I can teach you Quenya.

I'd appreciate that! Although I might start to worry that you have better things to do. Then again, I guess when you can have eight conversations at once it's not such a big deal if one of them is teaching me Quenya.

I assure you that I will not spend time that is better spent elsewhile! "I can speak aloud and project the translation; it's not the fastest method but you'll pick it up that way eventually."

Oh, it's so pretty!

(Although part of that might be the influence of the speaker... no, when he checks, the language is legitmately beautiful even when he imagines it in someone else's voice. Also, wow, he is falling in love with Maitimo very far very fast. Good thing Maitimo doesn't seem to mind.)

Maitimo likes it. He's still trying to think how to make Taliar's 'make your world a paradise' ambition happen neatly in a way that doesn't lose him anything, but it's certainly going to go better if Taliar's in love with him. And he has all his thoughts, he's hiding nothing, it's so compelling... "It is pretty," he agrees, "We cultivate it for beauty, it is something we care about very deeply as a people."

I've been picking up on that. Your architecture is amazing.

And so is their fashion... and so are the Elves themselves, really... although Maitimo is definitely the prettiest, but that's mostly his personality, he has such an excellent personality. Taliar speculates that his soul would be gorgeous. Which reminds him - when am I going to be describing the soul extraction process to somebody...?

"I can set that up for tomorrow if convenient. We have people who are interested."

Sure!

Huh, he's picking up on the language faster than he expected - can't be a new soul power, it hasn't been long enough, maybe he's just better at languages than he thinks he is. Or maybe it's a side effect of being in love with his language tutor.

Osanwë probably helps but he can't help but wonder if it is a power, seeing as he's said all of three sentences. "How do you tend to notice when new soul powers manifest?"

It varies by person. Mine are sometimes really subtle, I didn't notice the lie detection until someone lied to me while it was active, but this languages thing is really unlikely to be one, I wouldn't have had any use for it at home and it hasn't been long enough for it to have developed since I got here.

"What's the development time like?"

Mine is three days for anything really new, and that's amazingly short, comes of having an entire major theme of my soul dedicated to coming up with new powers to handle new situations.

"So we'll know pretty soon once you're powerful enough to take the Enemy."

Yeah.

"If it's - not possible even in principle - would your soul give you powers helpful for evacuating, or something, or would we just be waiting and assuming it'd be doable eventually..."

Taliar's soul glimmers, a hint of silver-blue light playing across its surface.

Interpret that as contemptuous laughter at the thought of things being impossible in principle, says Taliar, patting it fondly. But if it was going to take long enough that evacuating everyone out of his reach would be a reasonable intermediate step, then yes, I'd wake up one day able to transport large numbers of people between worlds or something along those lines.

"Good. And aware of that, or would you have to check -"

I'd find out somehow, it wouldn't wait around for me to happen to try transporting large numbers of people between worlds. My soul's good about these things.

"I shall trust it and stop worrying so much. And set up a chance for you to explain the procedure to some interested people tomorrow morning."

Sounds like a plan.

And tomorrow morning there are intrigued Elves and intrigued Men!

So Taliar explains - to the Elves, he doesn't have enough Quenya yet to explain to the Men directly - how to go about contacting your soul, which is the first step in the process that eventually leads to manifesting it.

What you do is, you sit quietly in a situation where you're unlikely to be distracted - easily distractible people might need a room to themselves with nothing else going on in it; people who are good at maintaining focus might be fine doing it just about anywhere - and you think about what sort of a person you are, what characteristics your soul will embody, and you try to figure out what perceptible aesthetic characteristics your soul will have when manifested, and while you are doing these things you also try to reach for it. As soon as you're reaching for it in the way that's right for you while thinking about at least one true aspect of your personality and at least one correct aesthetic detail and no wrong ones, it'll work. Perhaps this will go better with examples:

Taliar's mother imagined her soul having red as a dominant colour theme and thought about her fondness for interesting puzzles. She tried reaching in a lot of different directions, but the one that ended up working was imagining her soul as sitting right in front of her, just out of arm's reach.

His father doesn't remember the process very well anymore because it happened a couple thousand years ago now, but he did mention once that the direction he had to reach to look for his soul was up.

His grandfather hasn't said much about how he manifested his soul, but he imagined it as shaped like a tree and the direction where he successfully imagined reaching for it was down into the ground.

Taliar himself, armed with all these stories of members of his family looking outward for their souls, wasted an hour or two on that before he found his correct direction: inward. You always know very unambiguously when you have succeeded in finding your soul. It tends to be hard to articulate the experience, but Elves have osanwë so he can just show them his, like so—he calls up the memory and shares it.

He was sitting up in bed with his eyes closed, concentrating on on his sense of his own personality and on the idea of his soul glowing with silver light, and he finally tried looking towards himself instead of away, and it was like suddenly discovering a piece of the sun coextensive with his body. He was filled with light and fire, blazing gold with just a hint of silver, and unlike every story he'd ever heard about reaching for your soul, there seemed to be no distance at all between him and it. It was right there with him, filling up his skin, closer than his own shadow. He opened his eyes and half-expected to find himself glowing, although he knew it doesn't work like that and in fact he wasn't.

So! That is how you look for your soul, any questions?

Lots of questions. The Elves are overwhelmed with how pretty, they all want to try it.

He answers questions and reminds them about the vulnerabilities inherent in being a soulbearer, and he offers to help people guess what kind of aesthetics their souls might have, since none of them grew up in a culture where soul artifacts were a thing at all and they probably don't have a frame of reference for it. Here are some examples of soul aesthetics! His father's soul like a shining cloud, his mother's like a curl of flame, his grandfather's in the shape of a tree, the Emperor's tidily geometric black-and-white crystal...

And they all set to trying it.