"You don't have reformed oaths."

"No, we don't. I'm impressed that it was possible retroactively. I don't know that it will be for us."

"It might not be. I haven't asked the Valar yet."

"Orcs should be okay even if it isn't, if we just put them on a planet without Elves."

"That won't do it by itself if they have ongoing expectations about what serving Melkor might mean and he isn't outright dead, or if orcs ever invent the means to travel on their own, and this is a bit of a distraction."

"I apologize."

"He's okay. I understand why you wouldn't take his or my word for that."

Nod.

"I'm going to have an easier time answering questions than volunteering several hundred years of fairly private information. Do you want to think of some and get back to me?"

"When you say he's okay," she says, "what do you mean?"

"The thing we care about most, stopping the Enemy, is going to happen. There will be lots to do and he is happy with how much influence over it he'll have. And he's endlessly smug about all of the other mes. We're sort of - going to take a couple of Years to figure everything out - but I think he'll come out of it satisfied with everything."

"That sounds more like you expect that he will be okay, than that he is now."

"I'm not sure there's any difference? We have forever. Expectations about how things are going to be in the long term are - much more relevant to whether I feel okay than contingent situational stuff. Same for him."

"I think you have higher standards for how much you want to benefit most people."

"I do. If I were trying to do right by him I'd be doing very different things."

"Why aren't you?"

"During the war or now?"

"Both."

"During the war because - the Enemy likes to play games, you know, send out thousands of orcs with their children, see what you do, do you murder babies or redirect all your resources to raising them - escapees, most of whom are alright, but one in ten and even I couldn't identify which ones would murder a hundred people in the night - escapees carrying children who aren't orcs at all but are, you know, old enough to talk, and that means -

- I asked myself if I could do that for as many centuries as it might be needed of me, do it right, do it without ever getting tired or careless or compromising with my own exhaustion. And the answer was no. So I figured out what I'd need, and I took it. It's not doing right by him but it was doing right by the priorities he cared about, most of the time. 

Here - well, now I have to figure out what we are for the rest of eternity and I know it has to change but I don't want to rush ahead, I'm terrified I'll mess it up."

"Do you need help?"

"Yeah, probably."

Nod. "What's the state of things right now?"

"He's sworn to obey me, with exceptions but not as many as it'd take for that to be conscionable even by the standards of my society."

"Can you release him outright or only cease to give him orders?"