They were created in Valinor, so are now back in Valinor, but their owners have been relocated to a beautiful beach on this continent.

Well, put the boats by the beach with the owners.

I would have done that originally but you said to put them back, so I put them back. Fairy orders are very terrible world-design, you know.

If I ever find someone who designed them I will take it up with that person at that time. Can you make me immune to receipt of orders?

I could do that. You sensibly made Maitimo not part of the system that operated on orders; making someone immune only to receiving them permits much more abuse.

Yes, I'm aware, but I might need the mechanism and I'm not sure if Fairyland itself is part of your jurisdiction. If it turns out to be I may abolish the system altogether later, but for now. Make me immune to the receipt of orders.

Silence.

Did you do it?

Unless the mechanics of fairy orders escape me, one that is given is bound to be carried out.

You'd been in the habit of confirming things. Is it just that you didn't like this one?

I disliked it, considered it unwise, and was alarmed by what your decision to give it after barely any time to discuss those concerns said about you. I can move many hundreds of thousands of times faster than you, and had much more time to consider it, and still have little confidence it was wisely done; you told Maedhros once that ordering forces far beyond your comprehension was unwise, and it remains so when the forces are favorably inclined. And now I have less latitude to protect you from yourself, or my world from the unintended consequences of your decisions.

Did you have an alternate suggestion to reliably keep other people from using fairy orders on, most pertinently, you, at one remove without prematurely sacrificing my ability to edit the universe?

Make you immune to undesired or non-consented-to fairy orders, most obviously, or make it impossible for people to order others through you, or changing the recency rule on you so you can pick a satisfactory bedrock of orders and not have them overridden, or other things that didn't involve rewriting a great deal of your fundamental nature. And no, I can't put it back; you're not of my universe and moving this many things this quickly without any destabilizing and undesired side effects is at least as hard as raising a continent without causing tidal waves and a rise in sea level.

I cannot undo most of what you've asked. I cannot put an oath in force again. I cannot kill the people I've brought back to life; I can tell the Valar I've reversed my instructions regarding who should be in Valinor, and I cam move the people around, but that'll be 'doing it again' not undoing it, and will be destabilizing. The swanships destabilized the whole timeline.

The timeline?

I can alter all of Arda's history, not just this specific moment of it. Lots of your changes propagate forwards; some of them also propagate backwards. Now the swanships are not the sort of thing that could only be made once.

She rubs her eye. "...I think I should maybe sleep before I tell him to do anything else."

"All right. Good night."

"I'm probably awake enough to do things less complicated than that, if the ex-prisoners need anything...?" She looks at them.

Some of them fled as soon as the orcs all vanished. Some of them are still there, not moving, staring blankly ahead. "Leave that to me?" Maedhros says.

"Yeah, okay. I'll go find a nice bit of roof to sleep on, it's vaguely horrible in here."

He nods fervently.

She sighs. She goes and finds some roof that is less vaguely horrible. She sleeps.

The sun rises. Maedhros and most of the prisoners are out in the ashy, rocky valley in front of Angband.