A story for curious onlookers:

On March 25 I received a PM from Morendil. Its full text follows.

Hi Alicorn,

Silas has asked me to inquire with you if you would now be "able to return to dialogue with (him)". This comment of yours was the trigger for thinking the question was timely.

After an hour or so of dithering, I've decided to grant the request, on limited terms: I've promised to ask you a question, and that is all.

Please feel free to answer me, or not answer as you see fit. Please feel free to provide any message you'd like me to pass back to Silas, or not. I will not relay anything back unless you ask me explicitly.

My motivations are, mainly, curiosity as to what's going on, and a desire to be a cooperator when asked for help explicitly.

I hope my decision causes no future ill feelings between us, though I accept full responsibility if it does.

I replied:

First of all, you've engendered no ill will for yourself; I can understand why you chose to relay the message.

However, I need more information before I can proceed. Specifically, I need to know how said dialogue would take place (format, presence of third parties, time, topic, ostensible goal of the conversation); I need to know something about Silas's motivations for making this attempt (because he finds it annoying to coexist on LW with someone who won't talk to him? because he looks at it as a challenge? because he finds me scintillating and admirable and regrets not being able to bask in my company? because he wants to look magnanimous and charismatic upon publicly interacting with me again?); and I need to know whether it's going to take the form of "Silas said X and Y and acknowledges why this led to shunning but is sorry now and wants to apologize" or the form "gosh, hasn't it been long enough, won't Alicorn just let bygones be bygones already?" The latter form of "reconciliation" is neither useful nor, as a general heuristic, safe, and I won't undertake it. I could likely be persuaded to receive an attempt at the other, although the answers to the other questions would have to be satisfactory. (Kindly don't prime him with my specific examples, as they're rather obviously connotatively tagged and they lose a lot of informative power if he doesn't come up with them himself.)

One thing to note is that nothing in that comment is new since I stopped talking to Silas. I stopped talking to him in spite of the fact that I was reasonably sure I could make myself like him, simply because I judged the tradeoff to be not worth it. Liking somebody on purpose is time-consuming and hard. In order to reverse the decision, it has to be shown both that it was worth trying to like him at the time, and that it is additionally worth the cost of reversal now in the form of a weakened consistency effect the next time I'm invited to return to talking to someone I've previously written off. (Note that I may be forced to rely on this exact consistency effect if, for example, I'm ever abused by a loved one and manage to leave once and am then pressured to return. It is not trivial for me to have a self-image of someone who stays gone after leaving.)

Morendil's reply (including a minor edit he clarified in a separate message):

Thanks for replying. I'm now feeling nearly discharged of the obligation I've taken on voluntarily: it seems to me that I've delivered the key message I've been asked to get across, i.e. that Silas would like to be at least able to offer peace talks.

As I said earlier, I intend to pass nothing back that you don't explicitly ask me to, and I prefer to err on the safe side and look for something in quotes with a request from you along the lines of "tell Silas the following". (And again, replying is optional.)

Ideally, this would be something that I can pass back to Silas such that from that point on, the two of you can either continue with the status quo or negotiate further on mutually agreeable terms. I have no burning desire to see this go one way or the other; I do have a preference for being a go-between only so long as necessary.

I said:

You may tell Silas the following:

I am tentatively willing to engage, preliminarily through a go-between, whom it is your responsibility to find and keep interested if Morendil declines to continue providing the service. This exchange's continuation is dependent on satisfactory explanations from you through the go-between about your motives for wanting to resume being on speaking terms with me, and a summary of why it ought to be considered worth both my time and some undesirable peripheral psychological effects.

Apart from a mis-addressing of the passing on of this message, I heard nothing more on the topic from anyone thereafter.