But obviously they'll all be disgusted and horrified if they knew.

You don't have to tell them. Clearly you're capable of not doing it. But if there's some way around it - maybe not the memory thing in particular but that still seems really promising to me honestly -

I don't think there is. I think I'm just stuck.

Why couldn't you - tell some witnesses that I'm going to make you forget a thing, your informed opinion is that you don't want to know it except on some occasional basis, and - then you'll be better and you can go home and on an occasional basis I can let you remember it for a short time and you'll be nearer Fëanáro at those times than you usually are now -?

As soon as you do it I'll desperately want it undone, and then what?

And then everybody knows that when you have the memory you don't want it, and that constitutes your informed consent, and then I guess everybody runs interference so you don't pester me at all hours of the day but it seems better than you wasting away here. There might be a better idea, especially if I can think of a loophole you couldn't - if you were willing to tell anybody, I mean, the Valar would just reembody him right away and you'd be done, but I understand why you can't bring yourself to do that -

If I were willing to kill him, you mean? How could he ever live with that? And the Valar haven't brought anyone back yet, they say it's just a question of acclimating people who died by Cuivienen but what if it's not right away, what if I just murdered my son and then he was dead?

If you were willing to tell people, I imagine someone who has been here for a while and doesn't need to be alive right now in particular might be willing to test it out. And - and I don't know about Eldar but on my plane people recover from the most horrifying sorts of things happening to them in their childhoods up to and including being murdered by a parent and then resurrected, it's not common but it's happened, it's not easy but it's doable, and you I don't know what you're going to do if the memory thing doesn't work and it's as airtight as you think it is - is there no way to release an oath -?

No, there isn't.

Then in the long run how is even being dead going to help, you have to do something else...

I don't think you can suffer while you're dead. I can just not come back to life.

He knows I'm going to die, I think. He's known for a while.

You think he'd react well to hearing that I have to kill him for anything to ever be all right?

Well would be an exaggeration. If I thought I could convince him it wasn't his fault that might be a different matter, too, but I tried telling him and it didn't work.

She shakes her head miserably.

And if we could come up with a way for the forgetting thing to work you wouldn't even have to do that.

She takes a deep breath. Okay.

...okay, you'll tell people your informed preference is to forget the thing?

To only remember it occasionally.

How often do you think that should be?

as infrequently as is allowed, but I already feel right now like it's choking me and I'm going crazy - once a month?

How long is a month here since you don't have a moon...?

Do those things usually have something to do with each other? There's a thousand days in a year, but that's too many to not have anything in between, so we split it in fourteen and those are the months of each Vala...