That should not take too long. The Noldor are gifted with languages.

Good.

This, it's almost definitely going to correct the misconceptions about magic's enforcement priorities. Can't hide it once there's a library's worth of stuff people can read. You are sure we can fix it anyway in time once the war's over, right?

Yes. Or suggest to people that it is already shifting, which as I understand it it is, just slowly, right?

It is, in some but not all of the arenas that need it. It's at least safe to imply things about it.

It might be a good idea to think about how or whether we will keep these safe from Fëanorian spying.

It might be completely impossible, in the worst case where they're spying by palantir and can just read over our shoulders. If we just tell them...they were the more cautious about flattening Angband, and turned out to be right. The original objection might not apply. Problem there is that all my 'taking Maitimo at face value' alarms are going off.

Nod. And if we wrongly trust them with this much information -

A lot of it's no more dangerous than what we already gave them. A lot of it isn't. Translations as they get made, maybe?

If they have good spying they'll just learn English.

If their spying's good enough that they can see the English, we can't really stop them anyway.

If I knew for sure that they could see everything we were doing, I would do something differently - they can't have perfect knowledge, they did have to go get the ritual from Melian, they were not just watching us...

There hadn't been many awakenings to see, at the time.

I do think it's unlikely that they know more than where the library is. At most. But it's probably not possible to be sure.

Worst-case - they can read this, they are willing to pick a fight - what happens?

Probably we win because of numbers. There'll be a lot more variety in what magic is available, and not a lot of things are immune to being overwhelmed. Unless they escalate all the way, and that's several steps beyond picking a fight.

We only have an advantage of numbers because they have not bothered awakening as many people yet.

We also have more people in total, but that just means they'd have to do a sudden push.

We could open books only for short periods and with a lot of other ones open simultaneously? To take advantage of the fact that there are only so many palantiri and nothing else is reaching here.

Might be better than nothing. I suppose they can already kill us all with no warning if they wanted to do that.

Could they? How? We've got the upper hand magically.

The 'drop rocks' trick still works fine.

Right. They don't have to be hypersonic rocks to kill us.

Humans handled something similar by promising that if one country used an unblockable city-killing weapon they'd escalate until the collateral damage was 'everyone.' It worked, no one launched, but if it comes to that reading minds would be worth it.

Yes. And it does not work if you could plausibly get everybody the first attempt. I don't think they will, but since they can maybe there is no point in worrying about anything else.

It's harder if we're spread out. Some of us will probably be here for a while to come, eventually some in our fallback city full of demesnes and that one might actually be able to handle falling rocks....

Well. I feel less confident in my assessment that it is meaningful that they could have hurt us and haven't, if they are soon going to lose the ability.

And they have to know we're planning to spread out if they know anything.

Yep.

Sigh.