"I haven't heard anything, we don't get couriers from Alqualondë very often. But I - know what it was like to love my wife and I can recognize someone who is in love with one of my daughters. And I don't suppose it will help any to tell you that love isn't supposed to hurt so badly."

"No, it really won't."

"Do you want to talk about what happened?"

"I - I suppose you ought to know. It's - more complicated than it looks - by a lot -"

"Are any of my children alive?"

"Lírnith is. Unless something's happened since I got on the boat."

"Thank you. All right. What -"

"- I'm from an entirely different world. It's got - only humans, no other sapient species and no Valar - and different magic. Instead of all the music and the - oh um, I'm, allergic to music, if there's any within human hearing range of me it's very painful, I can leave sometimes to let you sing, I'm sorry I know it's inconvenient - um, instead of magic music and magic Ainur and magic items that people just make, there's artifacts. If you touch an artifact it does things to you, one good thing and one bad thing, usually permanent, sometimes a one-time effect."

"...okay."

"And there was an accident on my way to school one day and six of them hit me."

"Six of them."

"Yeah. Some of the stuff was obvious right away. I'm blind and deaf except that I can speak and understand and read and write arbitrary languages, so I can hear speech and see text, and if people sign I get visible flashes of that too. The blindness and deafness - and also no sense of smell, it was all three together - come with a weird sense that goes about a hundred yards in all directions pretty crisply and fades out from there, I can tell where things are and density and texture and stuff like that. The languages comes with faceblindness, which was hard to notice because of the actual blindness. I'm too hot all the time and I have no idea what that even goes with, something good but apparently not very good." She stirs her tea a little more. "The music allergy goes with a pretty good healing factor. It'd be more convenient in my world than here - it keeps - being a problem here -" She forces down a bite of the food, composes herself. "One of the artifacts sent me to Arda, and it lets me give out pairs-of-effects to other people if I touch them, and take them back again, they're only permanent for me. And the sixth one does - mental opacity - I didn't have to learn to distinguish private thoughts, that's how we figured it out when I mentioned there weren't Elves in my world such that I could've learned it there - and - and the way I've been describing it is that it also sometimes not always I don't even know what the filtering criteria are also causes a psychological - obsession - with another person -"

"I see."

"- so I landed very badly injured from the accident but healing, extremely confused, in a refugee camp, that was promptly massacred for a Silmaril that was there, and fell in love with Rirosseth."

"Sorry, who is Rirosseth?"

"- she doesn't like her birth name anymore. Your eldest."

"...thank you. Rirosseth. All right. So you landed somewhere they attacked because of their oath, and fell in love - and vice versa, or -"

"It didn't do anything to her, she hadn't touched the artifact. And she wanted to know where I was from and what I was doing there and before I could explain very much Lírnith started singing but we didn't know then what the trigger was so I was just kept unconscious for the next week until all the singing for the dead was over."

"...was kept unconscious -"

"She kind of had to continuously strangle me for a week - checked occasionally to see if when I healed I'd stop screaming - I didn't - eventually she fell asleep and they'd stopped singing then."

"Okay."

"...and then more explaining happened in both directions and we figured out the music problem and some of the other pairs and I didn't have anything else to do so I stayed in their fortress and tried not to mention the whole magically in love thing but she noticed."

"She does that."

"She didn't take it all that well and Lírnith ran interference -

- and then Lírnith wanted to test the effect and she did and she didn't get stuck on anyone while she had it and it got rid of the oath."

"Oh. Praised be, uh, something."