Local years or more like mine?

Thousand of your years. This world switches to your years in - sixty of its years, six hundred of yours.

...Why?

I can't tell, which means I have something to do with it.

Do you and everybody else with prophecies ever get together and pool everything you know in case you have something one of them can use?

Can't. If I tried to share this with Maitimo he would not see anything. If I tried to say it he would not hear anything. If I were the sort of person to try to kill him in advance I wouldn't have seen anything that would cause me to want to.

...but you can go through me.

I was not at all sure this would work until I tried it. I am not sure you'll be able to tell him either. And fate is - sticky, it endures for ten thousand years after people who aren't in the plan start appearing - I am worried that sharing it somehow precipitates it, I am worried that sharing it somehow fails to prevent it - I am not at all sure I'm approaching this rightly. But I ended up concluding that he was unlikely to do anything much worse.

There is a lot more I could share, things that have more obvious avenues to cause harm much sooner, but those I think will wait until I have reason to trust you.

I suppose that's reasonable. Although if I do turn out to be a reliable prophecy transmission mechanism in general that seems like too good an exploit to turn down.

Reliable prophecies about weapons that can shred cities and poison the soil around them for a thousand years?

If they're going to happen unless somebody in particular knows about it, and nobody but me can tell them? shrugs Kib. I mean, yes, I can see why you'd want to know I was an acceptable waypoint for information of that nature, but it sounds like the worst case scenario is that cities will be shredded and soil will be poisoned, which is already slated to happen, so...

Only two cities, in the fated version of the future. There are a lot more cities than that.

I'm not calling for needless carelessness, I'm saying this looks like an occasion for some modest risk-taking.

I agree wholeheartedly. That is why I am here.

Nod.

I can give my oath to things I've said, so you know I've spoken the truth as I understand it. But I have to give it spoken, osanwë does not work. Do you speak enough Quenya to understand me?

Might depend on the phrasing. Would it work if I gave you a sentence in the common?

I am not willing to trust you so far as to say an oath in a language I don't speak.

Oh, good point. ...But it would in the general case? That's interesting. Uh, I know enough Quenya to assemble "I swear I said the truth today", if you need a more limited time frame or something I will need to look stuff up.

"I swear I said the truth today."

...how exact-words-dependent are these things?

One doesn't exactly experiment with them. Intent - of the speaker and as understood by the listener - matter.

Thennnn my Quenya is not actually good enough, that's not airtight and if I'm going to go try to tell Maitimo that he cuts his way through swaths of people for unclear reasons I'd like to have it airtight.