No one really knows how the parties get to yes

I am probably privy to barely more information than you. But I trust the King, and if the King thinks it'd be worth a war to get one of those things, he's right.

That means a bit less if, when the war on the horizon needed fighting anyway, he committed in advance to every war. No need to say so.

Worth a war doesn't necessarily mean it'd end the existing one. It did sound really useful when I asked the prince about it earlier.

They could definitely kill a Vala in principle. It wouldn't be as easy as getting our hands on one.

And that is itself not very easy. Well. Getting secure here should be a good step.

Yep. And recruiting, which has been going well, and buying the King time to furiously invent, which he is doing. The Silmarils only took him a Year and a half.

Really? Wow. Does that mean we can expect more Silmarils, or something else about as capable, that soon?

No, because he's been spending a lot of his time on necessary but less force-multiplier-y projects like portable means of distilling water and better enchanted swords and armor - we just trimmed the instruction set for a good enchanted armor, now it only takes a hundred fifty days to make... And the Enemy burned down his library and destroyed all his notes. But in a hundred years, probably.

A hundred Years. Still much better than not, but...

We should have had hidden copies of everything in the libraries. It's so hard to reconstruct it all from memory - so much of it was test results from tests we no longer have the infrastructure to conduct -

Not his worst crime, but it can go on the list.

How's the reconstruction going here? It looks like you've made another impressive round of progress while I was gone.

The walls'll stand if he comes again, now we've just got to figure out what doesn't decay in these environmental conditions and accordingly what we should be using for houses and so forth, make everything sufficiently pretty...

Finding things that don't decay might not be worth it, might have to settle for repairing or replacing houses every several Years.
That one's a bit of a human perspective on it, though.

People won't feel at home in houses they have to replace every few Years. We're running trials of all kinds of preservation techniques, though. We'll figure it out.

That and the beauty requirement are constraints humans wouldn't have, all I can say is good skill.

Thanks. Want to talk with prince Nelyafinwe?

Yes, I should fill him in on Doriath.

And a minute later, hello, Amber! How are you doing? You made it out to Doriath?

There and back again. They're friendly, for now, mostly because of all the not being overrun by orcs.

Our pleasure on the not being overrun with orcs! How's the King, is it Elwe?

It's Elwe.

I don't think they'll do anything worse than shut the borders and refuse to talk to us, once they find out, and if it takes long enough even that can get– mitigated.

Do you think so? How?

Magic.

Melian caught us catching harvest elementals, it was either explain the whole thing or find a way to break out by force. We did end up giving her magic like you suggested.

She'll probably do the demesne ritual eventually. The same one we used to cross the Ice, except she'll cover an unprecedented area using it the way it's supposed to be. One of the downsides is that if a practitioner never leaves their demesne it risks ceasing to exist with them in it, and the way to avoid that is make sure there are a lot of relationships between people on the inside and outside. Or Others or even things, but mostly people. Cutting us off would put Doriath at risk.

The King hopes they'll at least take in families as refugees even after they find out, and having people from our hosts in Doriath would play into this really neatly.

And if they do cut us off, how do we protect them from that? Can one-sided relationships do it?

Theoretically...
What matters is that they're doing things and affecting the outside world. The spirits can't just forget they exist, because otherwise how did all this stuff happen or why did this person say that. And if Melian decides to cut Doriath off from the rest of the world, she could cut it off really effectively to where no information gets out at all.