Thank you! This was way too long but you are a special nub. link for reference!

-I love the ocean being, in these people’s conception of reality, nothing really to do with what the ocean ‘is’ from a modern perspective, they have no concept of that at all and the thing is that there’s no objective truth outside their perspective as far as this universe goes, it’s turtles all the way down. what it means to them. what it has always meant to them is the ocean is endless, and is endlessness itself. it has no edge and this is the taken-for-granted way to the divine, to the valar, to the halls of mandos, etc. now that the seas are bounded the only way they can wrap their minds around the idea is that now the sea must be somehow bottomless, the limits of human imagination are clunky — uhhhh maybe it’s a door? maybe there’s a path? to the….whatever that must be down under now? OR SOMETHING? it’s mostly just the “????” part of gogol’s wootton major post.

-uncannily still clear bright silent moonlit night as a liminal space or time. the numenoreans probably navigated by echolocation quite a lot, given their brand of low key magic and sea-attunedness, and vague tech in the last days. if you listen hard enough the nameless whatever that you have lost might manifest itself by the pattern of sounds. somehow, right? the standard for ‘this is ridiculous and makes no sense’ is pretty undefined when the world has knotted into something unimaginable.

-I know we can find it by math! apparently math still works. so if elves can sail off the curve maybe there’s some sort of solution for us along those lines.

– hey btw what exactly is the ‘it’ we are trying to find? it’s vaguely ‘some trace of numenor’ and what does that mean? pieces of the island of elenna? the path through which it was lost? the place it used to be? evidence it existed? the world that was Before? the time Before? we’ve already lost this. it’s ours.

-i am vaguely haunted by anarion, who we know little of. it’s cool how rumors start, with ‘this is the entirely subjective thing I personally saw’ to other ppl generating a whole bunch of theories around it and ways to fix it.

-after azruben dives — again the sense that what the world ‘is’ is more about what it seems from each person’s perspective. ‘the world feels not-round’ is just the closest conscious approximation he can grasp.

-I am not ruining what he sees. but like…. the mirrormere, and the dead marshes, and earendil snagged in a glass, and lothlorien. eregion. the land remembers, the water remembers. or is it shows, like the straight road? well azruben sure doesn’t know.

-he sees the arrival of the edain, foam flying before the ships beneath earendil….I can’t write anything that isn’t pinioned to some lotr thing – faramir had his dreams of the great wave that sank numenor, thousands of years after, as did Sam for a moment at the ring’s destruction.

-salt like blood: again with the your mind makes things real