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Tumunzahar makes Menegroth look like a contract project. Which, the Dwarves assure her, it was. The stonework is astonishingly careful and beautiful, silky to the touch up close while from a distance it gives the impression of stretching on forever above, a sky of stone with crystals for stars. Vast natural cave systems are connected by dozens of perfectly smooth, gently sloped broad stone pathways from which the fall, if she fell, would be several miles down. There are handrails. "We use those to move materials carts," someone explains to her, "we're not going to be reckless."
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.
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The routine checks for invisible Maiar turn up one two hundred miles to the south.
She tags the thing which is leaving an illusion-shadow, but it hasn't moved anyway.
purposeful_glory
"Are you whatsherface who turns into a bat or somebody else?" asks illusion sound near the shadow, while Loki's still up in the air invisible.
The shadow turns around in what at least resembles confusion.
Did you color the land? That's not wise or good for the plants. You should stop.
purposeful_glory
It helps me find invisible people. Sometimes they mean harm to my people. Who are you?
I haven't picked a name incarnates can speak, I don't spend much time around them. This is my river, and I wander it from source to ocean making sure that it is thriving.
Thank you.
purposeful_glory
Is the color inconveniencing the river? I could make it a different color, or line it up more carefully with the river bottom; all it needs to do is catch shadows so the Enemy's people don't sneak up on my settlement.
It sends a projection of the way the color falls on the river, and the ways this affects fish and plants, then flickers through a hundred possible colors or alignments, searching for something that affects the river less -
- this one will do.
- this one will do.
purposeful_glory
Thanks for the clear mental image, that will make it easy.
And Loki implements it.
And Loki implements it.
Thank you. It'd be better not to do it at all; rivers aren't meant to be colored.
Thuringwethil calls you the madwoman of the east but I think you seem rather sensible.
purposeful_glory
Ah, that's turns-into-a-bat's name, I'd forgotten it. We didn't meet under very good circumstances; she was working for the Enemy. I'm not sure if it's her full-time job.
She does not strike me as likely to have a full-time job.
And what is yours?
purposeful_glory
I manage a settlement of mostly Men, who appeared without very much idea of how to go on from there and were previously being interfered with by Thauron. And I develop magic.
Don't redirect the rivers, please.
purposeful_glory
I'll pass that along. I don't think any of them have plans to do so.
They have very short memories.