"Have one. You have an artifact for attentional capacity, you've been having a surprising day."

"He can't be helping himself," he says to Cor.

"Can't help himself. I can't help myself, you can't help yourself, he can't help himself."

"And a good thing he can't or I'd have had a less enthusiastic audience for my attempt at lessons in Senserke."

"And this urgent project would be further delayed. Please sit down." It's a throne room, with conference tables sort of flanking the throne.

Plop.

"How can I be most helpful to you?"

"...exhibit difficult-to-fake signals of trustworthiness and epistemic responsibility?"

I'm optimistic on convincing you we're not mistaken. We have good information - we need to - and Melkor's never offered anything even resembling a defense of his actions and they're not really the kind that could be defensible in the right light.

"I've been getting that impression, yeah."

The atrocities stopped when he was imprisoned last time. He has a few lieutenants who should also be destroyed, but it's not a distributed organization, and there's every reason to think that with Melkor dead it wouldn't be an organization. We anticipate and are prepared for some deadman's switch-type consequences of destroying him, but we don't think there's any meaningful respect in which the war would drag on, or some more important thing be destabilized.

"I can't really imprison anyone. My magic can do 'dead', 'burnt', 'erased from existence'... not really 'imprisoned'. And it's progressively harder to do more abstract things, I once annoyed my teachers by asking questions similar in character to 'but can I destroy somebody's freedom."

If you could destroy someone's oaths then we could get orcs loose.

"...oooooh."

Easy to test without bothering any orcs, too, we could swear to minor things.

"I like this plan. It does require me to either have a point here or use the one at home but it's worthwhile in its own right and also then you wouldn't have to kill the orcs to let me talk to 'em."

If it works they might be perfectly tolerant of living among Elves but they also might, even once freed, want to help Melkor to protect their families or hate Elves because we murder their children or something, I can't guarantee that deoathed orcs can be safely sent off to live happy civilian lives. But maybe.

"Possible I could send them home with messages, aren't any Elves there."

- that'd work, yep. 

"Suddenly orcs appear in Gatesnest with letters for the moonshot people! 'Hello, moonshot people, here is confirmation that the weirdo's long shot worked!'"

"Moonshot?"

"Next most plausible idea - well, from my opinion on plausibility rankings - was 'gate to the moon'. This has a lot of - secondary necessary steps, like 'figure out how to breathe on the moon long enough to hook into a point there' and 'figure out what to do after the moon has been eaten' and 'avoid horrible tide-related disasters' and so on, whereas if my thing worked it'd just work - wasn't anticipating that the place'd be inhabited but even that might be more beneficial on net than not - but if they figure it out they can buy time."

"I don't think our moon is big enough to be at all useful for that but maybe your world has a very big moon? Anyway, getting the orcs out of here so they can't report to the Enemy that we have new unprecedented magic, inspiring him to try something, is a good solution."

"Our moon is smaller than the planet - even than the planet is now - but still pretty big. I don't want to send many orcs, I'm hooked into the moonshot disappearance point but if something about their project changes and they need to stop using it I won't exactly get the memo, so I should use magic only very sparingly. A test on oath destruction, repeat on one or two orcs, send one or two orcs."

Nod. "So you know, it will involve killing orcs to take one or two orc captives."