"Your family sounds like... if the Enemy had decided to pull your strings things would have worked out even worse than they did for us."

"Do you have a scenario in mind?"

"Uh. Given centuries, could your sister be convinced that you're untrustworthy and unstable and going to hurt your family if she doesn't stop you for your own good, and could you have ended up convinced that she's incompetent and reckless and it'd be dangerous for her to end up in power, and could your mother have become convinced she needs to immediately and dramatically choose between you for the good of her kingdom? I expect that to be a recipe for disaster anywhere, and your kind don't even find fighting surprising."

"Thor is... I think very trusting of family by default, but I don't know what would have happened if her introduction to my sorcery had been anything other than me healing our father and I never was confident enough in her to actually tell her. That, and I still don't know how she'll react to learning that I have this little respect for Odin's dictates. She is incompetent at many things and reckless and might be dangerous to have in power. I am not sure what would have happened to make Odin need to choose between us suddenly. If she were dying, maybe. But it's a big multiverse and Thor is the sort of person who fits as a ruler of Asgard in particular and would be much more palatable to the people than I would; so if she wanted rid of me and was not convinced to leap immediately to assassination I would have gone somewhere else and done something with myself there which was less of an uphill battle. I can't see Thor thinking it matters in the way Odin does if Midgardian quality of life jumped suddenly or Vanaheim had a new professor of sorcery."

"And there isn't an Enemy trying to exacerbate the worst in all of you, thankfully. Is fixing Midgardian quality of life an ambition of yours? You've mentioned it several times."

"There was an engagement against frost giants there, and I decided to stay and explore for a few years, and I mostly liked it there and found their standard of living pitiful. I'm sure there are many equivalent realms but it's most accessible as an example."

"We don't have frost giants here. What are they like?"

"Taller than Quendi. Some of them by a lot, although they vary. Some natural magic with cold. They live in a place that is much colder than the ice you crossed, with no warm places in the whole realm; and I'm afraid I don't know very much about their society because it's not the sort of information easy to come by in Asgard and the interest would have looked strange."

"Huh. I'd be interested to meet them but actually I never want to be that cold again. I'm not sure I'd be tempted even in a century. And Midgardians?"

"Short-lived, a hundred years at the outside if nothing gets them first and it's a harsh world. They keep their souls in animals outside their bodies; one is born, and the 'daemon' appears and accompanies them for the rest of their lives, settling in a single shape only when they approach adulthood. Prone to intense intricacy of culture, I think partly because they are so young; a twenty-year-old has grown and may have children already and thinks things have always been the way they are, maybe with a little context from parents or grandparents, and embellishes from there without reference to anything older than that. They have thousands of languages, nearly as many religions and more cultures, although I didn't wander the entire globe."

"Wow. I can see why you'd want to explore a place like that. Is the teleportation spell still in the cards? How long are you expecting it to take?"

"I've started a little preliminary work on it, no better priorities having come to my attention. It's going to be fiendishly complicated, especially if I can't go and look up the answers to any question about physics I need to know; there's a reason I learned to turn into a bird first, it was in fact simpler. I might be lucky and master it in fifty years. I might have a partial in-realm version in a hundred and one between realms in two. I'd be surprised if it took me more than two hundred years even given the lack of advanced physics books but not floored."

"We can hold on for that long, here."

"So I'm told."

"Are you going to be okay? I'd love two hundred years on a strange planet but Turvo, or my father, would be desperately lonely."

"I do miss my friend. But I like a number of the people I've met here."

"'A number' is a delightfully ambiguous phrase."

"A bit, yes."

She shakes her head. "We should be over the pass in a few days, and down to that appealing-looking valley in two weeks if Elwë will let us settle there. We can make houses, we can plant things. I think it will be good for our heads."

"I hope so."

"Not Findekáno, he's not going to be okay. But everyone else will be a bit less angry, a bit less tired, a bit more able to think about what they actually want and how we're going to make it happen."

Nod.

"The first thing El- uh, Quendi do, every place we've settled, is build beautiful public spaces. Usually also beautiful homes, by necessity sometimes beautiful defenses, but always beautiful public spaces. It's what we're for. We can't be happy without it. You saw Elwë's, you must have a sense of what Valinor was like..."

"Doriath was exquisitely lovely. I've gotten osanwë bits and pieces of Valinor."

She nods. "I'd show you more, but I don't much like thinking about it."