"Good people are pretty rare, and rarer among powerful people. In my experience."

"I mean. You're not wrong. But it's important to me that I do it regardless."

"I noticed. Anyway. We're teaching lots of people the healing, easy to make the case it's needed for the war."

"Good. D'you think you can justify the rejuvenation the same way?"

"That one we're just putting out foot down on. Some people will object, but the King doesn't, so-"

"Yeah. It's important."

"It's important politically - it will change the dependence of Men on Elves - and personally. We shouldn't die like this. We aren't supposed to."

"No one ought to die," she agrees soberly.

"The tradition of our people is that we had immortality like Elves but then Morgoth tricked us out of it, when we were young and naive as a people and didn't know what he was."

"Well, my world never had a Morgoth, so I know that's not true there, but maybe it is here."

"The Elves say it was Eru's plan. But if so, stupid plan."

"No kidding. Although, I don't know, if he couldn't make you immortal the same way he made the elves without some of the drawbacks elves have, I can see people being willing to make that trade-off. I can't say I know enough about what the plan was to be able to say for sure that he didn't have a good reason to make a tradeoff that resulted in mortality. I mean, it could just as easily not be the case, but. Anyway now my sister and I are here and we can patch that problem."

"Indeed. What drawbacks do the Elves have in your eyes?"

"Can get married by accident and it involves permanent soul-binding, can make promises that metaphysically bind them so they can't ever change their minds afterwards, can get Doomed..."

"None of those seem inherently tied to immortality."

"No, but Odette says that Celegorm--Fingon's cousin--says that a number of their physical advantages are tied to a particular way their souls and bodies interact that ours don't--she was explaining human fertility, including a brief explanation of menstruation that didn't go much farther than 'it's painful and gross' and he suggested that she might want to copy it the way we copied their eyes, she declined because it seemed like a bigger change than she wanted to make on that little information, and he admitted that that was a good point and maybe the elf disadvantages had to do with that difference too. I don't know. It doesn't really seem like a practical question, unless Eru shows up demanding to know what we're doing, since the treatment for mortality is the same either way."

"Let's hope Eru does not show up with any demands."

"I don't think we can really plan for that," she agrees wryly.

"My mother didn't believe the Elf-gods existed. She said that it was very nice for the Elves how they had gods that told them everything they were doing was right. I - saw where she was coming from, to be sure."

"Using dubiously extant gods to support what you were going to do anyway is a pretty common thing back home, I was surprised to find out the ones here were verifiably real too."

"Are they really? How did you verify it?"

"I mean, I suppose it's possible that all the elves we've met have been unanimously lying to us in a way with no conflicting details about having actually met them, but, um, since they seem to really want their dead loved ones back and the fact that their gods are relatively accessible is the whole reason Odette expects to be able to resurrect their dead, I'm pretty sure they would have started making excuses by now if they had been lying."

"Well. 

That doesn't make their gods right. And they use their gods to explain why they're right, about all sorts of things."

"Oh, yeah, no, they seem to be pretty horribly wrong about a lot of things."

"So they're really more like Kings. Very powerful people you have to obey but you don't have to think have any special access to truth."