Miles awaits signs of a response. And reminds himself to figure out how to approximate Elven hearing. The microphones on the exterior of his power armour are capable of it, it's just a matter of processing the noise into something comprehensible to him.

Maglor smiles faintly after a second. "Our good deed for the Age. I am not serious," he adds at Miles' expression. "I would like to do right by our cousins; it was not intended this way, but things turned out quite badly. And I think it'll help Maitimo's recovery to keep faimly politics peaceable even without his intervention."

"I am very happy when things stay peaceable," says Miles. "And sometime we should perhaps exchange stories about unintended results..."

"I'm not inclined to offer an explanation of what they've no doubt told you, not right now," he says. "But I understand why you might demand to hear it."

"I'm not inclined to make demands. But I find myself telling a lot of stories around here. By local standards, my short life has had an astonishingly high density of events. I think it might be useful to share perspectives."

"How long would it take you, with all of your technology at your disposal, to build a fleet of ocean-going boats?"

"...I imagine that depends substantially on how urgently I needed a fleet of ocean-going boats. Why?"

"Imagine that we learned orcs were ravaging a continent east of here, and we needed to land everyone there as quickly as possible while there were still any civilians left to save."

"...I have no idea how long it's supposed to take to build a fleet of ocean-going boats, but I would be surprised if it took me longer than half a year and I'd be aiming for substantially less than that."

He shakes his head and smiles. "I think my father might have been able to do it that swiftly also, though we were hampered by having no instructions as to how. He was unwilling to wait. He decided instead to steal some."

"If there were boats sitting around that weren't in use for projects more important than rescuing orc victims, that... doesn't sound too unreasonable."

"Their owners opened fire on us. 

I actually don't know if that's what started it - it might have started with a scuffle on the decks of one of the ships, we were tryng to move quickly and didn't mind tossing a few people overboard - they could swim, all the Eldar can swim - and perhaps it escalated from there. The first thing I noticed was that they had opened fire on us, on the boats that were already leaving the harbor, and so we tried to get to their archers to stop them, and people spilled out of the houses and into the streets with fishing spears and gutted us. 

My cousin Findekáno arrived at that point. He saw that we were all moments from being dead and charged in, with many many more people. When the fighting ended we'd lost a significant part of our people. Everyone had a dead family member and lots had several. They'd lost almost no one, and they were angry and furious to learn we'd started it by stealing the ships, and they had aided in the theft. There were already differences between the host but that night cracked them wide open."

Miles winces in deep sympathy. "Hell. I'm sorry. That's... exactly the sort of disaster of unintended consequences I was thinking of, yeah."

"At that point the god of the sea lashed out, sank some of the boats - we tried to get to people, but if a Vala wants you dead it's over - and then spoke the Doom, sentencing us to fail in our mission and die on these shores."

"Which strikes me as very high on the list of stupidest possible responses to the situation."

"It did not help. Now we were in the north of the continent, losing people to grief and lingering injuries, and there were skirmishes every time our people made contact with theirs. My uncle told my father that he was a monster - which was untrue, but a comprehensible sentiment - that every single death was on his hands - true in some senses - and that it'd have been better for everyone if he'd never been born - depends how bad the Doom gets, I suppose. My father can safely be assumed to have said things just as bad, of course. And my father decided he couldn't win the war with an army under someone else's command whose members hated him and kept fighting with his, so when we reached this shore he said not to go back.

We did not imagine they would cross the Ice. We assumed they'd turn back and stay in Valinor."

"...Yeah," sighs Miles. "What a mess. I'm sorry."

"For us? We came out of that all right. I appreciate your condolences for Alqualondë. We've been hesitant to offer them, even to each other, because it was our fault."

"I'm sorry for everyone. My sympathy is not a limited resource. And I know how unpleasant it can be to have to live with doing unintended harm. It's not worse than being the one harmed, but it's not fun."

"It was easier when we weren't living right next to it," he says with half a smile. "I cannot help but be angry with them for crossing at such risk to their lives, making us accountable for even more. I don't want to renounce my father and his final choices, but I don't know how to set anything right without doing so."

"Do you want to hear my unintended consequences story?"

"Go ahead."

"When I was a child, I needed a bodyguard, for reasons that are a story all their own. He had a daughter about my age, and we were close friends growing up, she and I. My bodyguard was... not the sort of person it's easy to be close to, but he loved his daughter and she loved him, and I trusted him and relied on him and appreciated him deeply. As a small child I would sit on his shoulders when I needed a better vantage, it being difficult to see most things when you're about this tall," he gestures the height of his younger self. "Then when we were a little older, not quite at the point of adulthood but getting close to it, my friend started to be curious about where she'd come from, who her mother was. Her father hardly ever spoke of it. She knew almost nothing. We did a great deal of speculating about where this woman might be and what might have happened to drive the pair of them apart, whether it was that she'd died or left him or that they had been separated by circumstances outside their control... We even took a trip to what we thought might have been her mother's home planet and tried to see if we could find her on a war memorial, since we were pretty sure they'd met during a particular war, and might have been on opposite sides."

He pauses for a moment, steadying himself in the face of old memories.

"There was no sign of any such person, and my friend's father didn't question our interest in war memorials the way he might have if he'd thought we might find her mother there. We gave up the search and continued to travel, just for the diversion. My friend was disappointed, but she enjoyed seeing new things and new places and hearing new ideas, even without the answers she'd been looking for. And then... under circumstances that also very much make for their own story, I happened to find my friend's mother. She was just the right age, looked strikingly like my friend - they even had the same name. There was no doubting it. I thought it would be a wonderful surprise to reunite them all, mother and daughter and lost loves. So I arranged for them to meet as though by accident, without telling any of them ahead of time. It seemed like it would be - more special, that way. Nicer for them."

"The Eldar...can't raise a child without both parents. That sounds extremely painful for all involved."

"Among Men it's... not the most common arrangement, but not a remarkable one, either. Anyway. I still don't know exactly what happened between my friend's parents before they went their separate ways, but I do know what happened when they reunited, because I was there. My friend's mother looked at my friend's father with terror and loathing the likes of which I had never seen before in my life, and he looked at her as though the sight of her caused him incredible pain and transcendent joy at the same time, and he said she was still beautiful, and she killed him on the spot."