...Is that actually worse than what it's like when you have them?

No, it's much better, but now I can't do it again because you can't deliberately sabotage your own ability to fulfill an Oath, it cannot be done.

But you've been lying here for years, not doing whatever it was.

Not doing it is different than letting someone make you unaware of it. You can choose not to do something you swore this minute, you can't choose to make yourself permanently unable to ever act on an Oath.

...Well, it wouldn't have to be permanent, I could always undo it again...

As soon as you do it, I'll ask you to undo it. So what's the point?

If you decide while you know what you'll be forgetting that you want to forget, I don't have to put it back if you ask me to. Although I'd want you to confirm in general terms to some witnesses that that's what's going on so people don't think I go around nonconsensually walling off memories.

I think you can only temporarily delay fulfilling an Oath if it's in a way that will eventually make you better at fulfilling it.

Well, you won't tell me what it is or let me look, so I can't come up with any really specific ideas about that...

Maybe later. I just panic when I think about it.

Nod. Um, you're delaying fulfilling your Oath now, though - and I'm not sure what you could be getting better at doing...

In each moment you can choose to not fulfill the Oath. It hurts and it makes you so tired and nothing else matters, but you can still say 'this minute, I'm not going to do it'. What I don't think I could do is, for example, warn them so that even if my will snaps later they're able to stop me.

I can't will myself into dying but I can not bother willing myself into staying alive, and eventually I'll be so miserable I won't be able to.

Oh. ...What else can you tell me about how oaths work? Someone might notice if I were curious about them, and I've only been barely introduced to the concept...

Can't break them - like, if there's an action directly contrary to them, you cannot take it. An Oath not to do something is much stronger but more limited than an Oath to do a thing. I didn't know what happens if you just delay one, but apparently this is what happens. You can do things like 'try to fulfill the Oath honorably even if there's a more direct path available', but you start feeling the delaying thing after a while if you don't expect the method you're trying to work, and if you anticipate that someone's going to make the Oath impossible to fulfill you can't help them do that.

Can you - not hinder them from doing that?

Hmm. There's a famous old epic in which a young woman had sworn another enmity, and when some condition triggered she realized she had to kill the other woman, so she sang at length about how she had to do this, and then tried, and predictably people stopped her and took her weapons away, and the oath ceased to torment her while she had no power to get to her friend, and then an avenue for her to escape arose, and she ignored it while the Oath sang louder in her heart and became unbearable, and then she took the chance to escape and found the other woman and said 'I have to keep trying' and the other woman killed her. And she was the better fighter, so the song suggests that she permitted it.

The singing didn't constitute warning people? You said you couldn't do that.

The singing is in the story. Maybe I just feel like I can't warn people because I can't imagine it and it'd be awful.

Awful how?

It would hurt several people really badly forever and they'd never forgive or trust me and Fëanáro'd be crushed.

'Forever' is a very strong word.

I swore to kill my son.