"Magic destruction destroys infections. It won't close a wound but it'll keep it from getting really dangerous. That might account for it."

"Probably. I can see how it gets tempting to overuse."

"Yep."

"If the knowledge is widespread, it saves lives, you have to be incredibly willing to police it or it's over -"

"And it's hard to police, there are innocent reasons to have livestock and matches."

"Probably wiser not to have the knowledge widespread, if it does work for us."

"Unless I can find a planet it's all right to destroy."

"Unless you can find arbitrarily many of them."

"I'm not actually sure what happens if a point runs out of planet."

"We don't want to get dependent and then find out that makes magic stop working or everyone get randomly chosen new destruction points or something."

"Oh, yeah, dependency is absolutely a bad plan."

"Do you know anything about what causes ongoing destruction when there's no magic being used - in particular do you know if it'd still happen if there were no surviving magic-users -"

"It seems like what doing more magic does is both take a chunk out of the disappearance point's surroundings, and increase the rate at which it deletes stuff at other times, but the rate starts out too slow to notice. I definitely don't know what would happen if we were all dead."

Nod. "If the disappearance point is in the ocean?"

"It's been done. You lose some ocean. It can still punch through the planet."

"We don't have anyone living on the other side but I assume subsequent to punching through other bad things happen."

"Gets wider."

"Valar would fix it at that point but they'd probably also start intervening directly in Beleriand and that's not worth it."

"What would they do?"

"Uh, in the areas they consider their domain they read everyone's mind every long year - a hundred forty four local years - to determine if people have -" rebellious or antisocial or otherwise problematic inclinations "and then correct them."

"...rebellious or antisocial or otherwise problematic inclinations."

"Blasphemy! Lack of faith in Eru, the divine creator of the universe! Disobedience to authority! Willingness to break the law! Homosexuality! My father invented some things that would make it tractable to leave and survive without the Valar interfering, and then things really went badly. But now we're out."

"Congratulations."

"Thank you. Anyway. It is a bad idea to attract their attention even though I am sure they could save your world."

"I'm not sure it's worse than 'everybody dies' but it is shall we say not plan A."