"I don't think he can do it. If he had mind control outright things would have gone down very differently back in Valinor. You can do a lot with the memories but I don't think you can get me to sabotage my people. There has to be some other explanation for the Elves that do."

"Back in Valinor I was assuming he was supervised to some degree but when I speculated that he might not really have slowed my aging and just said he did Findekáno did not present this notion as counter-evidence, so there's that... Aydanci didn't think his private thoughts distinction slipped when the Enemy reacted to something he was thinking, either."

"He can definitely read memories. Not literally at will, but - the standard approach would just be torture someone long past lucidity until their private thoughts distinction slipped, and he knew too much, too quickly, for that to me the mechanism by which he got things out of me."

"If not at will then - when?"

"It might only be in Angband, it might just require physical contact, it might be there's some specific procedure to do it which he obviously would have made me forget -"

"Not only in Angband, he read Aydanci. Maybe easier in Angband or something."

"Or he can get surface thoughts in general, can get everything you've ever experienced on his home territory. He also has lots of other nice conveniences - you can't die or fall unconscious -"

"Charming."

"I don't mind talking about it - or, it doesn't really rise above the general background minding existing - but I don't think you'd find it helpful in any sense, and I don't want it spread more generally, it's...something of an information hazard?"

"Because people will be inclined not to accept strategically worthwhile risks of capture?"

"Because a whole lot of people will probably conclude there's absolutely no amount of nearly-certain blissful immortal life that makes a chance of Angband worth it how do Elves stop existing."

"I don't think you'd conclude that, but I am going to bound it at maybe five percent of people who really know? ...most of the dead of Utumno don't choose to come back, it's not because they're broken, it's because they know."

Nod.

"I'm sorry."

"This is in no way shape or form your fault."

"Last hallucination I was really vicious to you with it. I'm sorry about that."

"Did I do anything interesting?" mutters Kib.

"Got very demonstratively upset, of course, and then worked-worked-worked away on some golem that let you verify oaths from the Enemy, and then he made you a really good deal to hand me back over to him - and since I was strategically unimportant it was obviously the right thing to do -"

"I think he might have been trying to feel out from me what I thought your realistic reaction would be, so to be safe I - didn't think about that, I didn't try to sort out what my reaction taking it at face value would have been, I just begged very prettily and then you were all amenable to being seduced into not doing it and I knew by then - you told your golems 'hold Maitimo down, stop responding to instructions from him' and I thought 'yes, that's Thauron, I knew it'..."

"I wouldn't, I would never -"

"Kib would never," he says, almost gently.

"Do you want me to actually start talking about myself in the third person, I could probably get the hang of it, I do it with Aly often enough."

"I don't want anything from you. If this were real I'd want you to just make me do whatever it is I'm most useful at, so I don't have to figure out whether and in which directions I'm supposed to be resisting. And if interacting with me's bad for you I guess I'd want you to stop, and if it's good for you - it doesn't make sense not to offer you everything I offered Thauron wearing your face..."