"Yeah, I think he's overestimated himself and is going to get them all killed, and with twice the numbers it'll take a lot longer, even if it still isn't enough."

"And I doubt I make that much difference. Even with helping across the Ice.

Though, what all does he have? If the valaraukar were the most dangerous, I might at least be relatively untouchable."

"We don't know of anything more dangerous than that, except the Enemy himself. But there's a lot we don't know."

"Any ways to actually hurt him? Bucket of water, sunlight, throwing eggs at him?"

"The physical forms the Valar take are possible to damage with ordinary magic weapons. In theory you could just throw soldiers at him until he died, though you'd probably lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers."

"That sounds much less bad than I was afraid of. Are the physical forms copying human ones– or, I guess it'd be copying yours? What's your species called, by the way?

Human forms are inconveniently easy to demolish, even if his is a lot tougher."

"We're called the Eldar, among other things And their forms often copy ours, though I hear his current one is twenty feet tall and fairly unlike us."

"Figures. If he can die of suffocation or blood loss or that kind of thing I might be equipped to do that, but it sounds like we can't even count on that."

"No, wouldn't expect that to work. Just taking chunks out of the connection between the physical world and the source of their power."

"There are almost definitely ways to magically disintegrate things, but I don't know any.

And if the war is hopeless without magic, that's...bad."

"We can't not try."

"One step at a time, I guess. There's the rest of my life to think of something, unless I get very lucky and get home or very unlucky and don't.

Anything that looks like a midway point down there? Doesn't have to be exact; as long as it's less than two hundred miles from each side any landmark would do."

"There are some cliffs I'd recognize again, but they're not exactly distinctive."

"If you can identify something like "third cliff from the west" that would do it. Distinctive would be better, but not really mandatory."

"Yes, I can do that."

"Good. Then the rest is just mapmaking for normal reasons, let me know when you've seen enough or if there's anywhere in particular to head toward."

They head back a few hours later. "Thank you."

"No problem at all."

"So what's the secret plan my sister is working on?"

"She didn't tell you? She volunteered you for it. She's collecting the components for the ritual to make people into practitioners. It'll take two to make the Ice safer, if this works."

"She said something like but that but I didn't have enough context to make head or tail of it. Are there side effects? How does it make the Ice safer?"

"Definitely side effects. In the long term it'll involve some of the bad karma I mentioned, more at the level of a few years bad luck than the universe trying to kill you. So maybe not long term for you. It means permanently passing up one of the major sources of power commonly used by practitioners where I'm from. It might involve fights we're not equipped to handle, possibly dozens of them.

If it works, it makes the Ice cooperative. Warm enough no one freezes, stability for whatever people are walking across, paths opening up. Can't do much about food, unfortunately."

"All right. Thank you. That could make a tremendous difference."

"Like you said. Numbers. Might at least help stall, right?

If it works, of course."

"When will we know if it has?"