"All right. I don't suppose you can modify my armor so it works while I annoyingly now have an extra hand?"

"Show me what it should look like?"

"I meant what it should look like modified for two hands," she says after a stunned pause.

"I'm not really sure. I'm accustomed to fighting this way, if there's a way to avoid modifying the entire secondary weapon design."

"The secondary weapon design was very clever! But I'm not really an engineer, giant glass spiderbubble notwithstanding. I should see if Illia can figure something out when she wakes up."

"I will take it to the person who designed it. He'll come up with something, he just can't mold metal with his thoughts."

"Once someone else has a design, I can implement it."

"I'll let him know. Do you want armor? We can work up something like this in your proportions, the metal is mithril and even without any magic beyond what goes into the crafting we are effectively invincible."

"I think I would like that. What's mithril?"

"It's a metal that is unusually conducive to being enchanted and therefore possible to craft nearly-indestructible things out of. It's also accordingly possible to design to be resistant to other magic. I'm actually uncertain if you could instantly kill me, were I armored."

"I have no desire whatsoever to kill you but it might be a good idea to see if it does in fact resist my kind of magic."

"I should have done the test yesterday while already armored, it takes a while to put on." But he nods to someone who starts doing so.

"I think we all had other things on our minds yesterday. Speaking of, what's up with that Thauron guy?"

"He is one of Morgoth's more powerful lieutenants. If you fought him you would lose."

"That part I gathered when you told me to run."

"He can, broadly, either make a battlefield awful for an army or kill someone specifically. If he had any idea what you were capable of I think he would attempt the latter."

"He tried to stop me leaving, with winds. It didn't work. I...hope I could survive if he decided to prioritize killing me. I'm not confident of it."

"It seems likely, but not likely enough to warrant the risk, not when we were really only there to ensure that a fight my cousins would otherwise have lost had two fronts and therefore gave them a chance of getting out alive."

"Sounds like the right decision. Of course, if he's not quite as bad as Morgoth, and I've already promised myself that I'm going to get strong enough to kill him, somewhere along the way I'm sure I'll manage to get him too. Assuming I don't die before then."

"An assumption I have more confidence in than I did a few days ago, since you actually do retreat when so told. Let's ride out; on the way you can check whether my armor does anything about your magic."

"I really don't want to die, and I trust you enough to follow your orders. Ride? I don't know how to ride a horse."

"In that case we'll ride and you can fly."

"Will it be important to have horses once we're there?"

"For us, yes. It is much easier to fight large numbers of people on the ground who have swords if you are not on the ground and have much longer swords. You can fly, so probably not for you."