Alicornutopia

If you could do that, maybe you could swear not to feel your chronic pain for a while.

Ezra wrote:If you could do that, maybe you could swear not to feel your chronic pain for a while.

Or at least not to mind it, if pain is too physical.

(The example I'm thinking of for comparison is evil!Maitimo swearing to hate himself as much as Elspeth hates him/"deeply, searingly regret everything [he's] done to Findekano." It seems like, by parallels, you should be able to swear to, e.g., be deeply deeply thrilled about your chronic pain.)

Oath answers: you can swear in a foreign language: not if you don't know that you are swearing but yes with only extremely vague knowledge of what you are swearing. (Swearing 'feels like' something, you can't do it fully by accident.) Oaths made in a language you don't speak have even more latitude than oaths coerced as soon as you can talk.

Oaths can't make you do things that are outside your capabilities; you can't swear to enjoy being tortured unless enjoying torture is something you could do anyway, any more than you could swear to fly. you can't swear to be happier than your maximum capacity if you were trying really hard to be happy anyway. Mind-controlly oaths are also much more deeply affected by intent; Morgoth can't get them from Elves without complicated hallucination games and it's not because he's never gotten anyone to choke out the words; it works in grimdarda in the way we witness because Findekáno knows what he's doing, prefers it to his other options, is not incapable of wanting the things he's swearing to want, and (most relevantly) swears it in order that it will be true. You probably couldn't get a Bell even under such a willingly made oath to torture people for personal amusement, they're not capable of wanting that.

You could do a conlang so 'I swear X' in English is "I swear Y" in the conlang but then the person would have their choice of interpretations and the one they had in mind will hold sway.

“I swear to enjoy all pain I experience in the process of doing magic”

“I swear to keep the same personality throughout all castings of magic”

I also don’t see why “I swear to make no more oaths” is dangerous; even if you forget it, wouldn’t it still stop you because it’s a negative oath?

But you could use that so that your English-speaking audience thinks you're sworn to X, when secretly you're sworn to Y instead?

An easy hack might be a conlang where "not" and "never" are intensifiers and "always" is a negation.

Do the Daevala actually have (demonproof) FTL communication, or does Demon!Mandos actually use Cam’s trick if necessary? Is there an equivalent of the Maia in that world (bound daeva don’t quite fit the theme)?

*runs around in circles shrieking about Evenstar*

I KNOW

THIS MUST BE HOW ERU FEELS ALL THE TIME!

I looked around for Evenstar person before I realized you were probably talking about Evening Star continuity. Which is cool too but I'm way behind on it. I'm trying to catch up!