"It was unclear to what extent it was prophecy and to what extent it was sentence. It wasn't all prophecy, though - anyway. Fëanor got tired of dealing with the larger host who was loyal to someone else and angry with him about the massacre. He and his loyalists fled in the night and lit the boats afire on the other side, stranding us there. We crossed the Ice - it took years, ten thousand people didn't make it -"

Mirelótë shakes her head.

"He was dead by the time we made it across - he'd tried charging Angband - Macalaurë was ruling them -"

"Macalaurë?"

"Oh, Maitimo'd been captured forty local years earlier - objective, Angband's sped up - they'd given him up for worse than dead -"

"Chip backups can be rolled back to before capture - my husband doesn't remember Utumno -"

"Our Rúmil did."

"- Captured Elves who were not used to make orcs were uploaded from their chips and copied many times in addition to being run sped up."

"That we don't have."

"It seems like it would be hard to do with immaterial souls. People have tried running rescue simulations of their forks - it never goes well -"

"The locals told us to just kill escapees - he only gets them go once they're damaged enough to be more use to him - I was never sure if that was true of Maedhros or not - that's the Sindarin name he chose -"

"There were no escapees, of ours."

"I don't know if there were genuine escapees of Angband but sometimes he did let people go."

"Those either. Orc-ancestors and uploads. Or one and then the other."

Sigh. "Anyway, the two hosts of Noldor sat on opposite sites of a conveniently positioned lake and glowered at each other and eventually Fingon had had about enough of it and needed a tractable Fëanorian and broke into Angband and rescued him. And he was in fact mad, and grotesque to look at and desperately unhappy, but he was still better at diplomacy than any of the rest of them -"

"- you're going to need to use Quenya names if you don't want me to ask who everyone is but from context I assume Findekáno."

Nod. "Thingol banned Quenya when he found out about Alqualondë. It was a terrible overreaction but - to a terrible tragedy which everyone else was just pretending hadn't happened at all, so people found his overreacting more sympathetic than - all the pretending -"

"Banned Quenya. My word." Sigh.

"Anyway. Maedhros surrenders the crown and apologizes for the ships - which he'd tried to prevent, he said, though I don't think we ever quite believed him because when he tried to get things he generally got them -"

"Depends."

"And then they besieged Angband for centuries."

"...okay."

"They were trying to invent something that'd let them take him but they couldn't do it in time. I lived in Doriath, Melian tutored me, she was the only person who maybe could have done it and then - and then the mountains on the northern range all erupted and killed everyone close, and the kingdoms folded, and the survivors fled, and one of them was this traumatized human boy who wandered into Doriath without reaching Melian's attention somehow and wandered into Lúthien and fell in love with her - and she with him -"

"Most of what I know about Lúthien is the music recordings she makes available."

"She was a - very sheltered, very talented, very sincere young woman, who erred the way I think royals often do where they take public goodwill as a bit of a moral imperative - not in the sense that one needs the trust of their people, in the sense that disagreeing with them about anything, or being anything other than precisely what they want you to be, is a betrayal of them - and Doriath wanted her to be naive and inspiring and blissful and irrelevant, and so she was, until she met him and wanted something badly enough to notice that she needn't be irrelevant -"