"He's not going to hurt any of your people."

"I would like to say mine wouldn't hurt a fly but while he's generally sane and has never hurt me his harmlessness is in fact historically narrow and conditional. Still, I wouldn't expect him to show up at a peace talk under false pretenses."

"I would like to be somewhere else before mine is invited but I think he ought to be invited, there is probably quite a large achievable change in his behavior with the right incentives and that matters."

"I don't know where to send you. Maybe Círdan would take you since you are not, in fact, you."

"There's a sense in which it makes sense to hold me responsible for whatever I apparently would have gotten into without Leareth and Vanyel showing up to complicate our war, though."

"There's not no sense in which that's true but it'd be more true if not for the intervening decades in Angband. I think you are meaningfully a different person - and regardless of what kind of person you are, what happened shouldn't have."

"Well, I'd be happy to go to Círdan's if he'll have me."

"Círdan is?"

"The ruler of one of the other Elven polities in the world at this time. There's also Lothlorien but I would expect him to be even less welcome there, and Eryn Lasgalen which definitely won't take him, and ...various human countries?"

"I like human countries, especially if they're familiar with Quendi and know how to interface with osanwë and decorate livable places for us. I lived in Haven until I was captured and was very happy."

"Decorate livable places?"

"We can't live in ugly environments! It is a sort of embarrassing weakness as a species but there you go. I have had success with analogizing to horrific background noise all the time."

"That's so weird! I guess that explains why it's so pretty here."

"Yes. It's lovely," he adds to Elrond, sincerely. "Everything we hoped we could eventually build in the Outer Lands."

- nod. "We also die of being confined, which - those compulsions to not move were very unsafe -"

"He intended to kill me if I escaped. We talked about it. Or - not even just if I escaped, if anything outside his model of why it was safe to keep me happened. This wasn't my fault but it's still that. - I have been assuring myself that if I ask to be carried around your city I will be -"

"Of course you will be."

"Then I should be okay for at least a little longer, just knowing that, and later you can give me a tour."

Belrun shivers.

"Are the compulsions not removable, then?"

"A mage could do it. I'd prefer not - him - any version of him - but there are other mages competent to do it."

"Vanyel from my world, maybe? Since you know him? If we can get ahold of my world."

"Yes, that'd be fine."

"I was thinking I'd try to Fetch letters home. I don't have a clue how I'd go about it but if it was possible to Gate between worlds while Gating to the other end of the planet remained unsolved then it might be feasible."

"Ooooh. That's a great idea. I don't know very much about the interworld Gate but I can send you random snippets of things I overheard."