"Better wait, then, yeah." Sigh. "We might want to evacuate even if we're using a disappearance point elsewhere, it wouldn't surprise me if he has something rigged to take the continent with him. Less Doriath."

"Uh. Yeah, that's the sort of thing you'd want to avoid."

"I don't know how to avoid it but we can send everyone nonessential south and have the ships ready for everyone else. I don't suppose 'any contingencies of Melkor's' is a thing you can destroy?"

"Uh, probably not and even if I can it's vague enough that we're in losing toes territory."

"I'd rather lose a toe than a continent but if it's not possible it's not possible. We could try to flip a Maia, get more information, but anything like that risks the Enemy finding out we're planning this."

"How would you go about doing that?"

"We've got Angband besieged, we're in range, we can talk to them. Find someone who isn't sworn to immediately tell Melkor anything of interest to him - some of his servants are more 'helping out whoever's the biggest guy around' than loyally devoted to the cause -"

"If you can pull it off it might be worth it for the extra detail, not just because then I get to live but because if I get it wrong enough it won't work."

"If it's likely to be lethal it should really be someone who can come back from being dead, rather than you, but the point still stands. I'll - think about how to pull that off."

"It'll take longer for it to be someone else - they can't just be artistic generically they have to know the forms in use. Maybe you have a painter who's good at artistic conventions the way Curufinwë is at languages, I guess that would do it? I don't know how much of a problem taking longer will be."

"The war's been going a very long time but I do expect he'll react to the sudden manifestation of new capabilities on our part, and Valar are slow to react but we can't rely on that to an arbitrary degree. How long would it take you to develop a way to do the oaths thing remotely, now that you can do it at all?"

"A few weeks maybe. It'd represent a greater expenditure of power."

"So. We need enough information to kill Melkor, ideally without killing whoever does it - I'd trade a life to have him gone a week sooner but there are additional complications involved in making the risk fall to someone who's agreed to let me make those trades with their safety, and most things which decrease the risk to the caster also increase the odds of success. - there's additional reason not to have you be the caster, though, if a lethal failure occurs we need someone around knowledgeable enough to try again. Melian could answer questions, but giving her enough information to make her likely to answer also runs a substantial risk of tipping her off that we're doing something which endangers Doriath. Melian can usefully be thought of as a safety-of-Doriath maximizer with unclear beliefs about how much of a risk the Enemy poses her and excessively pessimistic beliefs about how much of a risk we pose. Alternatively, we could try to convince some of Melkor's hangers-on who are there for convenience to join us in exchange for sparing them. But we don't know what oaths they're under, and it'd take valuable spell invention time to develop a way to deoath them remotely."

"- in case it affects any of this I am not sure that even an Elf mage who died doing a bad spell could come back. If I died of this I would not leave a corpse - or at least not a whole one."

" - that does affect it. If it eats the soul we're presumably gone as thoroughly as you. We could use humans who aren't also needed for spell consulting, though. Maybe elderly ones. I suppose they'd learn more slowly. Can you make confident predictions about whether you have enough information to not die before you cast the spell?"

"Not especially, as long as there could be something substantial enough missing or wrong."

"All right. Are there additional considerations to balance here."

"Maybe but I won't know about them till I get a messenger. Or don't."

"I think my preferred way to balance the considerations raised up to this point is to have you rush a version of Melkor-killing based on everything we presently know - that'd take a month, right? - to have for use if the Enemy decides to make a move and suddenly everything for a hundred miles around catches magic fire."

"If he can do that why, uh, doesn't he?"

"I don't know. Candidates include 'this is more fun', 'he's worried that'd inspire the Valar to intervene', 'he is building up to it', 'it wouldn't be aesthetically satisfying', or 'there are things he anticipates being unable to do once he controls the world and that we're making substantial progress on'."

"You've been having a war with this guy for hundreds of years and do not have an idea of how he strategizes?"

"Since we besieged Angband his strategy has been to occasionally send orcs in easily-overcome numbers, to have a lieutenant go get the humans to start a religion and hunt down and exterminate nomadic Elf tribes, to occasionally use his Maiar in small precision operations to try to take Elf prisoners, to release fucked-up Elf prisoners, to offer us a parley, and to breed bigger scarier monsters. That is a complete list of all of the things he has done."

"Huh."

"I know that 'he seems to just be trying to be evil' is a simplistic view of one's enemies popular in many contexts where it's inappropriate, but."