Slight chuckle. "Complicated knitting." 

"...more seriously, we try to understand the relationship between the topology of different structures of magical energy and the effects they have in the world, and then experiment until we get the ones we want. At least that's what I do. I never was taught spell development and it's entirely possible that they've got some much more efficient method in Absalom." 

" - that actually sounds fascinating."

"It is! I feel very lucky to have been born in a world where the very fabric of reality bends itself to the exercise of reason. Also sometimes I'm wildly wrong and just make things explode." 

" - will you teach me?"

"I think I'd better if I'm teaching you magic at all, since I'll have to reinvent almost everything anyway. Will you show me how you come up with magic songs?"

"Gladly."

Aww, Élie likes him. 

...Élie likes him, which means he's in the middle of making an important strategic error. He's far from home, alone except for Félix, in the company of an ancient warrior-prince who thinks humans are a half-step above brute beasts – and he's been told he can use his unique magical knowledge to defeat an evil god. In this world, he's not a wash-out who can't hang second-circle spells. Here, he's the most powerful wizard in the world. He's being offered everything he's ever wanted by a man he should, under no circumstances, begin to trust. Magic's fun. He'd better keep his head. 

"I believe you were going to show me some maps, then." 

He has lots of credible evidence that his people are three hundred years into waging a war against an evil god. If it's faked they were very thorough. They have maps of Valinor where they started, and their first scouting maps of this continent and then the subsequent ones as they took back more and more of it, and maps of what they can learn of Angband from this distance, and records of food shipments and assignments and battles and incidents relating to released prisoners before they adopted the sad but necessary policy of just executing them on the spot. They have letters to and from Doriath, urging them to help with the war. They have contracts with the dwarves for weapons and ores and help with the war. They have complaint letters from the dwarves about late payments during a major battle for the north. They have so so many notes on all of the languages spoken by every people they've run across, including the petty-dwarves hated by the rest of the dwarves and the various tribes of humans and (though it's unclear if this part is a joke) all the local varieties of animal. They have plant and horse breeding records. They have decrees from the King on topics mostly related to allocation of resources for the war.

Élie needs to take 15 minutes to prep Comprehend Languages but after that it does look pretty credible. (That is, of course, what he expected). 

"What happens when you let the prisoners live?"

"Lot of them ask you to kill them. Lot of them ask you to - kill them so they won't even wake up in the gods's hands, which we don't know how to do. Some of them act normal and then one day stab their family, out of nowhere. Some of them never do that but if you ask them if you did them a favor, later, they  - they hate being asked that, so it's hard to know if you're getting a true answer, but they generally say no, not really."

"We don't know how to spare souls from the afterlives entirely, but we do have ways to capture them before they go. We're – almost certain they don't have any conscious experiences while they're trapped like that." 

"Well, you'd have takers. Not that many. We haven't had all that many captured and it's even rarer for them to be released."

"You said that Quendi go to the gods when you die. Does that include your Enemy?"

"No. We go to Mandos, and he restores us to life if he sees fit back in Valinor, where the other gods have power."

"At least it sounds like reinventing final blades isn't a screamingly urgent priority." 

He's got no idea how he'd being to reinvent final blades – they're proper Artifacts – but there are circumstances in which he'd spend the rest of his life trying. 

"We don't think much of Mandos but preferring to never wake isn't - the normal attitude about it. He sends you back, he just twists you up a bit first. And you can - untwist yourself, after a fashion."

"Our plan is to get everyone back."

"Well, I'm all in favor, but we will have to figure out that god-killing thing first."

"It's a ten or twenty thousand year project, isn't it? You Quendi have the advantage of us there. It's very difficult for humans to live in a world where our battles mean life or much worse than death for millions of people on the scale of years but the war itself takes millenia." 

"I imagine it would be very hard. One of my projects is addressing aging, so that humans would be around longer. I don't have it working, though."

"We haven't solved that one and I think we've got more to work with. Of course, it also looks less urgent. ...It does seem more likely than not to me that humans here go to the same afterlives we do. If that's so, eternal life is much less important than making sure they don't end up in one of the unimaginably horrific ones." 

"What causes that?"

"Being Evil. If you don't have this concept, the word won't translate well. It's a metaphysical quality baked into the nature of the universe, and Galtan doesn't have a separate word for things an individual speaker thinks are morally wrong. If you want to distinguish, you might say 'unvirtuous'." 

" - well, I think everyone's unvirtuous, by the standards of the gods."

"It would surprise me very much if your gods decide what counts."