"I will not tell Doriath what I think of their standards of consent," she agrees.

"It's also rarely helpful to tell someone they're a victim of an event in their own life they've conceptualized differently. True but not helpful. Anyway. Elu's disappearance left his people divided over whether they should choose a new King. They ended up doing so in a divisive way that I think took everyone involved centuries to forgive."

"Your species and drama."

"You can laugh at us in three thousand years, if humans have not managed to generate as much of it."

"I concede the point."

"You might in fact come out ahead! I am very open to the possibility that the Eldarin temperament is a dramatic one."

"Lots of humans promise to pine for someone forever, but generally we don't go through with it," she offers as an example.

"Ah! We do actually pine forever. It's inconvenient. Finding it so at the time doesn't make it go away."

"Humans usually don't. Andreth mentioned it and I've been calling it Elf Hypermonogamy ever since."

"As good a word for it as any."

"Although if that's how it works anyway I'm not totally clear on what the point of avoiding marriage in wartime is."

"I think it's supposed to be that you only pine forever for a spouse? But in practice, often one finds oneself pining forever even if unmarried."

"Andreth and Aegnor weren't married," she points out. "Is this supposed to relate to the soul thing or is it just an arbitrary cultural expectation."

"Neither? We love very deeply and are very sad when it doesn't work out. I guess there's a cultural expectation that you pine instead of getting over it, but absent that cultural expectation we still pine."

"I meant is 'you pine more if you're married' an arbitrary cultural expectation, not 'you pine at all.'"

"Oh. Yes, that I think is."

"So that's one area where you seem to be more dramatic, but hopefully I can ameliorate it."

"By giving us less to pine over?"

"Right."

"I wholeheartedly approve."

"Somehow I suspected as much."

They land in the city. He compliments the city. The Beorians watch somewhat warily. 

Odette explains that he is here as a guest because he was impressed by her sister's design sense and wanted to see the place.

Thank you. I think I need to have a talk with my cousin next time I see him; plenty of the people in Dor Lomin cannot stand me but I wouldn't describe any as nervous around me. 

Yeah, I...noticed things. About what some of these people think of how elves think of humans.