"Hmmm? No, I've cut stones and know the structure and might be able to do it, it's just - funny, how much of Tirion's hobbies magic can duplicate so trivially..."

"I'm very good at it, but then I suppose anything I can get good at in the time I've been alive would seem trivial to you."

"I didn't mean to imply I wasn't impressed! It's just that seeing things of Valinor here is very strange. Painful sort of nostalgia."

"Oh.

Makes sense."

"It's been a very long time. I do not often miss it."

"How old are you, anyway, I don't think I have any idea how old anyone here is besides 'older than four hundred and fifty'."

"The years in Valinor were ten times, roughly, as long as the years by the Sun as we now count them. If we used the years of the sun back before it had even risen I would have seen nearly three thousand of them."

"...That's not much younger than my religion."

"Is your religion considered old for your world?"

"It's not the oldest, but it's not young either."

"And I am not anywhere near the oldest of our people! Maedhros has nearly five hundred years on me, our father obviously has more than that..."

"Obviously. I wonder how it comes out when you adjust for Valinor time weirdness."

"Yes, I think five hundred years in this world have made up a great share of my experience of being alive than everything before."

"I think there are a lot of things I would have liked about Valinor and the time weirdness is very much not one of them."

"I expect you'd have thrived there, you have the appreciation of beauty. But yes, time feels different here, and it's probably better for mortals this way because this is the world mortals were meant for."

"I wonder how much of that is just the fact that we die. When we don't have magic that didn't exist here when people were meaning things."

"I suppose in a thousand years I can ask you if you still prefer this pace."

"I sure hope so. I don't come with an expiration date but frankly even with your example I don't really believe in forever and I want to appreciate all the time I have."

"I very much hope you get forever, at whatever pace you enjoy."

"Isn't that kind of unfulfillable? If you say, 'I hope you get ten thousand years,' then at the end of ten thousand years I will have gotten it; if you say 'I hope you get a million years' then at the end of a million years I will have gotten it, but if a billion billion years from now I am still alive, there will still be the possibility that something will happen, and if I live a billion billion years and one day then I shall not have gotten forever."

"There's no point in time at which I can comfortably say you got what I wanted you to have. That doesn't seem like a reason not to want it."

"Fair enough. I appreciate the sentiment. But that's what I mean when I say I don't believe in forever."

"I used to not believe in death."

"That's a good thing to not have to believe in."

"Only when it isn't real, I think."