"Ah. I see the problem with doing that with a dishonest person, then. Well, it's not as if I was planning to throw myself into his arms."

"I'm glad I'm not sure whether going to see him would be good for him because I'd certainly do it if it were and I'm really not sure that I should."

Nod.

"I mentioned to my brother that you could make cities invisible, and he was very tempted. He wants a safe place to rebuild, away from the fighting, a place people can retreat to when the war starts to grind down their souls, a place where children might be born to our new world, and that might be the way to achieve it."

"'Make cities invisible' exaggerates, a little. I can make things look how I like; I can make the seeming follow the thing; but I assume people would find it inconvenient to consistently be invisible along with all their possessions and have to come to me every time they had a child or something broke enough to lose its spell. And the illusion equivalent of one-way glass over a settlement would still leave it looking a little different from the surroundings to an observer. If I wanted to hide a city I'd probably make it seem to have impassable obstacles all around it approached from the ground as the first line."

He nods. "I think he'd be grateful of the chance to discuss those options, in any event, when you have the time."

"I was thinking of flying south to Círdan's tonight but I won't lose much time if I stay here late; I fly slowly when asleep."

"Well, then it might be worth a shot right now. He also might be grumpy right now because I'm too concerned with the wellbeing of our enemies and so forth."

"If he thinks you're too concerned with their wellbeing what can he possibly think of me?"

"That's what I'm worried about. But you can turn things invisible, and also there's no conceivable sense in which Alqualondë and the Doom and the ice were your fault, so he might have more patience for you than I'm anticipating."

"Well, I can give it a try, I suppose. Can you point him out to me from here...?"

"He's the one who stormed off when you said Maitimo is a bird and can fly and is happy. That tent over there."

"Thirty fucking seconds, I wouldn't begrudge anyone thirty fucking seconds," Loki mutters, but she follows his hand and flies down to the tent.

The front is open; he's singing to his daughter, who appears to be sleeping. When he sees her he stands, comes to the door, and closes it behind him. "Loki Odinsdottir."

"Turukáno," she replies. "I hear you want to discuss hidden cities."

"Yes," he says. "I don't want our civilian population in a fortress that's placed for war. I want to find somewhere as defensible as I can and build a Noldorin city there, in the style of Tirion where we came from, somewhere Itarillë can grow up safely and our numbers can increase and where everyone can fall back, if they fail as we're Doomed to."

Loki nods. "Seems like a reasonable thing to do. Making the city outright invisible won't work; everything in it would have to be invisible too. Do you need it to be impossible to see or impossible to reach?"

"The latter is obviously more important, but I'm worried that as long as the Enemy knows it's there, trouble is possible. I was thinking of picking a remote and inaccessible location in the mountains, if that helps."

"Oh, if you're in the mountains it'd be much easier to cover you over with something that makes it look like you're not there -" She makes a little illusion of a mountain valley. "This is nowhere in particular, I haven't been scouting for suitable mountain locations, but if you're in a dip -" She puts a little town in the dip, then roofs it in a shallower valley floor. "Like so. Does that suit what you had in mind?"

"Yes, except that it does need to feed fifty thousand people so it's more complicated than just hiding the town itself. But yes, that's precisely the idea."

He nods. "Or a fake mountain peak, snowy year-round?"

"More noticeable to anyone who's familiar with the skyline of the mountains, but -" She replaces the valley with a peak. "Yes, if you settle somewhere that's how the mountains tend. But clouds that go around mountains will go through an illusory one, and most mountains that are high enough to be always snow-capped are high enough for low clouds to approach them sometimes."

He nods. "Thank you. I can plan around that and determine the setup that makes the most sense for us. If you expect he'd answer honestly - perhaps you can suggest that the question comes from one of his people - you could ask Nelyafinwë how far the Enemy's scouted, and what means he has to learn the lay of the land."