"In general it's doable."

"It is. Some of my father's books you were reading explain the principles, though it uses our telepathy so I don't know if you could learn. The Dwarven style doesn't use telepathy. You could try that."

"Are there any books on the Dwarven style around?"

"The Dwarven kingdom was destroyed a few years back. I don't think enough survived to reconstruct their magic tradition, but I can look through what we have."

"I'd feel better having some magic even if it can't be sorcery."

"His birth name is Canafinwë Macalaurë, you could have had it just by wondering if he shared it with our father. Macalaurë means 'shapes gold'. But we have separate words for 'gold' the metal and 'gold' the color or the light, and 'laurë' is the latter, so it's closer to 'weaves golden light' than 'makes thing out of gold'. The Eldar love names. It makes me sad we can't tell you all about them."

"Half of what you just said didn't make sense to me because mortal languages are fundamentally bizarre."

"Oh? How so?"

"It's like, you're always talking in code for some reason. I just talk."

"We also thought that, until we met other people who just talked and whose words were not intelligible to us. So then we learned theirs."

"Yeah, I know there are multiple mortal languages," she says. "I'm not speaking any of them."

"I had noticed that. It has its uses but if you can't turn it off and hear the difference that's rather a shame."

"I can't turn it off. I can tell what sounds you're using, if I pay close attention, it just doesn't feel natural to do that. How did you notice? I thought it was supposed to be pretty unobtrusive to mortals."

"It probably is unobtrusive to mortals," he says. "You have an accent and cadence associated with early northern Beleriand Thindarin, with some sound changes specific to my family, and there's no way you would speak that way. It's more like how I'd expect it to come through if you were speaking osanwë. No one's words sound like their thoughts but yours did."

"Huh."

"I thought it was somehow matching what I spoke. Is that what it does?"

"I don't actually know what you hear. Various books say mortals will hear their native language, or whatever language they expect to hear - I guess the latter would normally match whatever you speak, but you seem to have been surprised."

"Perhaps it has to default somehow if someone strongly expects not to share a common language at all, or that if we share one it'd be the one that's not spoken on this continent."

"Maybe. What would you expect me to have spoken?"

"Nandorin, possibly, we border their territory, or you'd be from even further off and speak something else - if I bring a ship ashore in a strange city I don't have much expectations about what they'll speak but I do expect I won't already know it."

"I don't think I've ever heard of a fairy talking to someone who couldn't understand them. Unless they were deaf, and then writing's the same. We can do it with signing too it's just - uncomfortable."

"So clearly it doesn't run entirely off expectations. 'what you understand best' is a good guess. Sadly I think everyone in this fortress would have the same history there as me, so I don't see how we could check."

"Didn't occur to me to ask in Sirion, probably wouldn't have if it had. No one seemed confused when I talked there."