There's an amphitheater, a place where a hundred of the stone walkways twine around to create space for a hundred thousand people to sit in close proximity, and someone is giving a lecture or a demonstration at the base of it, the seats closest to him filled with eager, tiny, bearded Dwarf-children.
And they spiral down, and down, and down, past waterfalls and egg-sized gemstones left half in the rock and halls of crystal. Everything grows gradually more ornate and more perfectly maintained and the clang of hammers fades behind them. "People say," her guide says, "that we only have a council instead of a single King because there were nine winners of the competition to design the throne so we couldn't just select one person to sit it." And they push open the doors to reveal, indeed, nine thrones so elaborate it would be hard to choose between them, and nine squat bearded people sitting them.
"And I assume I'll need more sleep than you, but still, I'd already have the ability to do without sleep altogether if I could have covertly used it in Asgard. How abruptly?"
"About eight times longer than you should have gone, your thoughts get foggy and you feel jittery like you're being sustained by external strings. As soon as you close your eyes at that point you will sleep for a few days, and if someone tries to wake you before then you will have something resembling a very bad hangover and also still be exhausted." A rueful smile. "The sample size is quite large, but all the tests were on me."
Record record record. She will ask when he's done if the snowflake thing is essential.
"As with everything I will be more generally disseminating these things, but sure. What's with the snowflake thing?"
They all have associated physical effects, either chosen because they seemed thematically appropriate to me or because it was hard to design the song without them. Or some of them it's the point, like a song to knock people away from you."
"In particular I feel very awkward about giving you a skip-a-night-of-sleep-room and a speed-up-perception-room and not offering commensurate benefits to your cousins. I feel awkward about it anyway because your host is so much better able to leverage basically anything I offer, but still. I can dismiss illusions from existence remotely even though I can't usefully create them that way, anyway, if another Balrog gets dropped on their camp and commandeers their spell rooms as soon as I find out the room will cease to have special properties."
"No, it's working off mental images and persisting from there, I can't turn it into a video camera. I don't doubt that you're a particularly good source of magic songs and I really appreciate it and I wish I could just go around dispensing gifts to everyone indiscriminately but I am dealing with an awkward détente here. If my sister plummets out of the sky, finds out I'm a frost giant, and despises me for it, you may feel free to carefully equalize your distribution of things between the two of us, I won't be offended."
"Should probably be different rooms, people might want to hang out in the one and just visit the other."
And spellcrafts.