"...But your hope of success dies forever if you do." Sigh. "Here, have a copy of a map I made while flying." It appears, engraved in stone. "I'm going to go talk to some trapped Orcs."

"Yes, we realize that. But unless our hope of success is going to get better, dying sooner achieves as much as dying later. Have fun."

She probably can't do much about 'constant pain'. And she's decided that Orcs are on the bad end of morality, so now she has to stick to it despite vague misgivings unless she learns something that overturns her decision. But that doesn't mean she needs to kill helpless prisoners, hopefully.

She flies over to the nearest group of trapped Orcs and addresses one. "Hello. Your attack has, obviously, failed. I object to killing prisoners if an alternative is available. Unfortunately, returning you to Melkor is not acceptable. Are there any alternatives?"

They look confused for a minute. "You could drop us off elsewhere?"

"The problem becomes - how do I know you will remain harmless? If I can't be sure of that, I must choose an 'elsewhere' far enough away that you can't return easily. Which is difficult. There is only so much land."

"There is a great deal of land. It's a vast world, and mostly unoccupied."

"And you would rather be sent to some distant island and given some small help to build a home there, and stay there peacefully and promise to never attack elves or anyone else again?"

They look bewildered. "We can't promise that. Obviously we'll attack Elves if there are Elves."

"Why? Is your hatred so great that you cannot imagine ever setting it aside?"

"Yes," they all say unanimously. 

"We're orcs. We swear to hate Elves."

"...Is swearing binding?" They're all like the Irene, aren't they.

"Yes, of course it is."

She lets out a deep, deep sigh. "I could deliver to you a new home, or make one. But unless you will swear not to seek out elves, to merely hate them from afar and only attack them if they approach first, I cannot justify it."

"We cannot swear to do that; you can't give your word in a way that contradicts past oaths." They're staring at her, a bit confused she wouldn't know that already.

"I cannot allow you to go free to hurt elves later, as you would want, and it would be very difficult and I suspect also not to your wishes if I supervised a population of captured Orcs and prevented you from hurting elves whenever you tried. Can anyone think of an idea, a way to get around the oath's exact wording perhaps? ...I was told Orcs are always in constant pain, is this true?"

"Why would we want to betray our people and community for a stranger we've never met? You're not asking because you want to figure out how to resolve this peaceably, you're asking so you can feel no guilt when you kill us. This is our land. They invaded it. We have no desire to get around our enmity for them, nor they for us."

"Morality is a complicated question. The Valar other than Melkor insist that he and his creations are evil. Without having grown up here to have a fuller view of the question I choose to believe the overwhelming majority along with the evidence of your oath to hate elves, where outright hate is far beyond a desire to defend your land. You're right. I'm not sorry. It's a tragedy of the highest order that this fucking war exists at all, but I have to choose a side if I want to see an end. And I have. Do you have any funeral traditions or last requests that don't involve hurting elves?"

"Yeah, we like to ask our murderers not to monologue about how justified they are and the terrible price of war."

And then there are no longer any Orcs trapped in stone.

Damn it all.

They set to treating the injured and enchanting the fortifications so they stay that way.

She looks at the stars. Maybe she should have just left. Refused to get involved. No, she doesn't mean that, not really. But now she can't leave, it'd bother her for decades.

...Ignorance is bliss, isn't it.

She looks at the stars some more.

She builds a short, unmarked memorial out of sheer granite, stark against the local stone. Building things is more soothing than it ought to be. It's the one thing that is not so uncertain.

And she goes and asks the elves what changes they might like to those fortifications.

The Elves have a lot of requests, but don't know which it makes the most sense to prioritize. If she lays the foundations like so they'll be able to have plumbing.

Normally, she'd be dispensing civil engineering advice here, but she's in a very foul mood about how conflict seems so damned unavoidable sometimes. She'll do about a half of a town's worth of foundations before flying off.

That's fine; they were expecting to have to do it all. They're not sure they wouldn't have preferred that. Temperamental powerful deities were easily as dangerous as living in Beleriand without walls.

What a fucking mess. An entire continent of tragedies, an entire race she's condemning by taking this stance. But she has all the information available.

Or does she? Probably, yes, but it's a cheap test.

"Eru Ilúvatar. If you are listening, I would greatly appreciate it if you spoke with me."