"Anairë. I'll keep that in mind.

So, Valinor is in the direction that involves less ice. Is there anything more specific I need to know about getting there?"

"Uh. The people at the harbor might not be thrilled to see you, after what happened. Give them a wide berth. The whole place is dark and in ruin because of the Enemy we're going to fight. The city we're from is called Tirion, and it's white, and approximately in the middle of the continent, and was once very beautiful."

"Formerly beautiful white city, avoid the harbor, wait, how did he manage to darken the city?"

It probably isn't "sabotaged all the power plants," but that doesn't leave many candidates.

"Killed the Trees." A mental image accompanies this.

...okay. He did sabotage the power plants.

"When you mentioned that earlier, I thought it was a figure of speech. So it's going to stay this dark, not brighten in a few hours?"

"It's going to be this dark forever, as far as we know."

"My world has a sun," is sending mental images as easy as words? "and looks like this one sometimes, but only at its darkest. Usually there's either the sun or the moon vsible." Another picture.

"Neither of those look familiar. We can manage by the starlight, but it is a bit frightning after one's used to the Trees. And plants don't grow anymore."

"I can imagine. Did the Trees warm the world as well as light it? If the sun somehow went out, we'd freeze before we starved."

"They were warm, but the world was habitable without them. The other continent never had any Trees and we endured there for a thousand years perfectly well."

"Even though plants don't grow?"

"Some fungi do. The Vala of the waters is pretty good at his job and most underwater things are fine. There are root vegetables that can make it."

"You seem nowhere near as worried about this as I'd expect someone from Earth to be. On my world, if everything but those stopped growing it could be an apocalypse in its own right."

"It is. It's just an apocalypse that started several years ago, and has since precipitated enough other disasters we're rather inured to them."

"Oh. That isn't better. And here I thought my world had problems.

Did the Valar have any plans to react, or are they going to let the Enemy have his victory?"

"They have no plans to react. Thus us doing it, however doomed and underqualified."

"I meant along the lines of lighting the world with something else, since they can't possibly expect the rest of you to do that.

If not, I guess we're doing our wandering in the dark."

"Oh. They might do that eventually. No way to know, no plans in the works when we left."

"I really don't envy you trying to cross the ice in the dark, on top of everything else. Hopefully I'll be able to meet you on the other side one way or another."

"I hope so too, mostly because that'd mean the Valar tried to be helpful."

"Ha. Of course, if they decide to try to be helpful against an enemy who has been known to break land masses and the idea they come up with is sending me over, that would be new and exciting forms of mistakes.

Normally I'd wait to leave for Valinor when it's light, but you don't have mornings here, do you."

"He's not going to be able to do that overnight. And no, we don't have mornings. We've been trying to keep time by the movement of the stars, but it's hard."

"No clocks? Hourglasses? I guess you never had a chance to make those, if you left in a hurry after the lights went out."

"We actually waited several months hoping the Valar'd do something. Timekeeping devices weren't our priority, though."

"Right. Multiple concurrent disasters."