"Yes. I'm glad I fixed my eyes, though, that's not too overwhelming and it really is worth it."

"It's very useful particularly for fighting in the dark, which you're soon going to be doing. That was a good call."

"Yeah, I really don't want to give him any advantages I can avoid."

"It's going to be fine. He won't keep this up for more than a few years, and then we'll figure out a counterattack."

"I am legitimately disturbed by the number of orcs he has."

"He can manipulate time within in Angband. Orcs reach adulthood in three or four years and have ten or so children a year and are, since they're us, immortal till they're killed."

"And all of that is incredibly disturbing."

"You still do not know the half of what we did to get here so we could stop him."

"You're right, I don't."

"That wasn't particularly me insisting on telling a story, unless that's how you want to pass the time. I can, but there's a lot of politics, and -" he shrugs. "You seem like someone who'd rather politics quietly be handled such that they don't interrupt becoming a god. So I haven't been sharing them."

"I think," she says slowly, "that if I become a god it would be difficult to keep politics out of it altogether. Possibly I could just delegate that part to my sister, but right now she's getting all of her information from your cousins."

"I mean, Maedhros is also doing magic every waking moment and needs less sleep than you and will probably be a god not all that long after you, if he does not end up killing himself, and he's less likely to do that now that we'll probably just resurrect him."

"Much as I approve of Maedhros being alive I'm not going to bring him back against his will, if it comes down to it."

"Yeah, nor would we. I asked him. He did not seem entirely pleased that it existed as an option but said that if it did he would take it. Also, it's possible he'd still be in pain in the Everlasting Darkness, so if we don't fulfill the Oath bringing him back's more important."

"Good point," she winces. Then, "Wait, what?"

"Has someone explained to you that one difference between Elves and Men is that we can give our word bindingly and unbreakably, in a way that actually metaphysically binds us to it? We can. 

"No one has explained this to me. What did he swear?"

"All of us swore. Amras who you're trying to bring back to life and my father, too. To retrieve the Silmarils from the Enemy and whatever else withholds them."

"Why? And is the Everlasting Darkness in a different place from the rest of your dead, because if it is then someone really should have brought this up when I asked where they were when I started trying to bring back Amras."

"We're pretty sure they're in Mandos. All of us go to the Everlasting Darkness if we fail but we haven't failed yet."

"I don't mean why do you go to the Everlasting Darkness if you fail in your oath, I mean why did you swear an oath that had that as a failure mode."

"My father really really doesn't like Mandos," he says, "and I do not think regarded this as the worse alternative. But I think for Maedhros specifically it might be, depending."

"Please tell me every political fact you can think of so I can figure out how to get your dad back without it causing major internal problems for your society that the Enemy can take advantage of."

"My grandfather was the King. My father was his heir. My grandfather remarried in a deal with the Valar by which my grandmother'd be imprisoned in Mandos forever, and my father was unamused both with the deal and with the remarriage. The Enemy convinced my father's half-brother that my father was plotting against him and needed to be stopped, and convinced my father of the same. Then he murdered the King, and the half-siblings announced they didn't think my father ought to be the new one. It was threatening to have us too divided to fight the Enemy, so my father tried to just take the people loyal to him and leave the continent. They followed us and the situation was as unstable as before.

My father was killed. Maedhros decided that no amount of pride was worth losing the war over and formally surrendered our family's claim on the crown, swore fealty to my father's half-brother, fixed things. That's everything I can think of that might matter, except for the various things people are still mad at each other over and that's a long list and not really the heart of the issue."

"Okay," she says. "That sounds hard. Um. What if I brought your grandfather back too?"