The Avathar, that long, sweeping expanse of land lying in the southeastern reaches of Aman, nestled at the eastern foot of the Pelóri mountain range, was a place that most had long since ceased to think about. The territory was wide and deep, its breadth greater even than the lands Sylas had once held upon the Central Continent of Middle-earth. But for all its size, it had been forsaken.
Here, in ages past, the great spider-creature Ungoliant had made her lair, she whose darkness devoured light itself. When she had crept out from this hiding place and struck down the Two Trees of Valinor, and then fled in the aftermath of her terrible deed, the shadow of her presence had remained.
The land had been steeped in perpetual darkness ever since, barren, desolate, unmourned. A forgotten wasteland at the edge of the Blessed Realm.
But that was before Sylas and his household arrived.
With their coming, the Avathar shone with new life.
Sylas chose his ground with care, a sheltered position backed against the Pelóri, bordering a wide and tranquil lake. He raised his hand, and the land answered him. Stone and earth shifted; ancient mountains reshaped themselves; great trees moved as though guided by invisible hands, forming themselves into walls and archways and towers.
With supreme craft, drawing upon his mastery of transfiguration, alchemy, and every art at his disposal, Sylas shaped the land. In half a day's work, a vast castle had risen from the earth where there had been nothing but shadow.
He had built it in the likeness of Hogwarts.
And upon the twin tallest towers of that castle, Sylas placed his most precious materials: a Sun-fruit from one of the Two Trees, and a Moon-flower from the other. There, at those heights, they served as twin lanterns for all of the Avathar, the Sun-fruit blazing with a warm and golden radiance like a second sunrise, the Moon-flower pouring out its silver light like a quiet and endless moon.
Together, their light reached every corner of the Avathar, filling the darkest grottoes, penetrating the deepest caves, reaching into every shadow that Ungoliant's memory had left behind. The darkness did not retreat. It dissolved entirely, like frost before the morning.
The Avathar was transformed. Where there had been desolation, there was now a radiant and sacred land, green and glowing, wholly reborn.
Sylas's family had, at last, a home in Aman.
They did not let the occasion pass quietly. The blessings came pouring in, from friends, from kin, from those who had watched the work with wonder. Under those blessings, the Avathar bloomed. Grass and flowers spread across ground that had never known color. The air became clean and sweet. The water in the lake turned clear as crystal. The stars above, caught in Varda's ever-watchful light, shone with particular brightness over this corner of the world. It had become, without any doubt, a blessed land.
Word spread, as it does in Aman. The Elves came, many kindreds and peoples, along with the Ainur, the craftsmen of Aulë, and others besides. They came to celebrate, to offer blessings, to walk through the new halls and marvel at what had been built. The once-forgotten Avathar became, almost overnight, a place of life and gathering and joyful noise.
A thousand years slipped by like a quiet afternoon.
In the castle that Sylas had named Hogwarts, a great work was underway.
Sylas stood over a project he had been building toward for centuries, a potion unlike anything yet attempted in Aman or Middle-earth. He called it the Creation Draught. Its primary ingredients were the Sun-fruit and the Moon-flower; its secondary components were Varda's Star-dew, drawn from the wells fed by the light of the Two Trees; the tears of Nienna, the Lady of Mercy; and the essence of the White Tree of Life.
Into this formula, Sylas had poured everything: the full depth of potion-lore from the Wizarding World of his system's knowledge, combined with his centuries of study in Arda's own tradition of medicinal craft, and refined under the patient guidance of Estë the Gentle, goddess of healing and rest.
It had taken hundreds of years of effort. But the formula was ready.
Sylas had commissioned the craftsmen of Aulë to forge a cauldron worthy of the work, a great golden vessel, enormous in scale, set upon a furnace burning with fierce and steady heat. Into it, he first poured the Star-dew from Varda's wells.
This was no ordinary liquid. Collected from the dew that formed each morning upon the bark and blossoms of the Two Trees, dew suffused with the very essence of their light, it shimmered with a pale, luminous violet, cool and mysterious even above the roaring flames beneath it. Its temperature did not rise. It rested in the golden cauldron like a pool of quiet moonlight.
Sylas placed the Sun-fruit and the Moon-flower into the cauldron together.
He waited.
The Sun-fruit was, in its nature, the source of fire and warmth, a fragment of the very light that had once illuminated all of Aman. The Moon-flower carried within it the icy, silver serenity of the younger Tree's radiance. Even the most intense fire Sylas could summon was powerless against them.
He had tested this before and knew it well. Sure enough, the two ingredients simply floated in the glowing Star-dew, entirely unbothered, still, serene, and unmoved, as though the roaring furnace beneath them did not exist.
Sylas did not panic. He had anticipated this.
He reached beneath his robes and produced a small glass bottle. It was delicate in the hand, barely larger than his palm, but the liquid inside caught the light in a way that made it seem almost alive. Sacred. He unstoppered it carefully and tilted it over the cauldron, pouring the shimmering contents in a thin, glittering stream into the golden vessel below.
The change was immediate.
The Sun-fruit trembled. The Moon-flower shivered. And then, slowly , like ice touched at last by true warmth, they began to dissolve. Not into nothing, but into essence: the Sun-fruit melting into a rich, flowing gold, the Moon-flower unraveling into a cool and luminous silver. The two streams of liquid wound through the violet Star-dew, and the three colors, gold, silver, and pale purple, swirled and wove together without fully merging, forming a tricolor liquid of impossible beauty.
A fragrance rose from the cauldron: deep and complex and intoxicating, the kind of scent that didn't merely smell pleasant but seemed to awaken something in the blood, sharpening the mind and lifting the heart of anyone who breathed it.
The liquid in the little bottle had been Nienna's tears.
The tears of the Lady of Mercy, she who had long wept at the foot of the Two Trees, whose grief had watered their roots throughout the long ages of Valinor, possessed a power that no fire could replicate. It was Nienna's sorrow, patient and profound, that had tended the Trees in life. And it was her tears, it now seemed, that alone could dissolve what they had left behind.
With the Sun-fruit and Moon-flower now liquid, Sylas set to work in earnest. He stirred the cauldron with slow, deliberate strokes, adding ingredient after ingredient, each one a divine substance, each one added with the gravity and precision the work demanded. His face was solemn. His hands were steady. And as he worked, he sang.
The song was Yavanna's Song of Creation, also known as the Symphony of Life, the very melody the great Vala had sung when she had first called the Two Trees into being from the dark earth of Aman. To possess this song at all was extraordinary; Yavanna had given it to Sylas as a trust, not lightly. The Song of Creation was not merely music, it was power made manifest, a force of becoming woven into melody. It demanded immense strength to sustain. It could not be performed by the merely skilled or the merely wise. And Yavanna herself had sung it only once.
The weight of that truth was not lost on Sylas. Even at his current level of mastery, which stood at the very peak of what any being outside the Valar had reached, the act of sustaining the Song of Creation was a thing that strained him to his limits. Every note was a commitment of will.
Sylas was under no illusion about his limits. Though he had claimed great power early in his journey, giving himself fully and without restraint to the Song of Creation was beyond even him, to do so completely would have been to attempt what only Yavanna herself had done, and Yavanna was a Vala. But Sylas did not need to shake the foundations of the world.
He was not trying to call forth a sacred wonder like the Two Trees. He was brewing a potion. For that purpose, however extraordinary the potion, a mortal-sustained rendering of the Song of Creation was not only sufficient, but masterful. And so he sang with everything he had, holding nothing back within the limits of what he could bear.
His voice rang through Hogwarts Castle, carried on something deeper than mere sound. It was the power of creation itself woven into melody, and it did not stop at the castle walls. It poured outward across the entire Avathar, rolling over the golden Mallorn trees and the silver-white sacred groves, climbing the slopes of the Pelóri, and passing through the mountain range entirely, until at last it reached the hills and shores of Valinor beyond.
Everyone heard it.
Sylas's own family, those who knew him well and had grown alongside him through the long centuries, received the Song with open hearts. They paused in whatever they were doing, smiled, and listened, moved by its beauty, warmed by its familiarity, as though hearing a beloved piece of music performed with exceptional care.
But for those who stood further away, for the Elves of Valinor, and for the Maiar who tended the lands and temples and gardens of Aman, the experience was something else entirely. The Song did not simply reach their ears. It reached through them. Their souls rose instinctively, as though called upward by a voice they had always known but never heard spoken aloud. Wisdom expanded within them without effort or study, blooming in the mind like light in a dark room. They stood or sat or knelt where they were, wholly captivated, unable to think of anything else, nor wishing to.
And the land responded.
Across the Avathar, the yellow-leafed Mallorn trees stretched taller, as though straining to catch more of the song. The silver groves shimmered. Flowers and plants that had no business growing in any single season erupted together from the earth, rare things, extraordinary things, species that had perhaps never grown in the Avathar before, weaving themselves into a landscape of breathtaking beauty.
The Song of Creation, even imperfectly rendered, remembered what land was supposed to be. And it made the Avathar remember too.
Inside Hogwarts Castle, the cauldron was changing.
The three-colored liquid, the solar gold, the lunar silver, and the violet Star-dew, had been distinct from the beginning, swirling together but never fully merging, like oil and water and light held in impossible proximity.
But under the sustained power of the Song of Creation, that began to shift. The boundaries between them softened. The three essences reached toward one another, the essence of the Sun, the essence of the Moon, the essence of the Stars, and slowly, irreversibly, fused into something new.
A single liquid that was simultaneously all three colors and somehow more than any of them. It shimmered and pulsed and glowed, turning in the great golden cauldron like a living thing.
When the last note of the Song left Sylas's lips, he nearly collapsed.
His strength was spent, almost entirely, down to the very last reserves he possessed. He leaned against the side of the cauldron for a moment, breathing slowly, feeling the vast and bone-deep exhaustion of having poured his will into something truly immense.
But when he raised his eyes and looked at what floated in the golden vessel before him, a smile broke across his face, wide and genuine and luminous, the smile of a craftsman beholding his greatest work.
The liquid shone with divine light: gold, silver, and deep purple intertwined, radiant and shifting, alive with an energy that pressed against the inside of the cauldron like a tide straining against a dam.
The power of creation radiated from its surface in waves. It smelled of the first morning after the Music was sung.
This was the Creation Draught. His life's masterwork in magical medicine.
Its properties were, by any measure, without equal in the world. It would regenerate and restore the essential life-force, replenishing what even great injury or age had depleted. It would strengthen the drinker, magic power, physical vitality, and inner essence all amplified in tandem.
But beyond enhancement, it was also the supreme healing medicine of the age: capable of neutralizing any poison ever distilled, curing any wound not yet beyond the mortal threshold, and restoring those on the very edge of death to fullness of life with a single swallow. One sip, and a dying person would breathe again.
The fragrance alone had revived and sharpened the minds of everyone in the castle.
The inspiration for the Creation Draught, Sylas reflected, had come from a fragment of myth carried over from his previous life, the Three-Light Divine Water of ancient legend, said to be drawn from the combined essence of sun, moon, and starlight.
He had taken that idea, transplanted it into the soil of Arda, and grown something worthy of the world he now inhabited.
But it would never be made again.
The raw materials were irreplaceable. The Sun-fruit and Moon-flower were fruits of the Two Trees, which were gone. The Star-dew was a thing of Varda's careful collection.
Nienna's tears could not be asked for twice. He had used what existed, and what existed was finite. This was the only Creation Draught that would ever be brewed, perhaps in the history of Arda entire. A single golden cauldron's worth, and then never again.
Sylas did not waste another moment.
He dipped a cup into the cauldron and drank.
The exhaustion vanished in an instant, not gradually, not gently, but all at once, like a candle snuffed and relit in the same breath. His strength returned to him complete and full. And then it kept going. His magical power, the deep reservoir he had spent centuries building, surged upward at a pace that stole his breath, climbing past levels he had thought were years away, pressing against limits he had believed were fixed.
His inner essence expanded visibly, moment by moment, as though the boundaries of what he could contain were being quietly, permanently redrawn.
He stood there, eyes wide and bright, looking at the enormous cauldron with an expression caught somewhere between awe and hunger.
It was the size of a small pond. And it was full.
The choice was not difficult.
Sylas drew a breath and allowed his body to change, growing, expanding, his form swelling into something vast and immense, the scale of a giant standing in a room that had suddenly become much smaller around him.
He reached down, closed one great hand around the cauldron, that enormous golden vessel, its contents still shimmering and steaming, lifted it, and drank.
All of it. At once.
The moment the full volume of the Creation Draught entered him, the world came apart.
His magical power did not rise, it erupted. It tore upward like a geyser, wild and uncontrolled, slamming against every boundary he possessed with a force that felt, from the inside, like standing at the center of a breaking dam. The sensation was not pain, exactly.
It was the feeling of being too much, of containing more than any vessel was built to hold, of the seams of his existence beginning to strain and splinter under the sheer pressure of what was pouring into him.
He was going to shatter.
Without a single moment of hesitation, Sylas acted.
He raised his hand, and called the River of Time.
It came to him like an old companion, that silver current that flowed beneath all things, older than the Song and deeper than the earth. He reached into it, found his footing, and dove in, plunging directly into its current, letting the flow of time close around him like water around a stone.
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