There's an amphitheater, a place where a hundred of the stone walkways twine around to create space for a hundred thousand people to sit in close proximity, and someone is giving a lecture or a demonstration at the base of it, the seats closest to him filled with eager, tiny, bearded Dwarf-children.
And they spiral down, and down, and down, past waterfalls and egg-sized gemstones left half in the rock and halls of crystal. Everything grows gradually more ornate and more perfectly maintained and the clang of hammers fades behind them. "People say," her guide says, "that we only have a council instead of a single King because there were nine winners of the competition to design the throne so we couldn't just select one person to sit it." And they push open the doors to reveal, indeed, nine thrones so elaborate it would be hard to choose between them, and nine squat bearded people sitting them.
Does anybody have more songs for her? Or should she use her sleepless night to go tell a presumably also not sleeping Findekáno about the hack?
So he finds someone who does healing, and she plays a song - "most people do this with instruments, Lord Canafinwë was unusually determined to have his hands free -" and observes that range can be amplified and it should affect everyone in the range on either side - "It's not really meant for use on a battlefield" - and that Elven healing can't for example regrow limbs, though it can do a fair bit for wounds to the mind and soul.
"My primary use case is keeping somebody alive until I can get to touch range, so not being able to regrow limbs isn't a prohibitive drawback," Loki says.
And: I almost forgot - who wants the latest, not-very-much-content Maitimo update from the other day?
So she osanwës him the relevant parts of transcript including the remark about what Maitimo wants for his birthday.
Your phrasing tripped me up. I will be enthralled to watch events of that nature considering the bottlenecks he has to work through.
Laughter. I doubt he's confident he can pull it off, but if he could be confident that any of this were real he'd be quite sure of it, and so am I. Though I can't think quite how. If I tell Father now he'll say 'I have expended enough effort on putting distance between us and them'. So I won't tell him now, because it'll pain me to hear that, and I'll tell him once the assassin drama has been settled and then his answer will just be that it would be very practically costly and difficult.
But it'd put you closer to those trade-happy Dwarves that Maitimo is going to charm for you?