There is nothing out of the ordinary on the eastern border of Doriath, and then, abruptly, there is a brilliant light.
A crown of black iron, bent and twisted as though crushed by some terrible force, set with three shining white jewels of surpassing beauty, lands on the forest floor. There is no sign of where it might have come from or who might have put it there.
"Yes."
More games! Shirask is good at coming up with these games, it turns out. She would enjoy them a lot if she could enjoy things.
She mostly doesn't deal with the fact Shirask can't enjoy things. It just seems impossible to productively deal with.
Shirask is getting better and better at the skill of smiling when it is an appropriate time to smile! She makes her constant unimaginable suffering very easy to ignore!
And the games are legitimately fun and legitimately educational and legitimately just as harmless as leaping between trees.
Then even her parents can't object. After a little while, though, she wants to learn Shirask's songs.
"I will teach you all the songs I know, if you want to learn them. I have the one I developed, and a few I learned from Sauron. But my stealth song is very uncomfortable to use, and difficult. And I don't know what our parents will think."
"That's true. How much attention does Melian pay to you? Will we need to explain why you're vanishing intermittently?"
"She'll notice we're practicing stealth! Stealth's a good thing to know, she won't mind. She might still be able to tell we're here, she can pretty much do anything in Doriath."
"I would be surprised if she could, given that I walked out of Angband with it. There is a sense in which we won't be here."
"Then maybe not. But she's more Doriath than Melkor is Angband; he cares about other things. And he hasn't been there very long."
She smiles; she sings. It's lovely, in a soft strange subtle way. There's a lot of personality in it and the personality is very much Shirask's.
Two minutes into the song, she's fading at the edges, translucent, wavering, the sound of her voice distant and diminished. It goes very fast from there. When she's been completely imperceptible for a few seconds, she stops singing and fades back in almost immediately.
She does the next bit. It takes longer for her to vanish from this starting point, and the vanishing is a little less precise. When she reappears, she picks up where she left off and does another section. It will be possible to get through the whole song this way, eventually, and then she can explain the pattern she uses when she repeats.
Shirask smiles back.
"And now you know my stealth song," she says. "You can try it if you like. I warn you once again that it's uncomfortable."
Two minutes in, Lúthien starts to fade.
From the inside, it feels like all her connections to the outside world are being closed out, choked off, until there's almost nothing left of them. What light still reaches her is so dim she can barely see; what sound, so faint she can barely hear. She can't see her own body at all, and the sound of her singing takes on a bizarre quality because the only part that reaches her ears is what her own body conducts; none of it escapes into the air. Enough air reaches her to fill her lungs, but only just; it feels a little like she's constantly slowly suffocating. Where her feet touch the ground, it's solid - too solid, completely unyielding, and only the ground; she passes through grass and flowers like, well, like she isn't there. All her clothing comes with her, and she can still feel that, but wherever her clothes do not cover her body there's nothing, no air, just an unsettling emptiness.
It is, as promised, very uncomfortable. The sensory deprivation and air restriction are part of it, but being mostly removed from the world also turns out to be bad for temperature regulation. If she doesn't spare some attention to keeping her body a consistent and livable temperature, it will cycle unpredictably between too hot and too cold.
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