"That's strange. In my experience, humans like beauty a great deal. There are those who say we shouldn't need it, that it's pointless, but generally they're the servants of my Enemy and don't want us to have anything good in our lives at all." 

"- huh. Maybe the nature of the humans we have around here is the work of the Enemy; he did try to get to them first. And he does hate beauty. 

...who is your Enemy."

"We know him as Asmodeus. He is the god of tyranny, slavery, tormenting your inferiors, subjugating yourself to your betters, harsh discipline, deceptive contracts. He rules over Hell – what we call the Lawful Evil plane. On Golarion, his servants also rule the nation of Cheliax – of which Galt was a province, until five years ago.

He is very powerful – Golarion isn't the only planet he concerns himself with – but I'm reasonably certain he can't do anything to change our inherent natures. At least, not while we're living. If that power existed here I would be very interested, and very frightened, it's not something even our gods are capable of."  

"Melkor took Quendi prisoner, long ago when the world was new, and tormented and distorted them so the children they bore would be of a different race, brutish and ugly and agonized and His servitors, called orcs. We don't know what he aimed to do with Men, but - the ones we have live in ugly houses and wear ugly clothes."

Élie's reasonably sure that's not how new species come into being, but it feels a bit early in the relationship to start questioning what are obviously his captor's deeply held religious beliefs. 

"Most humans live in ugly homes where I'm from, too. Most people are very poor. Is this not the case for Quendi?"

"Most Quendi couldn't live in the conditions humans live under. If we are without resources we sleep under the stars. - we aim to give humans beautiful things and good lives too."

Élie's brain noticed when the Quendi said that there are no kingdoms of Men, and when he started talking about "their" humans. It's not so different from the way certain Chelish people talk about halflings – the ones who'd never beat their slaves or deny them food (at least, not without very good reason), but who don't think they're capable of living independently either. The Quendi are larger and stronger, possessed of unknown magical abilities, probably healthier, probably longer-lived. Obviously, humans are a sort of subject race to these people. The reasonable, pragmatic thing to do here would be to humor them until he has a better sense of what form that subjection takes. 

Élie's mouth says, "Why aren't they capable of making beautiful things themselves?"

" - well, they don't live long enough, mainly, and don't know how, and don't have time to learn." He doesn't sound offended, at least. 

"A healthy human in Golarion might live seventy or eighty years, if they don't die in childhood. Are the ones here very sickly?"

" - if they don't die young and don't get sick they make it around that long - well, I don't think I've heard of eighty, but sixty or seventy. ....which is a very short life. Many arts take centuries to master."

"I'd distinguish between skill and genius. A gifted artist might be able to spend centuries refining their ability to execute their vision, but a child of twenty is no less likely to have that vision than a sage of six hundred – and very likely more. We probably agree that perfect craftsmanship without artistry is nothing, so the question is how much great art loses for lack of craft. I think that, past a certain level of technical skill, the rewards aren't so great. Otherwise elderly artists would uniformly produce better art than younger ones, and that's not so."

" - well, humans also get worse at everything as they age; among Quendi it's true that older artists are near-universally better than young ones."

"Possibly humans and Quendi like different things in their art." 

"Well, I haven't particularly noticed that, but I don't actually work with humans, really."

Interesting. 

"Do humans and Quendi live apart, then?"

"Well, yes. We can't stand their villages, and they have young children to raise and so need to be back of the front lines. There are human units of soldiers, of course, but not many mixed units; they'd slow us down."

...that raises some questions. 

"Do all humans live in villages or are there larger cities somewhere else? Who governs them? Who governs you? – do Quendi not have children?"

"We haven't figured out how to have humans in cities without truly appalling rates of death from disease, so they live in villages. They are governed by our King, as are the Quendi. Quendi don't have children in wartime. It's not - the way we do things, to bear a child into a world that you haven't made any good for them, a world where they might die or worse. Of course if humans felt that way they'd just die out, so I suppose it's lucky that they don't."

Translation, humans are easier to control when they're poor and ignorant and divided. It's clever. It's also pointless. If humans reproduce and Quendi don't, then they'd be ruling a slave population much larger than their own, and that never works for long. 

Still, he should probably be offended. He isn't, really. It's a defect in his republican spirit, but he can imagine being a thousand years old and watching generations living and dying as children, not thinking of anything more than a couple decades in front of them – 

"No. No. It's not lucky at all."

His interlocutor perhaps can't think of anything polite to say to that; agreeing and disagreeing both seem fraught.

They ride on. The horses are vigorous and healthy, and the riders seem tireless. After a while they all start singing, a sweet fast-paced song with an eight part harmony they're presumably coordinating telepathically. The song has some magic in it, hard to immediately identify.

Okay but Élie is really good at identifying magic.

Can he see anything when he casts Detect Magic? Does the strength of the effect seem to vary with the rhythm? He's seen a couple of musical sorcerers with the armies – not so often that he understands how they work, but enough to get a rough sense of how the mathematics of spellforms can be expressed melodically. Is it anything like that? 

It's ....not something he'd be astonished to see someone do at home, some kind of weird sorcerer, though more powerful for the fact they're all doing it together. It's not a recognized Golarion spellform. It might be doing something akin to the spell Bear's Endurance, presumably mostly for the benefit of the horses? It's in any event not messing with his head.

Yeah, that's most of what he wanted to know. 

Does it look like it requires all eight voices, or would it work with any one of them, just weaker? 

It could probably be done with one? Certainly it doesn't look like it requires specifically eight.

See, that's really interesting! Golarion spellforms, at least the kind he knows, are much more self-contained – there's no way to add more wizards to a spell to make it stronger. He will very happily spend the rest of this journey trying to figure out how that works.

At any rate, it keeps his mind off the things he'd rather not think about.