There is nothing out of the ordinary on the eastern border of Doriath, and then, abruptly, there is a brilliant light.
A crown of black iron, bent and twisted as though crushed by some terrible force, set with three shining white jewels of surpassing beauty, lands on the forest floor. There is no sign of where it might have come from or who might have put it there.
"They can't tell men and women apart, they insist they don't even have such a thing - but babies come from somewhere - they don't have thoughts anyone can hear..."
"I think it's good that there are people in the world who are immune to mind-affecting magic and therefore can't be trapped in worlds of illusion by Sauron. That's almost the only thing I knew about Dwarves before you started explaining them to me."
"It's good, but it means it was impossible when we first met them to even tell they were people."
"Why? They didn't look anything like any kind of person we'd ever seen before, we could always read thoughts of anything, Elf or orc or Maia or combination thereof, that had thoughts, and they didn't..."
"I suppose this is just more evidence that different things are obvious to me than are obvious to most people. Or I'm not correctly imagining what the Dwarves were like when you first met them. How do you go about meeting someone whose personhood you're not aware of, for that matter?"
She sends what Dwarves were like when they first met them. Rustling noises in bushes, ridiculous amounts of fur. "Well, people hunted them, and then much later we met some who spoke something that was obviously a language, if not our language, and then we thought they were just people without thoughts until they learned our language and explained they're just unreachable by osanwe. I really don't think it'd have been obvious to you."
"I am no expert," says Shirask, "but being hunted sounds like the sort of thing that would affect one group of people's willingness to be generous to another."
"I suppose Dwarves are kind of the kind to hold a grudge for a thousand years over a mistake, yeah."
"Some Elves do that too, to be fair, but it's considered a serious shortcoming. When you have forever you can't cling to thousand-year-old grievances or they'll just stack and stack and stack."
"Wouldn't that make it even less healthy to hold a grudge a thousand years? You'd be teaching your children and your grandchildren and their grandchildren to be angry over something no one even remembers..."
"Or you would learn that these people are dangerous, and tell your children; and your children would remember the lesson and how important it was to you, and be cautious and wary, and pass it on to their own children, who would remember it in turn... I don't know. I'm not a Dwarf. I'm probably overestimating the importance of fear as a motivating force."
"We're not dangerous. It'd make sense to still be scared of us if we'd done it even knowing they were people."
"It is not perfectly logical to still be scared of you, but fear is rarely a perfectly logical thing."
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