep finding excuses to keep me. He gets up and whirls around to find Findekáno.

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...but it takes magic to move it again?

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I can hook into an existing one without costing. I can't make another new one without costing.

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If you want to kill him things wouldn't fall apart. 

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I would have done this a while ago if I only wanted -

I just want to leave.

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Okay. 

 

And there Cor is and he starts painting.

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Cor holds still and is painted and stares into space.

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And then they're somewhere else. Somewhere cold. 

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"Thanks."

Cor starts for the little camp to get blankets and ash.

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"Do you need anything?"

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"I'll hook into a point here. I'll go to the south continent. I'll be fine. Thank you."

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"Uh huh."

 

He sings it warmer and starts drawing the way back.

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"Thank you," Cor says again.

And he goes.

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They ask orcs for information about Sauron. 

 

No one can look at him (except Findekáno, who nonetheless doesn't). He gets his crown redesigned. It looks a bit ridiculous and the disappearance point corrodes the bit that brushes against it but people can look straight at it.

 

Disappearance points grow, but slowly. He has a while. Findekáno has a lot of opinions about how he should spend it. 

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The south continent colony fills up. They don't risk sending diplomats north while Sauron's still around.

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He visits mages, asks for someone interested in coming up with an artistic representation of the fact Sauron really shouldn't exist.

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There's a mage guild. He can identify mages by looking at them. Does he have lots of detail on Sauron?

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So much detail.

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Then he can commission a spell, or he can get a consultant to help him do it himself.

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He goes with the consultant. He'd feel bad if the commissioned person died.

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There are bids on the consultancy, with résumés. None of them include "saved two worlds".

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Anyone know how to get in touch with Cor?

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Sure, everyone knows Cor, what does he need Cor for?

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He might want to work on this but he also might want nothing to do with it and Findekáno isn't sure how to politely check.

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Someone digs up Cor.

"Hi," Cor says.

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"Hi. I'm sorting resumes for a consultant on Sauron. You, uh, obviously needn't have anything to do with it, but -"

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"I guess I could do that. I don't want to go north though." Sigh. "I'm - he had you way longer, you're the last person I should be -"

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" - please feel entirely entitled to express whatever you'd like, I don't derive any particular satisfaction from sitting on a claim to having had the Worst Time Of It."

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"Well. I don't want to go north. But I can do your spell consultancy here. Is our shantytown horrid, do you want to go take a hike out somewhere?"

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"I should probably go take a hike out somewhere if you don't mind."

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"It's fine, I have managed not to extend my various feelings to useful jewelry so I can actually just take hikes." Out of the mage guild they go. "The architecture will get better with time."

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"And it will probably always be calibrated for human and not Elven needs and that's fine. I'm - glad useful jewelry is okay, they're working on immortality."

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"Good. That'll be handy."

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"Won't it just.

Elves can kill themselves if they want to. Not as dramatically, I couldn't have gotten him, but."

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"Well. I too am still alive."

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"And going to stay that way!" And he shares what he knows about Sauron.

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And Cor can give him art lessons.

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It's a fun magic system. Shame about the eating worlds. 

 

"I got a book on governing systems in your world and circled five and told him to pick one. We're going to have a distributed council with rotating authority. Break everyone of the habit of doing what they're told."

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"Good."

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Swoops and swirls. "He'll probably end up pulling the strings, still. But no one'll listen because he says so."

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"Good."

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"We're keeping the pensioning, he's proud of that - should I not -"

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"It's fine. The pensioning's nice."

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"When we can afford it we'll just make it universal. We're keeping the infrastructure and the medical and energency response protocols and we're keeping the research budget and that's about all. Making the palace into a library." Swoops.

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"And he will just go quietly pull strings?"

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"How long does he have?"

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"I don't know exactly. It's narrow enough to be too deep to dig out casually on what it started with, but I'm not sure anyone's ever made a disappearance point and then not used it for anything. Making them on people isn't unheard of in like, stories, but it's for - remote killswitch reasons - eventually they get used -"

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"He'll pull strings for a while."

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"Could be thousands of years. And he could probably abandon the body, once there's a way to replace it. I feel bad about it being over a - miscommunication - it just seemed so in character -"

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"Well, he deserved it even without that last and he should absolutely have made it crystal-clear to everyone that you were free."

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"I didn't want to kill him if I could avoid it." Sigh.

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"Why not?"

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"I'm not a fan of killing people?"

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" - I mean, me neither but you can feel pretty strongly that it's a horrible tragedy in general without thinking Maitimo in particular is an instance of such a tragedy."

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"I probably wouldn't be terribly bothered about it if someone else had assassinated him."

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Nod. "Apparently his brothers were going to have a soft coup if it got worse but I am not spectacularly impressed with their judgment about how bad would warrant that."

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"I'm still - annoyed that it turned out Curufinwë wasn't a particularly good friend."

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"They're all very - before everything fell apart, I mean, likeable but utterly ruthless, and loyal to each other above everything - when my sister was forcibly married Tyelcormo was fanatical about seeing it avenged but he'd never dream of, uh, extending the principle -"

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"...if she wants that fixed, after we're done evacuating and see how much empty planet we've got left, I can figure something out."

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"She'd appreciate it." Sigh. 

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Nod.

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"How's Ranary?"

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"She's okay. She's in our homeworld doing evac."

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"I told her I'd look out for you. I - sorry."

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"You tried."

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"They exiled the girl. For disobeying orders and insubordination. She went to Círdan's."

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"At least they didn't kill her."

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"The kingdom has never executed people, on the grounds that no one deserves Mandos." He seems maybe slightly pleased with himself.

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"Cool."

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Art of Sauron being gone.

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Art art art.

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During breaks he sings and climbs trees and roams around and over a few weeks builds himself a stunningly pretty elaborate tree platform to sleep in. He ties himself into it to sleep.

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"Would you fall off if you just slept on it? It doesn't look that narrow."

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"...no, I wouldn't."

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"...should I not ask?"

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"I, uh, haven't slept unrestrained in four hundred years, turns out you get accustomed."

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"Ah."

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"It doesn't really feel like one of the most urgent parts to - unaccustom."

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"...what are the most urgent?"

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"I feel safest around him, anywhere else there's a nagging sense that maybe things'll be out of control by the time I see him next. It still feels really important for him to be happy. I - ended up not deciding to deoath him right now because if deoathing him actually fixes him I'd end up back with him and I don't want to and you'd think there's an obvious later point at which I could avoid that but -"

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"If it fixes him won't he have the decency to back off?"

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"If it fixes him he will be so horrified and miserable that I'm not sure he'd be able to do his job and then I'd step in and then - we were together for a thousand years before everything started, without a single sign - I really did love him -"

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Nod.

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"But my mental model of decent-person Maitimo says that he is happy to wait on re-existing for a century if it helps me be entirely disentangled before I try it."

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"I guess it's a mercy in more ways than one that I found out early."

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"Yeah." Sigh. "His plan was to tell you after the war."

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"How did he think that would go over? 'Thanks for killing my evil god, sweetie, by the way did you know my other boyfriend is my abused captive?'"

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"Oh, I think it was going to be 'I've done this for four hundred years and I thought I'd do it forever but then I met you and you're just as good as me in every single respect which I thought went hand-in-hand with the worst thing I've ever done and I loved you and I stopped'."

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"Okay yeah he could probably have sold that."

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"If I ever want to make him miserable I will tell him you said so."

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"Oh if he got me in the right mood and phrased it right I would've eaten it up." Sigh.

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Sigh. 

 

Sauron death art.

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So much Sauron death art.

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And one day somebody drops by.

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"...Hi. Here to call in your favor since it's not your fault Ranary didn't get out like I'd planned?"

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"It does seem pretty not-my-fault."

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"Yeah, I agree. You were going to put a point in a... star?"

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"Do you know the deal with stars, I love telling people the deal with stars."

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"I have no idea what stars here are. We know back in my home world they're spheres of fire like the sun. Unless we're wrong, but that's the going theory."

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"Here there are those but the ones in the sky are not that by virtue of the Valar being real bad at their jobs. The kind that are spheres of fire is the kind I want to put my disappearance point in. Stars are waaaay bigger than planets so it'll take a while to run through one."

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"Depends on how much magic you do. Multiple points take longer to start growing noticeably on their own than one, you might want to hop around between a few even if they're all on one star. This would not be a star anybody's using?"

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"I am not sure even your ex is that much of an asshole. Unused star."

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"I'll take you down to the guild and get somebody to go with you to the empty world and show you how to hook into a point and make a new one."

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"Thank you."

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He takes her down to the guild and explains.

"Could you let other people get close enough to the star safely?" someone wonders.

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"Depends how close to the star I need to be but if I can do it in this form and have the form intact afterwards then we'll know it's a yes."

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"That'd be cool," says Cor.

"I'll bring her," someone else says, "sheep are this way -"

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Thuringwethil follows agreeably.

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The mage paints her and herself and brings both of them to the empty world and shows her a point and hooks her to it so she will be able to make a new point and tells her how to do that.

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She spreads her wings and says the ritual words really dramatically and cackles with glee and is a mage.

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And the mage will take them both back.

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Thuringwethil flies loops in the sky, cackling maniacally.

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"Well, I hope that wasn't a terrible idea."

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"Yes, me too. It would be useful to have a Maia for scouting."

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"Very."

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Maia is so willing to be useful for scouting! Off she goes scouting.

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A week later someone drops by where Cor and Findekáno are working. "Hi," she says.

 

This person isn't a mage. Cor can tell.

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"Hi."

That's not her or the one we maged wasn't her and I think the one we maged was. ...Or her body disintegrated and that unmaged her but she'll probably tell us if that happened. What's that imply -

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That it's a different Maia and we cannot have them be a mage I'm telling the mages in the city but if anyone'll do it to save their life then we're fucked -

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"I think you owe me a favor."

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"Yeah, uh, about the paying you in sex thing, I'm wondering if I can take a rain check on that, I have trauma."

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"Oh, you're in luck, I thought of something else I want instead!"

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"No I just want to wait like a couple years? Maiar are supposed to be even more patient than Elves, right?"

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"Not when dealing with humans, we're not, or you wiggle away entirely. I want to be a mage. You can do that right now."

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"No I can't, it's a whole elaborate thing."

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"Oh?"

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"Yeah, no can do. I'm a very responsible human, if you show up for the sex thing in a couple years I will totally still pay up, just not like now."

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"I'm really not feeling very patient."

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Would they know what the different rituals to send people look like - if you send it without you -

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I don't see how? But where would I send it - I don't think I can aim it away from a planet the whole thing is designed to find planets -

"I can try to work through my issues faster than that but I'm not seeing it happen sooner than like six months. I guess it might depend on how much enthusiasm you need."

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The empty one? As long as it can't get out gives us time to finish -

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"Why no go on the magic? I'll be responsible!"

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There's points there. "Whole elaborate thing and also not what we agreed on."

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"You're reneging on what we agreed on! Can't be that elaborate."

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Planet someone didn't come back from, then, and we get backup and go after it.

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If they didn't come back because they met hostile locals or landed in the sea and it's inhabited -

"I just want a rain check, you waited this long."

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It'll kill us both and find someone in town who'll mage it. 

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"I came as soon as I could, sweetheart."

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"Ugh. I can get us what passes for a hotel room, we did not agree on the great outdoors. There are bugs in the great outdoors, who knew." I can lie about how it works, try to get it to destroy itself -

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"Deal."

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might work yeah but that involves maging them, right -

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Maybe I can convince it to go in a point. "I'm just saying, you'll get better performance if you wait."

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"Maybe I'll come back for seconds."

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"Now you're just being greedy."

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"You owe me big, sweetheart, I taught you how to kill Melkor."

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"For which I acknowledge that I owe you what I promised, not indefinite arbitrary - ugh, look, how good's your memory?"

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"Excellent."

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"Usually people need a mage along to make sure they don't fuck it up but if I can just tell you how and you can memorize the steps maybe you can go on your own."

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"Don't wanna come?"

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"It is so cold on that planet."

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"I can keep you warm."

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"So can I, I just don't want to do unnecessary magic, also please stop vaguely hitting on me if you're doing that, aforementioned trauma. Look, if you're not accidentally going to chant something the wrong number of times you don't need me."

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"Maybe I just like your company."

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"I'm sure you do, but I don't want to accompany you."

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"What's the procedure?"

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"I can land you nearish a point. The spell doesn't have great aim but you can fly, you'll be able to find it, they're hard to miss. You stare at it - which is kind of unpleasant - and whenever you're about to look away you say 'I am a force of destruction', and then you can look away for a second, till you've done that fifteen times. Might take you longer than a human if you have better tolerance for looking at disappearance points. Then you walk around it - flying over it should be fine too - and do the same thing from the other side, then you go a quarter of the way around clockwise, same thing, then from the opposite side from there. You go back to your starting point, you - there's some ash, in these little camp things, not that far from each point, you should take some of that, at home you'd normally just bring your own - go back to your starting point, throw in some ash, say 'I invoke the concept of fire' -"

He goes on like that for a while.

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She listens.

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"- whereupon the disappearance point should be pleasant enough to look at and then you'll be able to do the spell back here. I can come get you if you're not back by tomorrow? Not like you're going to freeze."

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"Uh huh. All right, you can send me there."

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"I'll go get a sheep."

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She follows, flapping.

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He heads sheepward. You warned all the existing mages, right? I'm going to try to land it directly in a point and if I don't manage that it'll waste a while and then be stuck unless it manages to figure it out.

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Yeah, warned everyone. How long would you need to come up with a way to kill it -

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It's in disguise, that makes it way harder unless we can identify who it usually is.

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Sauron is a good candidate but let's not gamble our lives on that if we can avoid it. If you send it directly to the point it'll just - go?

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The spell honestly doesn't have very good aim. It will probably get eaten if I send it into a point but I can't guarantee that on either level.

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Okay.

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Sheep. Blood. Painting the Maia pretending to be Thuringwethil.

Chanting.

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There's a flash of darkness and the Maia is transported.

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If this one had come first...

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Yeah I didn't check very carefully. This one wasn't her, though, we didn't agree on sex, she just mentioned offhand it was the sort of thing she'd do.

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Was the other one definitely her.

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If there are multiple other Maiar swooping around looking like her then possibly not. She's been fine so far...

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Hasn't been long enough to learn much - aargh - do you know how they determined the one they let into the city was her -

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I'd be guessing - they could have done it by having her swear something and then not do the thing. Uh, are we assuming there is only one of her to begin with and that she's not weird Maiar twins.

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I have never heard of weird Maiar twins being a thing but it would not be the weirdest Maia thing. I'm going to inform the northern kingdom.

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...yeah. I think if she were weird Maiar twins my spell to deoath her would have fucked me up and it didn't...

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Seems like a kind of big thing to leave out, yeah. He tells the relay what's going on.

 

           After a minute the relay relays back: he was willing to blow up the city rather than risk our getting mages but he gave them to the first person to show up claiming to be Thuringwethil, who is herself an amoral contract agent of Melkor's and who wanted it specifically because destruction is nifty?

 

You can tell your King he should give people better choices, Findekáno says. And to Cor: yeah, asked her to swear to being Thuringwethil; she swore instead to being Manwë's crossdressing alter ego and they decided that would have to do.

 

 

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Okay. So this is not Thuringwethil, the first one is unless there's an epidemic of pretending to be Thuringwethil and they're not even in cahoots.

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And this one prooobably won't be able to mage itself anytime soon but we also don't have much way to do anything about it.

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All of the human mages we know of are already hooked in to empty planet points, we don't have to go there till we have something intelligent to do.

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If we're sure of the first one maybe we can ask if she's found any promising worlds.

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For new points?

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For new magic. It shouldn't take that much to shove the impersonator into the point.

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Yeah, if I didn't pull it off sending it there on the first try.

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Yeah. Dangerous to try the Sauron spell if we don't know whether he's already dead or trapped on another planet?

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It's not the sort of problem that comes up with diseases, no good prior art on the question. So, yeah, dangerous.

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Fantastic.

 

He works on it anyway.

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Sorry.

He comes back from where the sheep are.

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It's not your fault at all. 

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I didn't realize Maiar could impersonate each other like that.

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It's not common to be that good at shapeshifting. They take centuries to get themselves bodies.

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Still should have asked her to swear something.

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And I should have suggested it. You thought on your feet well with the second one.

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Thanks.

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He's been growing his hair out inhumanly quickly; it's not quite long enough to braid yet. He clips it back. He sings. He relays things north. 

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They can't disarm until Sauron is definitely gone but they lay the groundwork to do it afterwards. They set up to have elections (in a distributed council system the public votes on laws, rather than on leaders).  They work on human immortality. 

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Thuringwethil visits. This one is a mage.

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"Hey. Somebody's been impersonating you."

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"Oh? I'm the awesomer one."

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"I'm sure. Mind swearing a thing to justify my surety?"

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"Do I get something out of it?"

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"I was assuming you don't like being impersonated. Do you want my frivolously magical chicken recipe?"

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"I'll take your frivolously magical chicken recipe. I swear that this isn't actually an adequate check because my impersonator is probably Sauron and he's good enough at illusions to make you think he swore to things."

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...sigh. "You roll a chicken leg in salted flour and dried parsley, you mix a drop of blood with a splash of lemon juice and a squeeze of garlic oil and pour it on, chant is 'I have only begun to burn'. Pepper to taste."

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"You're a sweetheart. I found some more worlds! One has acid in the atmosphere and two are too cold for humans to survive even a couple minutes on and the rest don't have atmospheres but so it goes. I'm gonna have to adapt the ritual to get myself landed near a sun."

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"Oh, I was imagining you could just travel to one the long way real fast."

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"Way faster than you but it'd still take weeks and that's boooooring."

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"Fair enough. Uh, how sure are you that it was Sauron impersonating you?"

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"Can't think who else. The Balrogs could do it but they're not that creative or they wouldn't be Balrogs, you know? Did the fake me wanna fuck you."

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"Not as much as they wanted to be a mage but I was pretending we'd agreed on that to fake them out and they weren't averse."

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"Sauron."

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"Balrogs would have been squicked?"

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"They can do lotsa humanoid forms but they take shortcuts, the bodies aren't functional."

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"...great. Uh, anyway, I may or may not have assassinated him."

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"How do you ambiguously assassinate Sauron?"

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"He wanted to be a mage. I sent him to the empty planet. With a fake ritual. Aiming to drop him directly on a point."

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"I like you."

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"Thank you. But if I missed the point he'll be rampaging around the empty world."

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"Yeah. Where'd you send him, I can be careful not to be noticed and poke him in if I do happen to see him."

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"Point two."

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"Kay! I'mma go make some chicken. You doing all right?"

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"Other than that, yeah."

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And she spreads her wings and disappears in a puff of smoke.

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Cor updates Findekáno.

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You think this one was actually her?

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She was a mage, and - acted more like the her I met in the city.

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Nod. If she's telling the truth is there any point in finishing an anti-Sauron ritual?

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Depends what your other priorities are. He might have landed away from the point and stumble on a working ritual - there are a few that work, in different languages - and be able to get here, but it'd take him a while.

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- eh, until she finds a world with better tech or magic I'm not doing anything more urgent.

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Yeah. May as well keep going, have it ready if he shows up Sauroning about.

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They finish it by the end of the month. It's built aesthetically around Sauron's fondness for illusions, blood-patterned Sauron-identifying artwork and soot to soak up the blood.  They don't use it. There are no signs of trouble.