"Sounds about right. I mean, they seem to be a lot more powerful than kings, but the difference does seem to be one of magnitude rather than type."

"And they're not a lot wiser. If any."

"Morgoth is the same thing they are."

"My mother didn't think he existed either."

"I wish she had been right about that."

"It'd been three hundred years since any real fighting, just occasional orcs. The Elves certainly got away with a lot by claiming it was necessary because there was a monstrous evil in the north and they were bottling it up. It made sense."

"And then three volcanoes erupted all at once and Balrogs started showing up and also there was this one enormous dragon kind of thing, you wouldn't have seen that at all, it was way west of here, Odette killed it."

"I believe the Elves are telling the truth as far as they know it, and that their Enemy is terrible indeed, and maybe even terrible enough to justify sending our sons off to war."

"It's better than any of the reasons I know of for the wars that have happened back home. Not that that's saying much."

"What've people warred over back at your home?"

"Religion. Territory. Who gets to be king. Old grudges."

"The Elves have those, but they've managed not to war over them."

"The elves have bigger problems. 'There is a much nastier external threat' is often a good way to get people to stop fighting each other and worry about the nasty external threat instead."

"So the Enemy is doing us all a favor."

"If you think it's worth it."

"I don't. I have a hard time thinking war is ever worth it. But this is better than being used for the Elves to fight each other."

"I mean, in that way, yes, but on the other hand the worst that could happen then is that you die horribly. Morgoth can do much worse things than that."

She raises an eyebrow. "My sons are out there somewhere. You know."

"I. Did not personally know you had sons. I could probably have predicted that if I had thought about it."

"I should have mentioned it."

"Morgoth has mind control abilities."

"No one told us that."

"One of the elves--at least one--thinks he's still a captive. Because one of the things Morgoth could do was force him to hallucinate he was being rescued. And now he has no reason to believe that he really was."

"Why not believe it, though? If you're a prisoner nothing matters, if the world is real everything does. I mean, the rest of us could doubt that too." She shrugs.

"He mostly acts like he believes it. But, you know, you can't always rationally decide what to believe."