"But then after that I killed Sauron with my bare hands."

"Yeah, I think I have enough motivation for that just from Maedhros. Although I probably can't afford the luxury of melee combat, given how my magic works."

"I did a lot of melee combat and I have melee ice powers. The first time I dueled him I didn't do especially well and I had to run away and Huan took it from there, but Sauron spent a few years holed up in Angband, shattering every time he tried to take material form. Second time I had tactical teleportation. And I was really, really pissed off."

"I'm working on teleportation," she nods, "technically I already have it but I really don't wanna use the version I've got too much. Much as it would be satisfying to put my fist through his face the way my magic works--i.e. not in any way melee-specialized at my level--it would be an unconscionable handicap."

"Dead's more important than satisfyingly dead," nods Loki. "I had to teleport a lot, very fast, and heal myself pretty much constantly, and output a great deal of ice. It was a hell of a fight."

"I plan to persuade the universe directly that he shouldn't ought to exist."

"...that sounds like the sort of methodology that might suddenly cause Eru's opinions to matter."

"That's not exactly how it works," she says, waving a hand. "It's anthropomorphizing too much--to someone back home I would have said 'I plan to persuade Sauron not to exist' but obviously his actual opinions don't matter in the least."

"How's that work?"

"Okay, so my kind of magic is divided into three branches: Sympathy, Effort, and Conquest. In terms of the mental actions of the mage, Sympathy involves persuading reality to be what you want, Effort involves pushing on reality until it does what you want, and Conquest involves commanding reality to be what you want. And all of them have mental side-effects and hurt proportionally to the strength of the magic you're doing. I'm as good as I am because I have fantastic resistance to Sympathy's mental side-effects and am a masochist."

"Ah, interesting. Are you getting more resistant or more masochistic or is something else changing over time that you think you'll be able to persuade Sauron to stop existing later?"

"Neither. Those determine how much power you can stand to wield and how wise it is, not how much you technically have access to, and that does improve over time."

"Gotcha. Interesting system. My spells are written out in a special alphabet and it takes me decades to finish one, but I can design them to do whatever and once I've got them I can use them as much as I like."

"I've only been practicing seriously for seven years and I can already technically teleport, so I think I prefer mine."

"Much faster than mine. Although as a non-masochist I find it pretty handy that it doesn't hurt to cast my spells."

"Yeah, there's that. It's kind of depressing how good Maedhros is at it, really."

Nod.

"That's not most of the reason I mostly hang out around Himlad instead of Himring when I'm in Feanorian territory but it's a little bit of it."

"I didn't have a Himlad."

"Oh, it's Celegorm and Curufin's fortress."

"Everybody's still obliged to pretend to care about Elu's fucking opinion, huh?"

"Oh, he decided to pull that linguistic blackmail bullshit in your world too?"

"Yeah. Fëanor taught me Quenya during it, delightfully subversive, that. I have translation magic that was getting me and I just used that before. Most of 'em reverted to their Quenya names afterward but I slip on a few occasionally, Elves have too many names."

"I'd say 'I wouldn't know, I only got to learn one apiece' but I have in fact managed to finagle finding out a few of their real names."