"And she was certainly inclined to put caution with her magic above my wellbeing, which I might be excessively inclined to interpret as not caring much about it."

"I can care a lot about a thing without caring most about it."

"So can she. So can I. But if I met a prisoner of Angband it would take one hell of a strategic consideration - people whose lives would be immediately endangered, concrete losses in the war - to make me not give them teleport and a suicide trigger on the spot so they could find existence tolerable again. And if those considerations were present I'd throw myself hard at working around them."

"...did she have a suicide trigger, that one makes less sense to withhold."

"Hers was nontransferrable. If I'd had that I would have been fine.

But I wasn't going to use a teleport for evil and offered in any event to swear to whatever she wanted, if she wanted me to swear only to ever use it to teleport into the Sun I would have."

"You were already under an oath though."

"You can acquire conditional new abilities. That oath wouldn't make me less able to kill the Enemy and anyone else who withheld the damned things, so it wouldn't have anything to say. After teleporting into the Sun the two oaths might have a disagreement but by then it couldn't touch me."

"Did you tell her that? I didn't know that."

"I tried discussing the topic and she said it was disconcerting when I did the manipulation thing at her. We needed her. I cut it out. I also have this unstrategic and trauma-related aversion to begging for things even when that's what the situation requires."

"Oh."

"Findekano also raised it with her for me and she said 'he'll get it after the war'."

"...I am moderately confident that she did not know that oaths could interact in that specific way and somehow no attempts to introduce the topic sounded like providing new information instead of something else."

"Well, you're the one who is her. I have seen her when she actually wants to solve a problem, including a problem with oaths, and she is very very creative if it's important."

"That part I don't have a good guess about besides 'she had a lot on her mind'."

"I like her a lot. I'm not angry with her, and wasn't even at the time, and think she'd consider me a friend. The only thing affected, in the long run, was my estimate of how much my state bothered her."

Nod.

"I won't talk about it casually again."

"I'm much better at this sort of thing when I'm wearing my therapist hat and not my a-version-of-a-salient-person-in-the-story-I-am-hearing hat."

"Like I said, I don't think I need a therapist. I'm safe now. I have reasons to think this is real, now. I am going to give that safety to everyone in the multiverse and then things will in fact be okay."

"Okay."

"I made her popsicles. After she used her ice powers to blast Thauron to shreds. There were mountains of ice everywhere and frozen foods had always been a delicacy in Tirion so we had a party for her and there were werewolf popsicles. And vodka werewolf popsicles which she didn't touch - do you also avoid drinking? - and everyone was so happy."

"Yeah, I don't drink. It can do weird things to subtle arts and I don't think I'd want to anyway."

"Makes sense. It seemed like enough of a personality trait I'd have been mildly surprised if you had. Anyway, it was a lovely party. Even better than the one when we leveled Angband, because that got interrupted by the Enemy's refusal to be dead."

"How'd you level it?"

"There are weapons in Loki's world that can do it, but she didn't remember how to make them. My father, despite declaring the problem impossible in principle, managed in a decade - he was accelerating himself, I think it took him thirty years' subjective time - to build necklaces that give retroactive eidetic memory, and then gave one to Loki, and then she remembered enough physics that we could piece together how to build the weapons, and then we built them. It was truly a spectacular feat of scientific ingenuity and I wish it had been enough. It did end Angband. It did free all the prisoners. It did end orcs."