That's good to hear.

I'm sure it's hard to believe.

A little. When I said if I never did anything scary here I'd curl up in a ball, I meant - subjectively scary, whether or not it should be, or would be if I knew the place better.

That's fair. I understand why, with your background, you'd want to press him on that.

I'm sort of impressed with myself for actually managing it.

We're grateful that you're thinking about how best to do your work.

I hope I can get anywhere. It'll be not only tragic for the family but very anticlimactic if I can't.

You noticed he didn't tell Fëanáro. We're accustomed to false hope.

Nod.

They leave Tirion and ride west, towards the excessively bright Trees.

Oh, for a set of tinted glasses. She squints, then puts her arm between her eyes and the Trees.

Rúmil smiles. Like to hear my pitch on the advantages of being captured by the Enemy?

Is it that you don't need tinted glasses? I bet it's that.

Everyone always guesses that, he says mournfully.

Bella laughs.

It also makes Finwë not seem very scary.

Maybe I'd be coping better if I'd run into more scary things at home.

It sounds like you wouldn't be here at all. Most people captured by our Enemy don't make it out, either.

I might be making it sound a little worse than it is because I'm actually the sort of person who'd look at a soberly assessed risk and then decide to do something stupid if I thought I had a good reason, so it's a good habit to pretend that interacting with anything that might squish me means instant squishing. And I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get along very well with a god, in particular, and probably not a faerie either; lots of people don't have that problem. Gods are pretty popular.

But sometimes do squish people without cause?

For certain definitions of 'without cause'. They really don't like if it you pronounce their names wrong.

...what? We can't pronounce the Valar's at all, so they helped up invent easier-to-say ones. They have killed people over saying their names wrong?

Yeah. There's a sound which only appears in divine names and nowhere else, and if you feel like expressing that a specific deity doesn't scare you, you pronounce it with the next closest sound instead, and sometimes people turn out to be mistaken about which deities oughtn't scare them.

So the problem is that it's done specifically as a ...gesture of defiance? And they take offense?

They usually don't like it if you do it by accident either, but that's sort of why it's taken as disrespectful to mispronounce a divine name, is my understanding.