I had basically come to grips with everything being a lie. In some ways it was easier than half of it being a lie.

Yeah. It would be simpler if we could write him off as no better than the rest, but now there's– a different view on the same news all over again.

And he's genuinely in a difficult position and trying to leverage it to give us our things back and keep his father appeased and minimally dangerous and make progress on the war effort - the engineering notes are genuinely useful -

- I sunk hundreds of years into trying to save him from himself. It's a very tempting project.

Did it work at all? I mean, he is demonstrably less bad than the rest; was that you?

I don't think so. Or - I would believe that he might sometimes have been deterred from being horrible by knowing that I wouldn't put up with it and believing me to be more useful than whatever'd be gained by being horrible in that instance, but that's not the same thing.

Yeah, not at all. I see why "beat the Enemy, move very far East" is such an attractive option.

When the ships burned I felt like I finally had permission to stop trying.

And now that wasn't him. It's not like you need permission; you have every right not to barter your usefulness for his marginally less horribleness... I hope I didn't just undermine the thing letting you feel like you do.

I am not remotely under the impression I have obligations to him. But I cared about him at one point and I feel better about walking away for a reason than walking away because it got hard.

Yeah. I mean, him being occasionally horrible is enough reason by itself, whether or not you it when you signed on, but I can see how it would feel like it'd take something unexpected.

He's never senselessly horrible, is the thing. The ships were senselessly horrible. Alqualondë was purposeful where it wasn't just a disastrous accident, the oath was so he'd have enough of his father's trust to do some steering, the manipulating you was so they'd have magic and was superior to just persuading you he'd be responsible with magic because this way we trust you more and his father trusts him more...

...and we trust him less. I'm not sure what it means that he considered that less important than the rest.

I don't think he thinks we have anything to offer them that he can't get anyway without our cooperation, and I don't think he thinks he's going to provoke us to war.

Not war or he wouldn't want you to trust me. One practitioner was be a big fraction of the total at the time.

He wants us to be, strong but irrelevant, I guess.

Which is reasonable enough from where he stands, means he doesn't have to worry we'll be targets who need protecting but also doesn't have to worry about us shaking up the strategic landscape he's trying to establish for himself.

Which doesn't make it less appalling a - he owes you his life -

I care less about that than the spirits would, to be honest. What he did has the same results regardless of who was going to be the ambassador in the incident with the trap.

What I actually want to say to him is that I very deeply resent how he makes it much safer to work with him if one is an aggressively vindictive person, and that I don't think he actually wants to be a distortion field that makes everyone around him worse.

At least I hope not. We would have benefited from being vindictive, but maybe he'd just see it as understanding incentives rather than being worse.

He shouldn't want to give everyone incentives to hurt him.

Incentives to act "reasonably," maybe, even if that means not leaving openings for him to take advantage of. Doesn't sound very convincing to me either, but if the competition is "yes, Findekáno you're right, I'm acting against my own goals, I'll stop—"

It could possibly be 'yes I'm being self-destructive, thousands of people under my command died in the space of two weeks and now I've decided I want power whatever the price and am not willing to beg for it'. I just hope not, because that'd be more worrying than 'I'll fuck over everyone around me if they're not sufficiently careful, then maybe they'll learn to be careful".

In either case we'd just scale down how much we interact with them and do our own thing instead. We can at least avoid being part of that everyone.

Yeah.

Thanks for telling me. I'm going to go inform the King.

Of course. You deserved the explanation more than anyone.

That's an interesting take on it.  I keep having to remind myself you're from another world.