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.

...I suppose that's possible. We don't treat children very differently than we treat adults, in most ways. What are you noticing?

Responding to what you think people's real needs or desires are, rather than the ones they're expressing or deliberately making known to you, trying not to directly say things that are trivial to infer so that people don't have to cope with them if they can't, being really cautious about telling people to do things lest this constitute an excessive exercise of power over them...

Mm... not quite? A lot of that is pretty situational, it's not how we'd usually treat each other. Except paying attention to indirect communication and inferring things, that's important when people don't talk. But on the one hand in a normal situation we wouldn't tell each other to do things at all, and on the other we wouldn't be quite as careful as I'm being here where I'm surrounded by stressed out strangers and don't know what people need me to be careful about. And you're probably seeing more of that from me because I'm a Speaker and because I'm recovering from something myself, too.

Okay. In Valinor we were lied to and things were kept from us for our own good a lot; we are very averse to things that even look like that.

Ah. She considers. I don't think I'm particularly in the habit of keeping things from people... I do think a lot about how to talk about things, to put things in the least upsetting way - it's not the only consideration but it is one - is that too close? Even if it is I think it runs into the problem where 'not that' isn't enough for me to know what I should be doing instead, though.

I also think I used to be careful about how I put things. The difference might be - is the goal to communicate with them in their own language, to ensure that what you want them to known is told to them productively? Or is the idea that they don't merit the information and so it should be told to them, if at all, in a way that stops them from acting on it?

You don't seem to do the objectionable thing, even if you still often are stuck guessing about how to reach my people in their own language and ensure they know the things they need.

Yeah. And I'll get better at talking to them - there really was a communication problem the first time, Findekáno explained what 'lots of questions' means, that's how I understood they were actually being nice to me today. And I don't think I'd ever decide that someone just didn't deserve information - didn't need it, maybe, or would be hurt or would hurt someone else if they knew, but I have a hard time imagining myself failing to respect someone like that.