Occasional! says Maedhros. He must have mellowed in old age. After the war, perhaps, you can meet him and he'll probably barrage you with questions about being half-Maia and experiments he'll assume you've already thought of and done about your own abilities.

Now I'm surprised he hasn't interrogated me about my ice powers and what I've been able to observe about my pretending-to-be-an-Asgardian spell.

That surprises me also. I suppose you learned of them right when you were confronting Thauron and he is good at not being sidetracked when there's that much at stake. You could probably easily prompt him into it

I might do. Although the circumstances when we wind up chatting aren't really suited to determining maximum volume of ice per second or anything.

What's he working on at the moment, do you know?

I don't.

He's not running your kingdom? Lúthien says.

I mean to pay him the highest possible compliment when I opine that it would be a waste of his time.

Maedhros grins. Loki, Lúthien wanted to see Tirion and I remembered I got distracted from showing you. Care to go back?

Sure!

So they spend a very pleasant few hours wandering around Maedhros' memories of the city, and then climb the walls and watch the Mingling, and then he lets it fade.

It seems astonishingly functional as a city considering how much it's optimized for aesthetics above all.

When you have no shortage of anything at all, it's not really hard to do impressively on both fronts. But yes, a lot of work went into keeping it running smoothly.

Even without material scarcity the unscarce things need to move from place to place.

Which is how I earned - well, I didn't earn all my pretty titles, I was born to them, but it's how I earned the feeling that I entirely merited them.

All your titles? How many do you have?

Huh. I've just got Princess and my military rank and something that I basically hold only to convince the foreign policy people that they really don't need to try harder to bother Odin. Everything else is informal or untitled.

The Noldor really really like titles. And names for things, generally. It made introductions drag out but it also made them genuinely informative, you got a very good sense of a person by the time you knew their name.

If someone wanted to introduce me informatively they'd probably start listing Things I've Killed. That list will... get longer when I go home and update everybody, assuming I'm not banished again and more firmly this time.

He laughs. In this war the Asgardian excitement about killing things seems wholly warranted. I plan to when I have a thousand years free learn to fight like that.

I'm not even a thousand years old yet, she points out.

I expect you are unusually talented, and there's no reason to expect I will be.

I could cast my grace spell on you. Well, not here, I'm not supposed to use spells that affect living things in Doriath. That's my talent, the entirety of it.

Quendi are - probably not as graceful as a spell for perfect grace, but pretty good. What we lack is systemized knowledge, on this subject. I've been terribly tempted to take it up anyway but there's no way to justify it as a use of my time.