"Yes, I was assuming the war had casualties."

"There are fates much worse than death. But yes."

Nod.

"King's free to talk with you if you'd like."

"If he's the person with whom I should talk magic strategy, sure."

"He'll probably bring in other people as well." He leads the way to a conference room.

Follow follow.

King! "I hear Gatesnest now has the good news."

"Assuming the orcs make adequate news-bearers, yeah, which they should."

"What's the plan when you get return word?"

"Depends on what the word is. Maybe I can keep using the point - it's aimed at turning into a gate to the moon, it's not helping eat the planet - maybe I need to attach to a different one but they can find a good world to put it in, maybe none of their scouts come back and we have to put it here even if we don't know how thick the world is..."

Nod. "And then how hard is it going to be to stop Melkor?"

"I am assuming he will not let me paint him."

"He's so uncooperative that way."

"It's possible to destroy things without individually painting or it wouldn't work very well for weeding or pest control, just, more complicated. I will need to know things about him like I needed to know things about oaths."

"I can have people compile comprehensive lists for you. Will it take a few days to develop, like the oaths?"

"Longer, probably."

"How much longer?"

"Uh, month or two, longer if he's complicated in some way? Less if I'm suddenly inspired, this part is arty."

"Maybe I can have Macalaurë come sing inspiring things. The Valar are slow-moving, I don't expect he'll react to the news we have new magic that quickly."

"The real sticking point is the details thing, I have to work around the fact that you probably don't have perfect information on a guy you've been at war with for hundreds of years, even without me in the picture there's every reason to obfuscate."

"We should maybe have some other people empowered to do magic before you attempt it. Or to attempt it instead, if you could teach them enough for that to work."

"I see your point but we don't know how thick the planet is and destroying a god is going to be big - I guess I could send someone to Gatesnest to hook into the moon gate point, if word is good."

"I am confident enough that there's no one on the other side to prefer risking it to risking being without magic. Unless you think it might be big enough to just eat our planet whole, in which case better wait on other worlds."

"I don't think it'd eat the planet whole all at once but if it went down two miles and then started going sideways - a hole thousands of miles deep that begins to expand sideways can do so visible amounts over days -"