"I'm sorry you're bored."

"Oh, it's much nicer than Angband, don't worry. But you'd be bored in my place, wouldn't you?"

"...I'd be frustrated, but I can keep myself hour-to-hour entertained on wheel spinning pretty okay, if that's what's available," Kib says. "I am capable of killing time if there is a good reason to kill time. It would not thrill me but I think I'd live with it better than you are, I'd, I don't know, write a novel, I was going to write a novel with reincarnation in to see if there was anybody else and never got around to that and I couldn't publish it in my world now but I could still write it."

"I don't think I actually get anything at all out of doing things for myself."

"On a certain level I do literally everything for myself. If I had to avoid affecting or learning things about most of the world around me I'd just have to - narrow that, a lot."

(There is, he'd realized a few weeks in, one thing he can do for the people he loves; the unfair thing is that it'd be much less of a favor if he told them he was doing it.)

"I do not think I like being narrowed, a lot. But it's hardly urgent. I am after all an Elf and will take fifty years to get pressingly bored, and by then maybe there'll be interesting progress in a field that didn't exist when I was captured which I can learn about."

"I considered learning to sing, but I determined I was only considering that because I was miserable over not having been able to save Aydanci and it is not in fact a good use of my time or anybody's ears."

"At least there's something thematically appropriate about it. I can't think what skillset should have let me avoid my errors - don't underestimate Thauron, I suppose, and here I am, trying not to do that again..."

"We knew he had illusions," murmurs Kib.

"Don't beat yourself up over it, it was hardly your domain for strategic decisionmaking..."

"Unfortunately, I do actually think I'd have come up with it if I had thought harder. It is the sort of thing I am generally able to come up with."

"Hopefully Nolofinwe is in the habit of asking himself all the time 'if this is a trap of the Enemy, how is it so'."

"Hopefully."

"Have you actually worked with him? I suppose you he could sensibly delegate to Findekano and not consider further, it wouldn't be a good use of his time to try to keep up with the engineers...."

"No, haven't directly to speak of, should I?"

"Can't think why, particularly. I benefitted from having you as an advisor but I don't think advising Kings is your generalized comparative advantage in this war."

"Yeah, that was about my reasoning, shorter on servantmakers than smart people."

"Hopefully not short on servantmakers for much longer, Lari came in all heavily supervised and showed me she can wake golems nowadays. She doesn't remember me. Not that I really expected her to, not that I fully remember any of you..."

"They must've at least told her who you are?"

"I'm the King who's very sick because the Enemy caught him, yes. My brothers all grew up running to me with every need and every triumph and every question..."

"...I'm probably not best equipped to understand the, the lost significance, but I'm sorry."

"I've been thinking about whether the oaths could work. The problem is of course that I don't want to swear them; swearing anything while in an Enemy-controlled hallucination seems like a bad idea. But if there were a way to set the right conditions, so that I wasn't still bound to it in the next iteration..."

"Well, you'd want to time-limit it, you could also word it to expire if there's a discontinuity."

"And then, what, reswear to it every month? What are you planning to do if some month I don't?"

"Hadn't assumed it was a likely enough idea to think through in that much detail... change all our security again and ship you to Valinor?"