"Oh, forty miles, nearly there."

"Before the Sun sets, if it has the same movement patterns as the Moon. Even being careful of the Ice."

"The patterns of typical suns and moons are comparable to one another, though not identical; usually though there are times when the moon is visible during the day, or not so at night, etcetera."

"Are you willing to share your thoughts on how best to protect the civilians, given that sending them ahead isn't it?"

"I know nothing about the tactics of orcs or the lay of the land, but I can turn them invisible when we're close enough that being unable to see their feet and each other will be less of a hazard. Maybe send illusions of some of them with you, although I can only operate perhaps a hundred of those at a time and I don't know how convincing they'll be to elf-quality eyes, not being designed for same."

"We don't know any of that either. The invisibility's a good idea. And I don't know if orcs have Elf-quality eyes, either. Probably not, since they're said to hate the light."

Loki makes an illusion of herself. It waves.

"It looks like you inexplicably have no body heat and your skin is missing all its purple tones. The former might alert an enemy to the fact it's an illusion; the latter wouldn't."

"You can see heat? ...And what do you mean by purple?"

"Purple is a color. I have some clothing that's purple, the purplest things are flowers meant to attract honeybees... and yes, of course we can see heat, it gives off light just like everything else does. It's most of our sight when there's no giant glowing spheres in the sky. You can't?"

"Heat is past red, in the sense that red is past yellow." He shakes his head. "I'm sure this isn't the real reason, but I keep thinking that the reason your people fight so much is because the world must be so boring, not being able to see or hear or share thoughts."

"Well, I'm sure I haven't seen your world at its best and can't comment on how interesting it usually is."

"No one will ever see our world at its best again, with the Trees dead."

"Were they contributing that much to your day to day entertainment?"

"Yes. They made everything they touched beautiful, and being around beautiful things is a great source of joy to our people. And they gave us more energy, made us better able to use our wills to shape the world, so enabled every other endeavor. And our cities, our artwork, our architecture, was all designed around the light of the Trees, to do interesting and novel things with it. We are a people who care about beauty more than anything, and we'd have an Age to build places that expressed every possible conception of beauty."

"That's very nicely done! I would enjoy seeing it some day, should that ever be possible. Do you miss it?"

"Some things about it."

Nod.

They reach land before the Sun sets. Findekáno can hear all the scouts, even the ones who are now quite far out, and reports everything they see and share. "There's one major river on this side of the continent, and the cousins are camping at a lake in the mountains near its source. They know we're here by now, if they didn't already; we've seen one of their scouting parties. Our scouting parties have orders not to raise weapons against them even in self-defense, but the one we saw left immediately. No sight of the Enemy yet, except the cloud concealing a section of the northern mountains." He bites his lip. "Setting up south of them on the river seems unwise."

"Would you like to? Even without our vision I'd expect that you might notice things they're at a bad angle for, and that is a problem we'll need to solve."