"I'd appreciate that."

"My pleasure. If you need anything else you shouldn't hesitate to ask my father, he likes you."

"For my charming personality or my Balrog-killing abilities?"

"He doesn't tend to like people for their abilities."

"...Mostly I was joking."

"It was nonetheless a reasonable question. You shouldn't hesitate to bother him even with problems of no immediate tactical import."

"I'll remember that."

And he heads off, leaving her with a lot of notes on and in the tengwar.

Literacy. Blessed, blessed literacy and in such a lovely alphabet.

Someone brings her dinner, after a while. They've finished the funeral songs.

Right, those.

Illia eats her dinner and practices her Tengwar and tries not to think about how long it's likely to be before Odette can raise the dead.

Unless she wanders out in search of company, no one will interrupt her. The orcs don't seem to be attempting a charge.

At some point she goes looking for a pair of gloves and the library.

She runs into Lady Hareth, who can find her both, and is here because the Men Fingon ordered conscripted back in Dor Lómin have now arrived.

"Oh, hello! It's good to see you again. How have you been?"

"Busy," she says, "turning fifty thousand civilians into infantry for the Elves. Or, in my case, more managing the supplies for the people who were doing that. You?"

"Killed some Balrogs," she says with no little satisfaction, "saw my sister again. So pretty great."

"Lovely. Where is your sister?"

"Moving around, but mostly east of here. She can fly very fast, so she doesn't really need to stick to one spot."

"That's useful. Not too much in the way of danger, I hope?"

"To paraphrase; she's safe, but less 'safely behind stone walls' and more 'safely fighting literally everything'. When Fingon bade her be safe when she left she said that she would ensure that her immediate vicinity was more dangerous for the servants of the Enemy than it was for her. Oh, but you didn't come here to hear me brag about my sister, sorry."

"I'm happy to hear about your sister. Being dangerous is a very good kind of being safe, and I felt much happier about your presence and magic once you assured me that you could use it to defend yourself."

"Yeah--oh, I should show you how to augment your muscles, it's kind of tricky to do right but it's not at all hard just to do. And then you can run faster than a horse or punch through a rock and stuff like that once you've gotten down how to do it without breaking something in your body along with it."

She giggles. "That would be lovely."

"We should go outside so if you crash into something it'll just be dirt or a tree or something and not stone."