"I do wonder if people who might be inclined actually know that you'd take volunteers."

"They might not, I suppose, though it seems obvious enough to me. ...there's also the question of - maybe there's someone out there who would like it, but wants to be able to quit if they change their mind, and they really don't have any good reasons to trust me and I'm not sure how to give them one."

"Do you ever let people go?"

"No, and they wouldn't be in a very reassuring condition if I did."

"Then I can see how someone might be under the impression that's not an option. Elves and orcs can swear to things, but you don't have that..."

"I do not," he agrees.

"Elves can also be forked from pre-torture instances, which was necessary for a lot of people after Melkor was defeated, but humans don't have that either unless your resurrection power happens to work that way."

"I could probably figure it out but it doesn't come naturally. And I still don't want people to know I can bring back the dead. What are you imagining I'd do with this ability—?"

"Oh, it's not the same, really, I didn't have something in mind for it. Melkor rendered a lot of Elves as pure bodiless information which he could duplicate and torture more conveniently in parallel at high speed. The results did not want to exist, so after the war their pre-capture instances were instantiated once per, instead. My husband's one of those."

"What a bizarre thing to do."

"The instantiated forks or the multitudinous torture?"

"The multitudinous torture. It's... I can't imagine what somebody would have to want, for that to be the thing they decided to do."

"He didn't like that there was a fated plan and decided to do things so horrible that they couldn't possibly be in the fated plan, to derail it. This did not work at all because Eru has appalling taste in stories. Also he just liked torturing people or I imagine he would have come up with something else."

Snort. "If I heard there was a fated plan where I was supposed to make people suffer for some omniscient creator deity's entertainment - assuming I had a very good reason to believe it was definitely true - that might get me to stop torturing people. What kind of an idiot do you have to be, to not notice that 'well I'll be even worse then' is the kind of plan that sinks in the harbor? Or did he not know what his role was in this drama?"

"I'm not actually sure how he came by his information."

"Suppose it's a bit pointless to speculate."

"Yes, I can't go ask him from here."

"At least not yet."

"Not yet."

"I'll send you a bunch more clothes that work with the wings," he adds.

"Thank you!"

"Welcome!"

"And thank you for teaching me to fly."

"It was fun! I'm glad you like your wings so much!"

Preen.