The Enemy murdered my grandfather and destroyed the Trees and is probably slaughtering and torturing his way across the Outer Lands.

...the Trees?

He sends the mental image. That's why it's dark, the Trees are dead. Are you used to the dark?

...No. We have a sun. Mental image of that.

We don't have one of those, so now that the Trees are dead there's no light in the world. We can fix that with the Silmarils once we win the war.

I'll have to take your word for that.

Like I said, I'll swear to everything if you'll do likewise once we have a common language.

I'm not sure why that would help. If you really need me to trust you, you could get in range of my telepathy.

...you can't be lied to over osanwë?

I have no idea how your telepathy works, but I'd take mine over a verbal assurance. I'm not going to require it for mere nonhostility or anything though.

I can't hear anything that someone wants to keep private, not once they're older than a kid and know how to keep thoughts private in the first place. You could be lying to me quite easily.

I'm the only telepath in my country and probably my entire world, she says, and if there's a way to shield thoughts from me within range I haven't run into it. Range is five feet.

Bit of a catch; I'd be happy to get that close so you can verify I don't want to hurt you, but I have no way of being confident you don't want to hurt me and that'd be pretty easy to do, at five feet. I am guessing your brother does not want to come over here as assurance.

Are you the sort to be reassured that if I wanted to hurt you you're already well in range of the other half of my magic?

Yeah, definitely. What's the other half of your magic?

Fire. More generally temperature. You wanted to know how I was warming the area; that's how. Aleko was cold.

Um.

And to his father, we might have a way across the Ice, or I might die. Either way, kind of need to know as soon as possible.

Go on, his father says.

Do you think you could help us cross this place? We need to do it as fast as possible to get to the site of the war.

Um. There's kind of a lot of you, and I sleep and don't know if it gets cold enough to freeze you while I'm doing that, and I don't know how much food you brought. But maybe? How big is it?

It's about four hundred miles by land from here, but we don't need constant warming, we have tents, the snow can insulate them too, we just need a clear path. We have more than enough food.

That's... a really long hike and I'm not very good at walking, but I can warm the area within my range as long as I'm awake and someone reminds me to keep doing it every now and then...

We can build sledges for our supplies and you can sit on one of them, if you can do warming that'd be directed enough to make a path for sledges. Or we can carry you, that's not a problem.

I have pretty arbitrary precision within my range. I can't directly affect terrain per se but I can melt and refreeze ice.

That should do it then. I'll tell people to get started on sledges. How fast? How much ice a day?

I don't have a capacity limit that I've ever come across, just range and attention. And I think you must see better than I can or something so that's a factor too on anything delicate, we can't see you from here at all, all I can do is tell where there's warmth.

I mean, I'm seeing you by body heat too, but I can see you quite clearly. He sends a mental image.