In the soot-stained husk of a building, Ithi'ka shifts her gaze across the dark forms of the soldiers, over the street, then again across the maps she's now tacked to the wall with crudely set scrap-nails.  They have dotted its clean surface with pinpricks and markers, indicating with fine chalk-lines and coal-smudges the critical features of the terrain.  With thorn stumps gouged into the surface of the smoke-reeking walls, they pin out the perimeter of the fence, the paths for the guards.  When the dusk bleeds its last light into the violet horizon, she takes a moment's respite from the purplish-lensed goggles that have been pressed to her eyes.  She eases them up to her forehead like a proudly raised visor, blinks silver eyes into the evening light.<br/><br/>She drifts in and out of the shadows of the bakery, more alive with the dwindling of light, seeming to think harder, walk faster, and breathe deeper.  When she's out of sight, a soldier searches over his shoulders, peers into the shadows.  "Where'd the drow go?" he hisses to a compatriot, who whispers back in an equally secretive tone, "probably had to go hunt her dinner."  They exhale a brief laugh together, then both look again.  "Weird one, her--" one soldier whispers, not seeing her in their midst.  He keeps his voice even lower, just in case-- his hushed tones barely meeting a whisper's resonance in the way soldiers will to keep out of the brass's earshot.  "She looks like a decent fuck, I'll grant."  A couple of them laugh the silenced, breathy laugh of furtive bravado.  He starts to scratch alight a tindertwig for his beacon lamp.  "Freaky little thing'd prob'ly go wild on a grown man's co--"<br/><br/>Before the twig meets the metal of the lamp to spark alight, a black shape surrounds him, and the drow's black-ash skin glides from the shadows to rest on his wrist, right where his pulse courses.   Startled, he drops the lamp with a clatter and jerks his hand away, completely forgetting his sword.  In the shadows of the bakery's husk, a glimmer of the dying light falls over her outline, and her silver eyes glint back at him. "You will be in the dark soon enough," she says calmly.  "Best let your feeble eyes prepare."<br/><br/>The soldiers snap to as if scolded, scurry back to work at checking weapons for the tenth time, counting bolts, touching up their 'disguises'.  The drow slinks back to the shadows like a cat stepping from a windowsill.  Her darkvision will be in full bloom in a few moments, and she will have to open the blackroot oil from her pouch.  She'll fight without the goggles, but will need the protection against magic's flare or bursting explosives, else she'll be blind and in agony.  But she'll do it subtly, so as not to reveal this weakness.  Perception is all she has for now.