He dives straight into Lævateinn at that point, in exchange for at last being close enough to bite down on her arm.

She bleeds cold, and with her other arm, while he's occupied, she blasts it.

That crushes him, blasts him sideways and backwards, is impossible to avoid. He doesn't let go of her arm.

Well, her arm hurts in a numb frozen sort of way, but she can fix it when it's no longer doing her the convenience of keeping him in one place. She grows Lævateinn to her off hand, transfers it, swipes sword against dog.

And he lets go, rolls away, lands on his feet thirty meters away. Take a break?

She fixes her arm. Sure. That was fun.

He huffs in agreement.

She goes back to practicing with the oomph spell. She likes the oomph spell, on balance, it'll just take a little more work. When the birds are ready she swaps which people are currently turned into them.

And after a few more hours everyone can fly.

Orders were to think on the way about whether we can do this, and if so, how, Macalaurë says. Any thoughts, now that you have a little more information about the Maiar?

The osanwë thing is a severe impairment but not completely incapacitating. The ice is useful, it works at greater range than Lævateinn and is harder to deprive me of, I should definitely take point if there are any Balrogs present and see what it does to those. I am not sure if we can hope to actually kill Thauron, though.

Is that the only objective worth taking this risk for? What else might be productive?

I have mixed feelings about discrediting him in front of the Men, since he certainly has less gentle methods of subversion available than the 'demons' con, and anyway only a limited number of them could supervise. Depriving him of whatever vague resource Maiar run on while he defends himself may be worthwhile in some hard to quantify way.

Injuring or exhausting him thoroughly enough would probably force him to retreat to Angband.

For how long?

Frustration. With the Silmarils in enemy hands? Not very long.

How long is not very long?

A year? Not a decade, certainly not a century.

Well, that's probably enough time for me to get the Men a more robust culture if I live there a while. Maybe if I'm lucky the Nandor will be impressed and help.

I don't think we can permanently commit resources that far away from the actual fight. Supply lines would be a problem. A settlement large enough to protect itself against Thauron would be using people we need much closer to Angband.

Maitimo does want you east, but not all the way among the Men east, and he was going to build a city first.

If there's a way to make the transition without Father losing years of his time, it might be worth it.

Haven't been presented with an idea for that one. How are you going to interface with your brother, anyway, he doesn't want to talk to me or you, are you going to send one of the twenty?

Father has orders for him that I should convey personally. He needn't respond to them or acknowledge them, and after that he can ignore us. Do you think he'll react badly?