"Heard about that. Maybe he's jealous."

"Of?"

"The two of you? He's madly jealous of my father, got very upset when my father was disinterested in collaborating. Maybe he had a crush on Tyelcormo."

"Cáno," Maitimo says with a slight edge. 

"Do Valar actually even have gender?"

"They seem to have preferred ones? I don't know of any who switch. I don't think they have the same concept of it that we do. Maybe Melkor meant to be a girl for Tyelcormo-"

"Cáno." With more edge.

"I think this suggestion is kind of a stretch even if your society didn't have such a strong homosexuality taboo."

"I don't think it's likely, I am just lost as to what about your arrival would have caused this - obvious and aggressive - a response when he's been being nice and peaceable for ninety-five Years."

"Yeah, it worries me."

"Ideas?"

"I don't even know enough about the motivational structure of non-evil Valar or the circumstances surrounding his supposed reform to guess."

"Fair enough. We attended the parole hearings - nearly a Year of them - but I wouldn't characterize them as informative."

"What were they like?"

"Upsetting, mostly. All the things he'd done. He wept and talked about how deeply he regretted it."

"...Do Valar...usually change their minds like that?"

"No. 

They do acknowledge mistakes, but I've never heard regret from any of the others."

"But they believed him?"

"We assumed they had some privileged information."

"I wish I knew more about how they worked."

"That would be nice, yes."

"...Does your people-psychic thing actually work on them or is Melkor unnecessarily paranoid?"

"They're much much harder to understand. It wouldn't be useless but it wouldn't be clarifying in the same way."

"Shame."

"I suppose I should have spent more time over the Years among the Maiar and Valar."

"I'd say you couldn't have seen this coming but I'm not sure how more people weren't suspicious of Melkor from the start."

"We were, it just wasn't obvious what to do about that. Eternal imprisonment really is a pretty terrible sentence, suspicion did not feel like enough..."