No hair-touching. There's kind of a lot of hair on Lúthien but Loki avoids it. "No need to be sorry. It's a completely pointless social convention. Asgardian girls are supposed to be warriors and the boys are supposed to turn to gentler occupations - and the latter rule is more flexible."

"Does the Enemy threaten your homeland also? What do you need so many warriors for?"

"It's a completely different realm; I didn't know the Enemy existed until I arrived in this one. We fight various large fauna and sometimes frost giants."

"We're taking security very very seriously at the moment and I still think less than a tenth of our people are warriors."

"Well, not all girls take it up. My mother is very strict and I was unusually conspicuous. If I'd been some ordinary Asgardian girl I might not have been able to study magic but I wouldn't have had to learn to fight, given that I had no aptitude for it when I was little."

"I'm very sorry. Learning anything you're not meant for is hard, and learning to fight is terrible, and both at once sounds miserable. These are the guest rooms. Let me put my hair up and then I'll dance for you."

"...I am uncomfortable with mind-affecting magic." There, another reason not to flirt with this elf. Good not flirting with the elf. "We don't even have osanwë and I was alarmed to discover that."

She halts in the middle of using both arms and the dresser to do an extremely elaborate braid. "You don't have osanwë? Aren't you...lonely?"

"Well, I was, but that was because I had to keep substantial parts of my life a complete secret until someone tried to assassinate my father in public and there were no other healers in shouting distance. I don't think most people are, and I did eventually have one friend who knew. Anyway, I can send things, and see things sent to me, but not pick up passive thoughts, and I learned immediately on finding osanwë existed not to accidentally leak anything."

"So what do people in your realm do if they're stuck in a political meeting and it'd be tolerable if they were there because their father wanted their insights but instead they're just there because their father thinks it's educational and they'd be doing something actually educational if they weren't there but here they are so they construct an elaborate mind-palace with a friend and chase each other through it?"

"...Oh, that sounds like such an incredible luxury. Although more of my intolerable meetings were heavily liquored feasts with repetitive storytelling. I just sat through it alone with my thoughts."

"You poor thing," she says emphatically. "Well I don't know how to be revitalizing without also making people happy so I suppose you'd better recover from your exhaustion the old-fashioned way. If you want to find me in the morning the little white lilies are mine so you can find a trail of them and follow them."

"I may do that before I go notify the Nolofinwëans that they need to adjust their vocabulary and start taking orcs alive."

"They need to what? I missed your audience with my parents."

"Sorry, I have substantially worse hearing than Elves do and little sense of when you are and aren't within earshot. Orcs take oaths to - behave orcishly - very young, before they have sophisticated concepts of the nouns involved; and can with enough argument and threat be talked into re-swearing with the same wording to instead serve a benign noninterventionist deity known to other realms and encourage Elven population growth - for, of course, more total eventual suffering and death - and consider groups of Elves who don't use that word for themselves unsuitable kidnapping targets." Yawn.

"I'm sorry, I'm being rude, you're tired. That's - fascinating. Tell me more in the morning. White lilies. The convention is that the intensity of the color indicates how recently someone passed, but of course they chose white for me so you can't really tell without looking closely at the flowers, and you can't tell which way to go." She shrugs. "Rest well."

"White lilies," nods Loki, and she goes to bed.

In the morning she wakes up inside a spacious Elven guest room that is not lit at all except for silvery light emanating from everywhere. It has a closet with several elaborate Elven dresses in her size, and a plate with an unfamiliar food. There are white lilies trailing to the plate and faded violets trailing to the closet.

She eats the food... considers the dresses dubiously and winds up leaving them there... makes sure she still has her possessions and violets-wardrobe-person did not relieve her of anything... panics for a moment over the dagger before remembering she left it in the woods so as to come "unarmed" in the loosest technical sense she can qualify for as long as Lævateinn remains small and blunt... and follows the white lilies.

Through the spacious audience chamber, along a winding underground river, to the edges of a strange territory where the ethereal glow stops and there are torches, up through more hallways to the surface. Lúthien is outside the gates of Menegroth talking with a tall man with a harp.

Loki waits a polite distance back and looks at the attractive decor.

"Pleased to meet you. Unfortunately, oaths are inconvenient and they can only get out of it by getting further-yet-differently into it. I accidentally started a religion in the process. But yes."

"Won't this just result in orcs who can do anything they can justify to themselves as service to an apparently absentee god?"

"I thought it would wind up that way but it turned out they solicited a lot of information about what the absentee god might want. I'm their only source of educated guessing. It's awkward. At any rate, orcs who can do as they like are better than orcs who are bound to serve the Enemy and some of them are quite friendly once you get to know them."