"Uh, if you stay out here they probably won't bother you, but you can't live here alone forever, and they'll notice you if you enter their territory."

"There's nowhere populated that's accessible from here and outside their territory?"

"No. We're on the northern fringes of their continent. No one lives here, obviously, and everywhere habitable is in Valinor proper. I am sorry."

"It's an inconvenent choice, but at least I didn't have the choice made for me."

"Yeah. Though I mostly blame the idiots who started the fighting for that, not the Valar."

"No rule against multiple people being evil simultaneously. Unfortunately."

She flinches. "None of them are evil, just scared and selfish."

"Sorry. I forgot you said they had been with you."

Which isn't a retraction.

"They're my cousins. They made some bad calls, and I'm furious with them, and sometimes I hate them, but - they're really not evil. The enemy we're all trying to stop is."

"It sounds like he's the rare person who's nothing but that. Which makes taking sides a lot easier."

"The Valar didn't think he was all bad either. Kept trying to give him second chances."

"Oh, so they do have a concept of walking back punishments. That's good news under the circumstances, even if they've also got really bad judgment in deploying it."

"Yeah. I expect if we headed home and fell to our knees they'd eventually pardon us. But we don't want to go back. We wanted to emigrate long before all of this, and now we're needed even more."

"Do they demand the kneeling and so on from everyone, or just from people they think committed crimes? Because if they know or care what people in their realm think of them...."

"You wouldn't have anything to repent of, would you? I mean, everyone's supposed to respect them, but the reason we couldn't just head home is that we rebelled against them, and we'd have to show that we regretted that."

"People who run countries vary a lot in how much they tolerate dissent, and I don't know what the Valar are like when they aren't at their worst. If I walk in there and someone finds out that I think their sentence was badly thought through and a terrible idea even as applied to the people who were actually at fault, I could imagine someone in the Valar's position considering that disrespect."

"They might. They've never issued a sentence like the Doom, before, though."

"I'm not realistically worried about provoking a repeat performance, I'd just rather avoid offending people that powerful without a very good reason. General principle."

"Wish we'd heard of it." She sighs. "Anyway, there was fighting after the Doom over the remaining boats, and it was about to get really bad, and the people who currently controlled the boats decided to sail off with them and not come back. Since then we've been scavenging for supplies and trying to figure out how to make the trip. You can't do your flying trick again?"

She does not say no.

"Flying is a very generous term for what I was doing back there, but thanks.

Anyway, flight has the same issue as the heat thing. Most of the more interesting devices humans use are black boxes to any single person. It wasn't just water in there, and unlike the fabric the liquid wasn't salvageable afterward. I couldn't reinvent gravitics even if we weren't in the middle of nowhere."

"I'm sorry. Uh, I'd be happy to start showing you how we're scaling the cliffs and things, it takes some practice to get the hang of..."

"Thanks, but I think I'm going to try the other direction. Much less suicidal for a human. So scaling cliffs probably isn't a priority."

"Gotcha. Best wishes. If you get admission in Valinor, tell my mother hi."

"I'll do that if I get the chance. What's her name?"

"Anairë. She's - well, I don't know what she technically is now, with the upheaval, but she should still be living in the palace."