Yes. To do something and to think about doing it and to desire to do it are all the same for them. Incarnates are different, apparently.

Yep. Well, what did it look like when he delivered the oaths?

They show her the memory; Melkor kneeling before them, sobbing, pleading for another chance at life, promising never to harm even the smallest creature in Arda, promising to fix everything he'd done wrong with orcs, promising to heal Arda together with them...

Well, was he definitely speaking aloud? It does have to involve speaking aloud if she remembers right.

He was speaking aloud.

Well, if vampires did oaths one could fool Elspeth by going out of her pitch range, but presumably Valar all hear the same pitches and stuff...

Depends on how they're doing their senses, actually.

How were they doing their senses?

Fourteen different answers. Some of them had incarnate forms, some of them were just aware of all things in the relevant radius but in a way difficult to translate to senses.

Well. Are the latter group sure he wasn't sneaking anything into all that sobbing?

....no.

That might be it then.

Elspeth is so helpful! Can she explain why not all the Elves wanted to come to Valinor.

Not even all the Valar thought that was a good idea, right? How was the idea presented?

They showed up and told the Elves how nice Valinor was! And safe!

...so, total strangers who do weird things to the air around them and have difficulty holding normal conversations with incarnates that take their traits into account show up and announce that they want to uproot some Elves and take them to this place none of the Elves have ever seen and it is definitely nice, and safe, because they totally know how these things work for incarnates right, and are totally trustworthy...

But it was nice and safe! For nearly four hundred Years it was perfectly so!

Look, sometimes people who don't know Elspeth don't believe her when she says wacky things out of nowhere, she has about a sixty percent success rate leading directly with "so! vampires exist!" when she's talking to somebody who's wandered into a Coven site instead of doing a whole "sit down this is complicated" shtick, and the Valar were operating with a handicap where she has an overwhelming advantage.

It's actually pretty impressive that most of the Elves came. They should congratulate the Elves.

At this point that would probably sound condescending.

Can she explain condescending.

Yup!

They might be able to pull off something like congratulating the Elves if it were more in the form of an apology for being so inscrutable and not realizing what a leap of faith coming to Valinor was, but just "millennia later, by the way, congratulations" is gonna have problems.

What kind of problems? If it's a nice thing, why would a couple thousand years make it less nice?

Time kinda matters to incarnates. It matters when things happen before other things, even if the things are "more of whatever is going on already", and this adds up to urgency and scheduling and panics over being late and hurrying through things - and saying things a couple thousand years late implies all kinds of stuff about what can possibly have been on your mind in the intervening couple thousand years and that matters -

Oh.

In hindsight, not saying or doing anything for three Years after the Darkening probably was a bad idea! Incarnates would have cared about that!