She arrives a few minutes later. "Sorry, Loki, I knew you were coming today and I didn't want to go too far but we aren't really needed here and it makes the Quendi nervous to have us wandering and I couldn't just sit out while everyone worked, anyway. I explained everything but you should heal them so they'll see the real Melkor's power."

"Okay, I just wanted to make sure they'd gotten the explanation." Taptaptaptaptaptaptap. "I've got a map and some leads on places for you to go; there's some places you could settle just about now if we could get a few people to help with teaching you to fly and you didn't want to bring more supplies than turning into a bird can tuck away -" She reaches the end of the line. "Because osanwë can really shorten the learning curve there." She pulls out her map. "This area's unsettled. It's kind of exposed, but I could hide you with illusions if that would feel safe enough for you. Or, you can wait until I ask the fellow in charge of this city," point, "if you can have that island," point.

"I don't think it would be good for us to live in a place where other orcs will come wandering," she says. "Even if we're invisible, eventually some of them will stumble across some of us and then the fake Melkor will learn about us and be very very angry and send his servants to destroy us all and we'll die."

"I'll ask about the island, then," Loki says. "It's a little small; if there get to be lots of you you might want to live underground and use the whole surface for crops, and have boats and go fishing; but people can live quite densely if they want to."

"Okay. Once the false Melkor is overthrown we can go back home, right?"

"If you'd really like to live up where Angband is I don't think anyone will be likely to fight you for it once he's gone, although I haven't asked anyone in particular. And in fifty to a hundred years, if you're interested, I could find you a whole, empty world to spread out in."

"Yes," she says, "that'd be wonderful."

Loki smiles. And turns to the new-healed orcs. "So, feeling better?" she asks them. "Ready to re-swear like Vár explained?"

They stare at her apprehensively.

"Come on," she says coaxingly.

Vár is pleading with one on the end. "I don't want to die," he says, "but it's not true! It doesn't make any sense! These are Elves, they're just Elves who're tricking you. And even if they weren't Elves, they'd be the things that kill us, those are the things we're supposed to hate! It wouldn't make any sense to teach us to hate something that looks exactly like these that we'll never see. The stranger just has powerful drugs or something, or maybe does serve a powerful god, but not ours, and that doesn't mean she isn't lying."

"We take prisoners alive. Doesn't mean we're not their enemies."

"You do very different things with the prisoners you take alive," Loki points out.

"We might do this if it'd work. But Elves aren't stupid, won't give oaths to change sides. You did this to them - " he gestures at Vár, across the lake - "because they're children, they don't know anything."

"What about it do you think won't work?" asks Loki.

"If you tried to get Elf prisoners to swear to Melkor, they'd say no. So we can't do that, have to do something else. You haven't had to try anything else, because you've just got kids and they fall into line. The minute they realize that you're no acolyte of Melkor, that our Melkor is real and yours is just a story, they'll be stuck, they've sworn things that fall apart from each other, and that's as bad as anything we do to Elf prisoners."

"Do you have a better idea?" Loki says. "I don't really like using oaths for this either - my people have free will - but it was the best anyone could come up with."

"The Elves should all go back to Valinor and leave us alone."

"The Valar aren't letting anybody in. Besides, Moringotto was in Valinor at one time making trouble there. I will be delighted to put all the orcs on a separate planet once I can travel to separate planets but I won't be able to do that for at least fifty years and probably more."

"Can your Melkor prove he exists?"

"He doesn't do very much, at least in any particular place - it's a big multiverse - and I definitely can't decide on his behalf that this should be a time that he does something. I'm sorry. I'd have a lot to say to him if I could do that, but I can't."

"Then it doesn't make any sense and I can't believe it."

"Do you have," says Loki, "a better idea?"

"I have been tied here for two days, if I'd come up with one don't you think I'd have shared it? These are Elves. They aren't going to stop being Elves. I hate them and they know it and they tied me up here to see whether you can hoodwink us like children. I don't want to die. We're tortured by the Elf gods forever after we die, everyone knows that. But this is false."