And she heads for Fëanor's.

Tyelcormo sees her before she sees him, of course, and hurries towards her at bird speed. Loki. New policy; direct your response at Tyelcormo rather than at the bird flying at you. Other new policy is to start conversations with the words you ended the last one with, but we hadn't adopted that last time we spoke so I don't expect you remember.

Having no native osanwë I'm not actually sure how directional I can make it on fine distinctions like that, but I'll try; might be worth checking. I transcribe a lot of my conversations - which is a security risk if someone manages to be able to operate my illusions somehow, but will help me do the conversation-starter convention if they can't...

It's easy to test whether you can do the directional thing; I'll ask one or two of my brothers to stand behind a door and we can see if you can do 'Macalaurë' as distinct from 'person behind the door' when you do and when you don't know who's behind the door, and whether the person behind the door who you're not addressing yourself to hears it.

Yeah, that works. I suppose we now know that my ability to change shape and turn invisible are not unique markers. Although I can't turn into a Balrog, so if something does that, please feel free to assume it isn't me.

Bit late at that point, isn't it? The King thinks he's made some progress on the projectile weapons you described to us, thinks it's maybe a five-year project. It'd be faster if he weren't juggling so many.

Does that mean I should bring my dinged armor to the Dwarves instead of him, then?

No, that we're very fast at, comes up a lot. Also I think the forge-minded find things like that relaxing the way I find hunting relaxing.

My armor is weird, though, she says.

How so? Anyway, someone can probably tell you in five minutes how long it'd take.

Fair enough. I'm not actually sure, I never branched into armor-crafting, but I'm reasonably sure it is not just shaped metal. It's a little enchanted, not heavily - that should all be intact - and probably has peculiar materials in it. The damage is superficial, but it's not going to take well to being heated up and pounded on, I think.

Yeah, just ask Curvo or the King. So did that drama conclude the trial?

Not exactly, but it made it fairly clear what had happened and I didn't feel the need to supervise the rest of it in person.

And they're quite clear, I hope, that if it happens again we're not going to go 'oh, inconvenient how the Enemy keeps using Nolofinwë's people to try to kill us'?

You're not? I mean, that's exactly what happened. Sarpalarë was very foolish and everyone is being warned against similar failure modes, but that is in fact the thing that happened and I am not sure why you'd find it implausible that it'd happen twice. Surely that's the response you'd want if the reverse were tried.

We will. But I do not want any other foolish would-be assassins in Nolofinwë's camp who don't even require magical urging to go settle a score to anticipate that we will.

I think Nolofinwë is making it clear that he won't stand for it.

Good.

Anyway, turns out I can kill Balrogs, so that's exciting.

Congratulations. Was it a fun fight?

Well, up until the end of it when I discovered in the stupidest way possible that I was secretly adopted.

...huh?

So, I spent the entire fight being not particularly outmatched but definitely very uncomfortably warm. And - to summarize a lot of inferences I then made based on things I don't think I've mentioned to you - when the Balrog exploded I then turned blue and concluded that I was kidnapped from the frost giants as an infant and my mother was probably planning to use me as a puppet ruler of their planet to end the otherwise interminable war; the remaining mysteries are why I'm so short even when blue and whether my father even knew she did this.

I want to lock Maitimo and your mother in a room with the table game Governor - oh, you've probably never heard of it...

I haven't.