"Great. Where would we get fire, or is that not a thing there are elementals for?"

"There are, but they'll be somewhere fires are common. Or at the very least somewhere that isn't literally freezing. Keep a fire burning long enough, find an excuse to run magic through it even if it just wastes the magic, and it'll probably attract a fire elemental eventually. If there's one to attract."

"We could light a fire, but you're the judge of how important symbolic relevance of my ring is."

"For an implement, symbolism is the most important thing. Second only to whether you can physically carry it around with you, but that hardly ever comes up.

If you have fuel for fires, that might come in handy during the ritual. Since we're expecting a lot of variations on ice and cold."

"In that case let's acquire a fire spirit for my ring," he says, "and it shall be positively brimming with symbolism. People built sledges out of the wagons and we can requisition and burn them if it's worth it; there's some wood actually set aside for fires, but less of it. And clothes. And books, I suppose, but Eru."

"My guess is it's not worth it. There aren't exactly flame spirits coming out of the woodwork around here, not even if the woodwork is on fire. It'd probably be a waste of the sledges. If it gets to where we're burning books it definitely was."

"Can I add it later, or does the implement's power depend mostly on what's going on in the first ceremony it's used for?"

"It depends on what it is going in. There wouldn't be anything stopping you from sealing an elemental in your implement afterward, but there'd be little or no benefit compared to sealing the elemental in some other thing."

"All right." He grimaces. "Doing your magic improperly under these circumstances is going to weaken us in it, probably permanently?"

"That's more a feature of major rituals than of the circumstances, but yes." Unmentioned is that the ritual to make the ice safer is in fact scheduled to be used improperly. They alreadyknow about the permanent consequences.

"I can't think of much else we can do to prepare. We–or at least I, probably you too–should eat and sleep first."

And they return to the tent. It's windy. It's freezing.

They do have the sole good source of warmth, but the air one wouldn't do much about the wind even if they deployed it.

Amber eats, feeling vaguely guilty about the fact that she'll probably use up their rations faster than any Elda, and then heads for wherever people sleep on the rare occasions that they do.

Also in tents, half-buried in the snow. Irissë points her to hers. "I share with my cousin. She won't bother you."

"Thanks." She enters.

It's empty at the moment. Warm enough - the snow is actually a bit of an insulator - and very very elaborately outfitted.

Who decorates their snow-buried tents this well? Oh well, whether it's an Eldar thing or a royalty thing it's not the strangest thing to happen today.

And sleep.

When she wakes up there's someone there, and some bread on a plate. "Lembas," the newcomer says. "And pleasure to meet you, I'm Artanis."

"Amber. Pleased to meet you too. You're Irissë's cousin?"

"Yes. On the sane side of the family tree. You dropped out of the sky."

"I did. Still don't know how I got here; appearing in midair is less surprising than appearing in the first place."

"Well. You picked quite the time and place for it, though I guess you can be glad you didn't crash on the other shore."

"You mean because that's where the non-sane side of the family is? I didn't exactly pick the side, but maybe I would have."

She takes a bite of the bread. "This is surprisingly good. Lembas, you said it was?"

"Yeah. That much will keep you all day. The Valar taught it to us."

Magic bread, called lembas. Artanis even looks like– huh.

"There's something like that in fiction where I come from. Only fiction, though. Sounds useful, especially under the circumstances."

"Yep. We will have about six months before we starve, even if we can't find anything out there."