"All right," he says. "I order you to act exactly as you think I would order you to act if I understood orders perfectly."

She rolls her wings up. "I know your name but not his. My current orders forbid me to move except as directed by new, enforced orders or if I am removed from Angband. They forbid me to enforce orders except on designated recipients. They have me trying to guess when it's been about an hour so I can think of something to tell Maedhros to do but it's supposed to be 'random' which is difficult to do without a source of randomness and I haven't settled on an interpretation yet. I do not expect more fairies to enter this world for the foreseeable future or for there to be a way to access Fairyland in that time. I am immortal but not more durable than a mortal would be against any particular injury. Ordering hostile vassals is very difficult and this stopgap will not serve you in the long term."

"How do fairies usually manage hostile vassals?"

"They get very, very good at issuing airtight orders, rely on themselves or non-hostile vassals for sensitive tasks if possible, they make sure escape is not a relatively appealing alternative if possible, they give self-incapacitating contingency orders in case of failure, and they make liberal use of qualifiers like 'sincere' and questions about the state of mind of the vassal."

"Is there a commitment I can offer you that would make you not a hostile vassal?"

"I don't know what the spectrum of commitments you'd be prepared to offer for that would be, but in principle you could get me considerably less hostile."

"I plan to command the Valar and control this world. I have no particular designs on yours and am happy to grant you significant latitude if I could be confident you would not use it to work against me."

"I am opposed to torture and death in general, would like to go home eventually if there's a way to do that from here after all, hold up better psychologically given time to draw, want him to stop touching me..."

He raises an eyebrow at Sauron, who does not take his hand off her shoulder. "It doesn't sound like we can be happy collaborators, then. Tell me, if you had the names of the Valar and ordered them to obey me, how would you expect that to go wrong from my perspective?"

If he understood orders perfectly he would have fucking qualified that for truth and therefore - "They could interpret your instructions. They could do things to avoid hearing them. They might have some way to break fairy control, yours over me or mine over them, because they're Valar. They could warn each other if I didn't speak to them all at once. They could render me unable to communicate before I finished the order."

He nods. "Very well. Sauron, I think you owe someone the Silmarils. Kill him and bring them right back. Fairy, climb up here and sit where you can see, and then order all the orcs in this room to kill themselves. I shall feed you names."

Promise gamely attempts to climb. She is pretty bad at it. She falls.

He picks her us, sets her level with his shoulder.

...well. She can see from there.

And he can give her names.

And she can tell orcs to kill themselves.

He gets bored before Sauron gets back. He tries lighting her on fire. That doesn't work. He tries crushing her. That doesn't work. This is intriguing. "Why can't I hurt you?"

"Because I know your name."

"Hmm. Jump down from there."

She jumps.

He picks her up and puts her back. "Could I order the orcs to injure you? Could I order you to injure yourself?"

"Yes."

He feeds her more names, instead.

She is still under orders to tell the orcs to kill themselves if they're in the room.

Sauron comes back. He has three Silmarils. Melkor stops feeding her names.