Blood sport. Because she was a foreigner she did not know the tales. Endless warriors seeking the holder of the throne, and endless warriors breaking upon the axes wielded by the cruelest soldier in the land. Ilúvatar knew blood sport in a way that a High Elf never could. Even as children, flinging broken rocks and ragged branches at one another, they'd been training for what was coming. The storm. The violence that followed a Sylvan Elf wherever he went. Ilúvatar had been best in the games not because he was evil, or because he'd come before the time of the Lion, but because the vicious nature required of a combatant was something he could summon at will. Those who had the same level of brutality often could not make it go away.
They were not fit to live in polite society.
Most of the rest, High or Sylvan or Grey or otherwise, fought as hard as they did because they feared pain. They feared dying. Thrust them, with a touch of training and military cohesion, into a battle and they would do their best to stay alive. It was the day after they always pursued. He'd killed many such warriors. To operate in the places that he went when the steel was out and the fight was on, you could not dream of tomorrow. You could not be desperate. Seeking, always seeking, the killing blow. But never desperate. Your future was only in the battle itself. Your destiny was this battle, the culmination of all that had come before. It was no service to the life you lived between battles, but those such as Ilúvatar who found the proper balance could still have a life.
There were few such warriors. He knew most of them; they were a fraternity in some ways, bound together by knowledge of battle that few could assume and none could pretend. Flaithriaoh was one such, and would be until the day he died. Eibhear had been another. And Fenrir, of course. Even Talmus had been such an elf.
Most of them, he noted wryly, were dead or dying.
"If it comes to who strikes fastest, and hardest," Ilúvatar said quietly. "I favor myself. I don't mean to become his prisoner, Lady Fiaethe'tari. I mean to force him into the open by making him believe one thing will happen. Then I mean to take that away from him and replace it with death. If he survives that night, it will be luck that sees him through, for reasons I will never be able to explain."
She was worried for him, and said as much. He was worried for her. She would need to be there, and she would need to be assured that her knight and her king would be retrieved. That was one purpose of the ruse, in any case. Ilúvatar harbored no illusions with regard to the danger. He simply did not see his way clear to allow this cowardly wretch of a knight to go on as he always had.
"Do not concern yourself with my safety," Ilúvatar said quietly. "Stay focused on your own. Baila and ten that he chooses will be with you at all times. That is as safe as I can make you, Lady Fiaethe'tari, but those eleven will fight as though I were in their midst."