"Killing orcs is painful but not really tiring. City planning is coming along pretty well, I think."

"Fighting ongoing all night for a week is what's tiring. I am glad to hear that."

"Yeah, I just--yeah. This sucks. It would be really convenient if Odette could just enchant somewhere to be selectively lethal to orcs--that reminds me. Lady Hareth says you mercy-kill orc children."

"Yes."

"I want to see if I can fix them, instead."

"Next time we run across some I will let you know. It doesn't happen often."

"I know. If I thought it were likely to happen soon I would have made it more of a priority to bring it up. But I thought I should mention it sooner rather than later, regardless."

"The Enemy will also certainly take advantage of it if he thinks you're hesitant to kill orc children, by changing strategies to use them as shields."

"I'm not asking you to put your peoples' lives at risk. If he tries that with me, specifically--well. I don't kill using physical objects that have to go through intervening objects."

"Convenient, that. And I expect you're smart enough not to offer concessions if he threatens his own peoples' children."

"Even if I were inclined to go along with that sort of threat in the first place, it loses a lot of impact when he is torturing them anyway."

"The Enemy's sheer awfulness is a little self-defeating," he agrees. 

"Yeah, it's--he acts like the kind of bad guy you get in stories where the authors like to divide people into impeccably good heroes and gratuitously evil monsters, and that's not how people work in real life, so I'm worried because I can't figure out why he behaves like this, and Morgoth having secret reasons for things really sounds like the kind of thing that has historically gone badly."

"I mean, the Valar aren't very much like people. They all have very odd limitations when it comes to that kind of thing."

"I guess that makes sense, but then the question is why is he like that at all."

"Finrod would enjoy discussing the topic with you. I've never been much good with religion and faith and reasons."

"I mean, probably the best answer I'm going to get out of anyone here is 'I don't know'. Trying to have a conversation about the motives of the...entities...who laid the Doom with someone who couches it in terms like faith seems...tiring. At best."

He smiles. "Fair enough. I don't know."

"And if there is another shoe and it does drop we hope it's as susceptible to being squished by my sister as the dragon was."

"I think the Enemy hoped to destroy us in one sweeping blow, and instead got a protracted stalemate. That's good."

"Relatively speaking, anyway, but yeah."

"I'm a bit of an optimist and even I thought when I heard that volcano that the war was lost."

"Magic is so great."

"It really is. Everything has changed."

"I know I like gloating about how Odette killed that giant dragon but I really don't actually want to think about what it could have done if she hadn't."