.....

Well, she could feign modesty, but on principle that's just silly.

Eeeheehee yes I was!!! I need to go regrow some brain matter but ahahaha in your face Valar!!

She squeezes her uncle a little, reassuringly. "We'll do okay."

"We'll stop him."

"Yeah." Gentle unhug, with a reassuring smile. "Good skill, I'm going to go be comatose for a little while now. Someone please take care of my horse for me." She pauses, and considers. She looks at Tyelcormo, and then at Huan. Then she sidles closer to the big fluffy dog.

"May I please collapse into your fluff," she asks, in a low whisper.

Huan does not talk to people. He does stretch accommodatingly, though.

She'll take that as a yes, and collapses into the fluff accordingly.

"Best dog," she mumbles, and then she is free to stop doing things and can just hate the world in peace.

Yeah. No one moves for a while. Then -

- we will return to Formenos and bury my father.

Nnnnnngh she doesn't want to be functional right noooow.

She can go not be functional in Formenos, though. She doesn't want to actually hinder them doing stuff. Getting on a horse is doable. She can do that.

She sends an affirmative that's only slightly hazy, then extracts herself from the fluff. Huan gets brief scritches for his service, and then she goes and gets on her horse.

And they head north. It's slow going, in the dark.

Well. She's not impatient. She's not really much of anything, just tired.

(Maybe she should have tried to talk Huan into letting her ride him, so she could be buried in the fluff for the trip. No, no, that would be kind of rude.)

They stop to rest. She can be buried in the fluff then.

Fluff.

"Your dog is the best," she mumbles, in Tyelcormo's general direction.

"Yep," he murmurs back, and hugs his father tightly, and sleeps.

Yeah, sleep sounds like a pretty good move. Long day. Or - long darkness. Whatever.

Zzz.

When she wakes she's feeling a bit better. Not great, but better. She probably shouldn't push it, but she can operate off of more than just a vague sense of responsibility and the promises of fluff to collapse into.

Fëanáro does not look any better. Anguished and exhausted and hollow. They head north.

She hugs him again, before they head out. Just because it might help.

North. Everything's so dark. It's so hard to get used to, everything, everything looks so different. She could get lost, if she's not careful.

She wonders how her parents are doing. Probably fine. They're probably fine. They're both pretty stable, they'll be worried about her... But she'll stay with her cousins for now, they perhaps don't need her, but they can use some kind of emotional support, all of them. Her parents will understand.

Formenos is shattered. It looks like Melkor just melted buildings as he went. The stone is strange and glassy and very cold. 

Fëanáro refuses food.

There is not that much left of his father to bury. This doesn't help.

No. No, it doesn't.

He wasn't her grandfather, but he was her king. She sings for the loss of a great man.

And after a little while he stitches himself together. Very, very breakably. He wants all of the plants gathered to take with them as food, he wants wagons with these specifications, he wants people at the forges making the following things, he wants songs developed for healing and for endurance and for sleepless travel...

Endurance and sleepless travel together sounds like a good combination, and like it's up her alley. She can develop something.

(She hates that there's nothing obvious she can do to fix it. Her uncle's hurting and she doesn't have song or salve to heal it. It bothers her.)

"I can kill him," he says to her one day, when everyone's at work gathering the things they'll need to leave. He's supervising the forges. He's let the ash settle into his skin until he looks like he's made of it.

She glances up from her musical notation. It's hard to write in the dark, but she's not going to subject everyone nearby to the cacophony that is her in-progress song design. She'll hum occasional bars to herself, to test how well the two song types mesh, but a lot of the song design stays safely in her head where no one can suffer from it.

"... I believe you," she says, after a thoughtful pause. Her heart seems to be doing something strange in her chest. The Valar were idiots but how wrong were they? How close is he to doing something rash? "But perhaps make sure how you do it is from far away?"

"I was not planning to charge Angband and challenge him to a fight. But we do need the Silmarils back. With them I could do it from a thousand miles off."

"Yes." She hesitates, then continues, "But I think he knows that. I don't - my faith is not in the Valar, but I think there was some truth to what they said. We should be wary of falling into a trap."

"He knows that they're important to me. He doesn't know anything about what they can do, he thinks I like them because we're Elves and like pretty things. You're right that he probably thinks he can bait us with them, but I'd rather he try, because he doesn't know what he loses if he loses them and he might be too eager to use them as bait."

"Maybe," she allows, "but the Valar wanted them, too, and I don't think it was for their beauty. He might not know precisely what he has or how to use them, but I don't think it would be wise to stake a plan on the Enemy's ignorance."