"There's something really perverse about you being disappointed in him."

"I was thinking we're still more 'people who can agree to mutually beneficial trades' than colleagues, but if you're ready to take the leap you can take him back to Angband with me. Patch him up whenever you'd like and so forth. I don't think he'll thank you."

"Wouldn't expect it, no."

"Change him back."

"What, can't you do it? Is he useless to you bird-shaped? Maybe I should leave him a bird forever and you'll have to write him off if you ever do kill me."

"You've made it apparent that you don't, yes. Loki, there's a galaxy at stake here, and you are choosing a heroic death over the chance to live to influence it."

"Maybe I don't think you'll get that far."

"Do you know anything about the distribution of intelligence in populations? Fëanor is the most gifted of the Elves. Orcs have the same average intelligence as Elves, and there are a thousand times as many of them."

He - doesn't start singing, exactly, but the sounds around him resolve themselves into music. The feeling is a little bit like standing in a fast-moving river. "This isn't your last chance, Loki, because I'll give you one more before I kill you, but it's your friends' last chance, I don't need them. You are underestimating us. You're going to die here."

"Have my options clarified into 'join or die', then?"

And he imitates her own voice, impassioned and unhappy and dangerous, from a few weeks ago, the first conversation with Vár: "I am asking you to think. You know what I want from you and you know I'm strong enough to get it. Can you think of any way for you to get anything you want given that?"

Huan sends her a location. The visible Thauron vanishes. The song rushes up around her and makes the sky even darker, the stars invisible.

She turns invisible, fights the song with silence, looks around like she's trying to find a visual clue to where he is. Steps in a wrong direction with her weapon ready to shoot out in the right one.

He contests the silence at least as forcefully as Melian contested darkness in Doriath, and then from Huan she gets a fleeting warning that something is moving, very fast, towards her.

Lævateinn shoots out, forked, thin-puncture-wound extensions ready to explode in barbs if she hits something. She doesn't need all her attention to do this, she practiced, she practiced so much, only good present her mother ever -

It hits him. The force is staggering. For a second he's visible, still in the form of a handsome Elf, and so are a dozen werewolves around him, and they are faster-moving than last time, and then they're invisible again, though he isn't, and he conjures up a blade to meet hers.

She skids, but only a little; she tags the wolves and Thauron too with their outlines; and then she makes the ugliest exit wound she can so she's ready to parry and pick off any wolves that come too close.

Go kill the others, Thauron instructs the wolves instead, peaceably, singing this time to make the ground buck beneath their feet like they're on the deck of a storm-tossed ship, and slashing at her with no particular finesse but such force that he nearly knocks Lævateinn out of her hands.

She wraps it around her hands, flicking through a healing spell whenever the power of a strike threatens something in a shoulder or the line of her spine; the thing can warp to turn as needed. If he's going to be a lousy fencer she can spare the brain to keep the outlines in place so the others can handle the wolves, so she can - silence - the - song -

He's not as good as Thor. A little stronger, maybe, but not as good. And she can hold her own against Thor without even taking the blink of an eye she needs to soothe her joints. She'd make a smart remark but she's a little scattered.