And I should have suggested it. You thought on your feet well with the second one.

Thanks.

He's been growing his hair out inhumanly quickly; it's not quite long enough to braid yet. He clips it back. He sings. He relays things north. 

They can't disarm until Sauron is definitely gone but they lay the groundwork to do it afterwards. They set up to have elections (in a distributed council system the public votes on laws, rather than on leaders).  They work on human immortality. 

Thuringwethil visits. This one is a mage.

"Hey. Somebody's been impersonating you."

"Oh? I'm the awesomer one."

"I'm sure. Mind swearing a thing to justify my surety?"

"Do I get something out of it?"

"I was assuming you don't like being impersonated. Do you want my frivolously magical chicken recipe?"

"I'll take your frivolously magical chicken recipe. I swear that this isn't actually an adequate check because my impersonator is probably Sauron and he's good enough at illusions to make you think he swore to things."

...sigh. "You roll a chicken leg in salted flour and dried parsley, you mix a drop of blood with a splash of lemon juice and a squeeze of garlic oil and pour it on, chant is 'I have only begun to burn'. Pepper to taste."

"You're a sweetheart. I found some more worlds! One has acid in the atmosphere and two are too cold for humans to survive even a couple minutes on and the rest don't have atmospheres but so it goes. I'm gonna have to adapt the ritual to get myself landed near a sun."

"Oh, I was imagining you could just travel to one the long way real fast."

"Way faster than you but it'd still take weeks and that's boooooring."

"Fair enough. Uh, how sure are you that it was Sauron impersonating you?"

"Can't think who else. The Balrogs could do it but they're not that creative or they wouldn't be Balrogs, you know? Did the fake me wanna fuck you."

"Not as much as they wanted to be a mage but I was pretending we'd agreed on that to fake them out and they weren't averse."

"Sauron."

"Balrogs would have been squicked?"

"They can do lotsa humanoid forms but they take shortcuts, the bodies aren't functional."

"...great. Uh, anyway, I may or may not have assassinated him."

"How do you ambiguously assassinate Sauron?"

"He wanted to be a mage. I sent him to the empty planet. With a fake ritual. Aiming to drop him directly on a point."

"I like you."