I like talking about Findekáno and virtually never have the chance to do it.

I will find you a lovely vacation planet when you're ready.

Back before I had more important problems it was a continual source of annoyance that one of my most satisfying achievements was one I couldn't tell anyone about, and that concealing it from everyone else was actually a major achievement in its own right which I also couldn't mention.

Yeah, I had that problem. And then Sigyn got himself just about killed and nobody was watching and - She spreads her hands. He didn't tell.

It makes all the difference having someone, doesn't it?

Yes.

The guest room he shows her to is furnished, if sparsely. The ones for the Nolofinweans have fur rugs and several fireplaces and so forth. I decided they'd probably debate it and decide to consider it an offensive gesture but I'd rather they be warm.

Yeah, my helpers take over the tower for the winter as soon as it's cold enough that an igloo won't melt. It occurs to me that I kind of have no idea how cold it actually was. Haven't had the nerve to ask for an osanwë of it.

The Eldar do not die easily and a lot of them died. It is infuriating that the only meaningful thing I can do is as indirect and inadequate as building a city to cause a different city to be vacated for them to live in safely.

My one consolation is that they won't give me any credit for it, so at least the mismatch between what I've done and what I'm credited with is in my favor even if both are far, far less than I ought to do.

Findekáno was so suspicious when I told him he could expect to move his host into the Mithrim camp.

...unfair to what, the automaton, or the possibility that he's real?

The latter. I don't care about being unfair to figments of my imagination.

Is the eighty percent figure you're planning on giving Moryo genuine?

Yes. This is sophisticated even for the Enemy, and there are obvious ways he could have gotten more from it and hasn't, and when I've proposed a test you've always risen to it - and there's the evidence of the passage of significant time - eighty feels about right. It's not going to fall very quickly from that, though.

Fair enough.

The larger point is that if I invited him here it'd be entirely artifice. I don't like being touched, I expect that knowing what it most likely really is I could barely find it tolerable, I know exactly what would fix things between us but it'd be a very elaborate, painful and unpleasant performance on my part that I spent months recovering from afterwards. That's not very fair to him. He'd never find out, but still.

Yeah, don't do that, the pair of you are way more than tragic enough already.

I was prepared to if it was necessary but it doesn't look like it will be, no one is starting a civil war.

Thank goodness.

I'm not sure if it's you we have to thank for that, but if so, thank you. I really was worried that is what it would have come to.

I don't know either, but I like to think I was contributory because I have a very large ego.

In one of the 'rescues' Thauron played me through before this one, the first one, when it didn't even occur to me to wonder whether it was real, Findekáno rescued me and the hosts were warring and he wasn't sure if he had me as a hostage or an ex-lover or what else and it had only been a few days, I was still utterly shattered and struggling to put myself together, but I figured it out and started moving the pieces and Findekáno melted into Thauron in my arms.