Lots of people said very cruel and hurtful things to each other. My uncle Nolofinwe tried to convince the King to exile my father from the tribe, and my father never forgave him. We tried to get some boats to cross the ocean, and the people who the boats belonged to tried to shoot us to stop us, and they killed many of us and we killed many of them. The people abandoned on the Ice. 

Mm.

Some of that's going to be tricky, I bet. To make right.

Very tricky. My father's dead, he can't apologize for anything he did.

...and if you don't usually die, you probably don't really have a way of handling that. Not that people always do anyway, at home, but.

We do not. Before my father's parents, no one had ever died.

Wow. She sits up. I wonder if it'd help for you to pick up some of the kobold traditions around that. You'd want to change them a little, I'm sure - make them prettier - but some of the basic ideas should still be useful, I think, if you don't already have traditions of your own.

What are the kobold traditions?

Well, we bury our dead like this - she sends a memory of a cairn of stones piled up to a bit over head height, with one side covered in flowering vines and the ground near the other sparsely littered with stones. The exact burial ritual I bet you'd want to make up for yourselves, for us it's singing and if they had a favorite thing it's buried with them and there's food, their favorite kind if we can manage it, and then everyone helps with piling up the stones and spends the night comforting each other. But the thing I think might be most useful is after that - cairns always need work; if you need to spend some time with the dead you can always go put back some of the stones that've fallen. And the vines that grow there are important, too - we give to the dead by keeping the cairn in good shape, the dead give to us with those - they're medicinal, they reduce stress and can help people avoid the effects of trauma. I don't know that Eldar would have an exact equivalent, but it seems like you handle social stuff differently anyway; you might need something different from that. But having a memorial that you can interact with, in ways that make sense for what you do need - well, it works really well for us.

That does sound nice.

She nods. Yeah. It doesn't fix everything, but it helps a lot.

My father's body crumbled to ash in our arms; there was nothing to bury.

Nod. We don't always end up with a body, either - my tribe'll have memorialized me, actually, they knew what they were doing when they exiled me. In that case we use something meaningful to the person, instead - a favorite thing, or something they made, or something that reminds us of them.

That makes sense. It is really too bad that the Enemy destroyed everything meaningful to my father when he killed his father; we haven't much to remember either of them by. 

Oh.

Sigh. It is more the meaning than the exact thing... it's better to have the right thing, makes it easier to think of it as real, but you don't have to. Or maybe the Eldar version just won't do that - you do more art than we do, maybe do something with that, instead.

Yes. I'm not sure it'll help as much as we'd like, but yes.

Nod. You can do the best you can, anyway.

Would you like to tell me about them?

Most of my memories have been either erased or tampered with. I don't think I'd care anyway but I certainly don't care as it stands. 

Okay.

For kobolds, a lot of the time if someone is very sick or very old or does a lot of dangerous things, and even sometimes if they aren't and don't, they'll pick something they want to be memorialized with ahead of time. I don't really know if that'd help - kobolds grow up knowing that people die, and that we're going to die; it's hard to think about but we have time to get used to it, it might be too much too quickly for your people - but if they want to - I'm thinking especially the warriors, anyone especially at risk like that - I can find a place to keep them safe. Maybe here, even.

I do not expect they'd want that, because they still have no reason to trust you. Maybe if that changes.

Nod. Here would be safer - well, unless something happens to me but we need to be careful of that anyway - but if they want it there with a portal that's fine.

I can suggest it. I'll let you know how it goes over.

She nods. Be gentle with them.

I am not sure what you mean.

Even in my world people find death hard to think about, especially the part where it can happen to them and people they care about. If they're already thinking about it, it can help to have something to do, but if they aren't, you can really hurt someone by making it suddenly feel real, especially if they're in a position where they're taking risks that make that more likely to be true.

Probably the best way to do it would be to make a memorial for people who've already died, and let people who're already thinking about it decide on their own what they want to do about that.

I am pretty sure everyone who followed us across the sea knew we'd meet our deaths here, and the Doom sufficed to remind them. But I appreciate your concern for us.

...I am thinking that a lot of our cultural differences may amount to that kobolds treat each other the way the Eldar treat children.