He raises an eyebrow. "He must have been entertained. I think we're okay over here, for the time being. Once Maedhros has decided what he wants I am sure it'll be communicated. You can heal anything? Can you bring back the dead?

"Not if they've been dead more than a few minutes. Maybe someday."

"It can be done with enough expertise in your style of magic?"

"I have never heard of a mage who could ressurrect someone more than an hour dead, but before a few hundred years ago no one had ever heard of a mage who could enchant a city to fly with only a little maintainance from mages inhabiting it. As far as anyone can tell, there is no hard limit to what magic can do, only what mages are willing to bear, and to work towards. Today the oldest living Great Mage is nine hundred and seventy-four years old. If I live to two thousand, I will be able to do things he could only dream of."

"I see. Well, good luck. Tell the spiders hi. Need anything?"

"Nah, I'm good. I'll see you on the way back, probably."

"Sure."

Well, that was significantly less depressing. Not that she's going to say so.

He snorts. "Nelyo's quite upbeat if he thinks that's what you need. Take it as a compliment, kiddo."

"Oh. I will, then." It doesn't make the actual problem less of a problem, but she supposes it's something.

"The actual problem is the Enemy."

"Quite. Hence the killing spiders."

"We've tried exterminating them. If you miss even a few small ones, which you will because it's a forest and it's quite literally impossible to get them all, they're right back in ten years. Just in case you get carried away out there."

"Okay, but do you have magic to detect the presence of spiders? I'm not planning to look for them physically."

"Not general-purpose enough that I could go "hey, how many spiders are there in this forest", so if you can do that, go ahead. Actually if you can do that you should probably just will Angband into a puddle, but I assume Maedhros is on that already?"

"I have been assuming that Angband had magic making it sturdier, which would make it harder to will into a puddle. I could be wrong, but on the other hand, to be quite frank his injuries and how he got them make me...cautious...about approaching the place before I'm sure I can take it down or at least get away. And he was practicing magic quite diligently when last I saw him."

"I'm actually surprised he let you leave without insisting you carry a single dose of a fast-acting poison. All his people do."

"It's possible he guessed I could commit suicide via magic. I could."

"Welcome to Beleriand."

"It would probably sound sarcastic if I said 'glad to be here,' but since I'd rather save a large number of other peoples' lives than preserve my own, I actually mean it."

"We actually had to work pretty hard to get here, and were departing from somewhere that was entirely safe, so the sentiment is understood."

"Really? I'm curious what kind of place would be entirely safe from the kinds of things Maedhros showed me..."

"The Enemy has brothers. They decided they didn't like the pain and suffering in the world, so they built their own sealed-off continent without it. We used to live there."

"Uh, why aren't they fighting him?"

"Depending who you ask, either because that would almost certainly destroy the continent and everything living on it or because they're selfish and lazy and can't be bothered."