"Yes."

"...is there a reason you haven't filled  it up with heavy rocks and then flown it over the fortress and dropped the rocks on Moringotto's head?"

"My time since I arrived has been occupied with learning Quenya wrong, being threatened by a Balrog, killing the Balrog, and teaching Curufinwë Atarinkë how to use some of my tools so he can research how to prevent me from dying of old age in a hundred years as would otherwise happen. Today I planned to start learning about this war. Then I came out of the shuttle and you were having an argument."

"You're dying? Curufin offered to help another person? You killed a Balrog?"

"I am followed by astonishing events wherever I go."

"Did they tell you we're all Doomed? That's pretty important, if they're asking you to fight with them."

"...I may have missed any mention of the Doom. Go on."

"So first thing, which is just a general point you should keep in mind: my cousins are dishonest as fuck, and in deep denial about basically everything.

Second thing, the Valar - did they tell you about the Valar? They created this world, and taught and guided us while we lived in Valinor with them -"

"...I haven't heard directly about them, no."

"They don't act directly. They're too powerful. Moringotto is their brother, and the last time they were directly at odds they nearly crushed the world between them. But they try to tip the scales, sometimes, and they'll step in eventually. Maybe. Anyway, my uncle committed a series of atrocities on his way out of Valinor, and the Valar laid a Doom on him and all who followed him: that all things we began would turn to ruin, that we would know every grief imaginable before our painful deaths, and that those of us who survived the Age would wish we hadn't."

"...That sounds..." He searches his Quenya vocabulary for an appropriate description, then shakes his head and settles for hoping the elf telepathy is working in his favour. (The thing that it sounds is stupid and petty and vindictive and generally the sort of behaviour that leads him to question someone's right to continue being a godlike figure.)

She laughs. "You've never been that angry? I've been that angry. They betrayed us, you know. They took the boats across the sea and lit them on fire and left us stranded in desperate conditions in the ice. Do you know how many people died? I don't have the power to call down Dooms, but I help my brother hide from his daughter that he still has nightmares, every night, about watching his wife die, and if I could call down Dooms I might be tempted."

His vocabulary is failing him a little bit again.

She realizes this and shakes her head apologetically. "I'm sorry. I - do you have cousins?"

"...Yes. One."

Much is going unsaid here. Some of it is about his cousin Ivan; some of it is about why the Doom is so fundamentally a bad idea. Maybe he'll think of the right words in a minute. Maybe he can hope to rely on elf telepathy.

"If he left you and your family to die somewhere, wouldn't you be - more than angry?"

"Yes. But."

God, how does he even begin to explain...

"The answer to atrocities is not, can never be, more atrocities. Otherwise it just keeps getting worse with no end in sight. I... I want to tell a story, I don't think I have the words for it in Quenya, but I want to try anyway."

She pokes one of the seats tentatively. Sits down. Crosses her legs. Uncrosses them. "Okay."

"Where I come from, flying ships like this are common. Some of them can cross vast distances on paths called wormholes - much farther than it would be possible to travel otherwise; so far you could fly at the fastest speed possible for twelves of twelves of lifetimes of Men and never reach your destination. When my people learned to make those, we left the place where we started and travelled far down those paths, settling wherever we found a place where some of us could live. One of the first such places to be settled was Barrayar, my home. But when the settlers had only begun to build their new home, the wormhole collapsed, became impassable. They had been relying on it for supplies, for a connection to the rest of civilization; without it, they could not sustain themselves as they were. There was... fear, chaos, death. A huge amount of important knowledge was lost. It was six lifetimes of Men before the rest of the universe found us again."

"I'm sorry."

He smiles slightly.

"Thank you. There's worse to come, I'm sorry to say. All this happened before I was alive. So, these paths: Barrayar had only one to begin with, and lost that, and gained a new one when explorers from another place found us at the end of a long route from a place with many paths, a place called Komarr. While Barrayar had been losing knowledge and slowly rediscovering it, everyone else had been going on without us, surpassing even the things we'd had and lost. It made us..." the word he's looking for is 'vulnerable'; he realizes he doesn't have it and goes on without. "Easy to take advantage of. A very powerful group of people from a place called Cetaganda bribed the Komarrans to let them pass by Komarr with their armies, so they could take them down the path to Barrayar and conquer it. They did that. The Barrayarans of the time resisted, but the Cetagandans had more people, better weapons, better transportation..."

"Men," she murmurs.

He shrugs.

"Other people gave us a little help, and we learned very fast, under that pressure. Twenty years later, we fought the Cetagandans again and won. They left. I still wasn't alive yet, but my father was; he led the conquest of Komarr, because we couldn't let the Komarrans keep the power they had over us after the use they had made of it, and he did it as gently as possible, because he didn't want to start things down the path of people committing atrocities out of anger at the atrocities other people committed in response to their atrocities. Almost no one was killed. At first. It was going very well. Then someone on the Barrayaran side decided that he was too angry, that the Komarrans should suffer for what they'd done, and he gathered up about twelve-twelves and five-twelves of the Komarrans who might have been involved in the decision to let the Cetagandans pass, and he killed them all. Because he was angry."

She stares at him. "And then?"

"It stopped going well. The Komarrans were angry about that, so they started committing atrocities against the Barrayarans, and the Barrayarans, who had already been angry about the thing with Cetaganda, got angrier, and in the middle of all this was my father desperately trying to keep order while the Komarrans blamed him for what his subordinate did and many of the Barrayarans blamed him for not having done more of it, and it was obvious to both sides that the other side was evil and deserved to suffer. The point I am trying to make here is that no one is so evil they deserve to suffer, and when people start thinking that other people deserve to suffer for the wrongs they did, horrible cycles of revenge are what you get out of it."