Ulmo is a very sensible Vala.

Good.

Sensible enough to ask whether the things I'm asking him to retrieve are actually mine?

I am not sure. Possibly.

Well, it's not as if that risk tips the balance. Still worth a try.

And the Valar do not innately have a concept of personal property. Sigh. They tried to convince Fëanáro that the Silmarils were theirs because Valinor was theirs and the Silmarils were made in Valinor. It didn't go over well.

Wow. That– wow.

Silmarils are very definitely Fëanáro's by pretty much every human law, obviously, not to mention the spirits' court of public opinion.

Well, you know how Fëanáro took it. So.

Yeah. He didn't do too great at the respecting personal property either. Not that we are either. At least we don't have mass collateral damage.

I took part in Alqualondë. We were the decisive force, there.

You changed the outcome of Alqualondë, not the fact of it. The spirits might side with you even if you had known everything. Choosing between your relatives and their enemies, it'd be automatic– that's one of the things I've been playing down, obviously.

Leaving the dubious substitute for ethics out of it, you're at fault for what you knew. All you saw was a battle.

All I saw, but not all I knew, I had a thousand years' exposure to my cousins. Sigh.

The sigh sounds like a cue to not say 'a thousand years of them not doing that.' She takes it.

I'd say the obvious moral from what the Valar did is to not try to take the Silmarils, but that one's kind of overdetermined already.

You don't say.

Believe it or not, I do. Well, that and 'if you build a gilded cage don't lock it' and 'watch where you're pointing that Doom or better yet don't point it'... 

How much more reasonable is Ulmo than the rest?

It is possible to interact with him by seeking to do so? He opposed the gilded-cage-and-lock-it idea? He did not murder us all after Alqualondë despite being very angry with us?

That's actually pretty reassuring. Earth's gods are notorious for handling anger badly.

The Valar - I don't know, but one way it has been explained to me is that they cannot have thoughts or desires independent of action, they can't do things like 'I want to kill him but other concerns inveigh against that', to experience something is to alter the world in expression of it. Not good, when they're angry.

If that's accurate, it'd mean he didn't want to kill anyone even when angry?

More importantly it'd imply that the Enemy didn't just kill us all because of some reason other than consequences...

Yes. Or that the Enemy doesn't want to kill us all.

That's even more unsettling.

Nod.

Over the next period of time that probably seems very short to Elves, she prepares to leave and sets off. There's no hurry, to talk to Ulmo, but she leaves eventually and a human taking their time is still just on a different scale.

The ocean is almost like an ocean on Earth - oddly warm, too, if she wades into it.

She does. Addressing Ulmo from the boundary seems appropriate. Modeling him as a powerful Other, which shouldn't be any worse than irrelevant.

It takes three weeks.