Sylas drifted.
The River of Time stretched around him in every direction, a current vast and ancient beyond reckoning, humming with the energy of every moment that had ever passed or was yet to come. That energy did not merely surround him.
It recognized him. And it poured into his body with the eagerness of a flood finding a crack in a dam, wild and insatiable, churning the air around him into a tempest of temporal force, a time storm, raging through the deep current with Sylas at its eye.
He had no attention to spare for the storm itself. Every fraction of his will was bent inward.
The power of the Creation Draught was detonating inside him.
He worked frantically, borrowing the River's ambient energy as a tool, using it to press down against the surging magical force within his body the way one might press a hand over a wound, slowing the catastrophic outflow just enough to keep control.
He refined the power as it moved through him, pulling it into shape, forcing familiarity where there had been only violence. He was not absorbing the Draught so much as wrestling it, trying to break something immense and wild into something he could hold.
But the scale of what he had consumed was not a thing easily overstated.
The Creation Draught had been made from the fruit of Laurelin, the Sun itself distilled into essence. From the flower of Telperion, the Moon's silver light made liquid. From Nienna's tears, which had watered the roots of the Two Trees through all the long ages of their life. From Varda's Star-dew, suffused with the light of the stars she had set in the heavens with her own hands.
From the essence of the White Tree of Life. And over all of it, woven through every molecule of the brew, was the blessing of Yavanna's Song of Creation, the most primal force of becoming that the world had ever heard rendered in music.
All of that was inside him now.
It did not sit quietly. It erupted, a cosmological detonation occurring within the confines of a single body, the energy of a sun and a moon and the tears of a goddess and the breath of creation all colliding and reforming and tearing at the fabric of what Sylas had been.
His original essence, the deep, foundational nature of what he was, was being remade from the inside out, forcibly restructured by energies that had participated in the making of the world itself.
One moment of inattention, one failure of will, and the sheer magnitude of the transformation would simply swallow him, dissolving whatever remained of Sylas into the current of the River.
And then it got worse.
The power of the River of Time, which Sylas had been using as a tool to suppress the chaos within him, recognized something it had not expected to find. Deep inside Sylas, buried in his essence like an ember beneath ash, lay his own latent affinity for time. The sheer density of temporal energy flooding in from outside was enough to strike that ember like a flint. It ignited.
The time-power within him woke up.
And it did not wake quietly. It rioted. A second torrent joined the first, not from the Creation Draught this time, but from the River itself, which responded to the awakening within Sylas like a sea responding to a storm at its surface.
Endless temporal energy reversed its natural flow and poured inward, into him, as though the River had decided that Sylas was now its proper channel.
His body was being reshaped not only by creation-energy but by time-energy simultaneously, pulled toward the time attribute at a fundamental level, closer and closer to something that had no name yet in the language of Arda.
The combined force was beyond what consciousness could navigate.
Sylas's awareness slipped. The strain of holding two impossible forces in check at once was simply more than the waking mind could sustain, and one by one, his thoughts went quiet, like candles blown out in a strong wind.
His consciousness released its grip on direction and intention and fell into stillness, drifting through the River of Time in a deep and dreamless silence, unmoored from any particular moment.
The River did not let him sink.
Around Sylas's drifting form, the temporal energy gathered itself with an instinct older than intention. It coiled and condensed and wrapped around him layer by layer, a cocoon of pure time, enormous and luminous, nestled deep within the current like something that had always been there, waiting to be formed.
Warm and vast and utterly still at its center, it held him in a suspension beyond sleep. Within its shell, the twin energies, creation and time, continued their work without him, rewriting and expanding and perfecting what Sylas was becoming, while Sylas himself lay unknowing at the heart of it.
The cocoon absorbed. The cocoon grew. The transformation deepened beyond anything that could be measured.
How long passed was impossible to say. Within the River of Time, duration loses its ordinary meaning. It might have been a billion years. It might have been a single second extended to infinity. Both felt equally true and equally irrelevant.
And then the River erupted.
The cocoon's transformation reached a threshold, a tipping point where the sheer magnitude of what was occurring inside it could no longer be contained within the River's own current.
Time shockwaves rolled outward in every direction, passing through the walls between moments and dimensions as though they were made of paper. Every corner of the material world trembled. Beings across countless timelines, past and future, near and impossibly distant, felt the disturbance and stirred in confusion, searching for the source of something they could sense but not identify.
Across dimensions, countless beings turned their heads.
On the dark periphery of Arda, at its outermost edge, in the shadowed places where the world's boundary met the Void, something else was paying attention.
It was enormous. Planet-sized. A mass of ancient darkness clinging to the margin of existence, its form that of a colossal spider, its body wrapped in a shroud of living shadow so dense and so adhesive that it clung to the fabric of time itself, sticky and nimble as a web, impossible to pass through without leaving something behind.
Its crimson eyes, eight of them, each burning with an intelligence older than Valinor, snapped open.
The time fluctuation reached it like a scent on the wind.
The spider was still. For a long, terrible moment, it was perfectly still. Then the darkness around it rippled as something like hunger moved across the surface of its vast mind, a greed so boundless and so ancient that it had consumed entire ages without satisfaction.
Its web of shadow extended outward, feeling along the threads of time, tasting the disturbance, tracing it backward toward its source.
A low, resonant voice emerged from within the mass of darkness. It was almost beautiful, which made it worse.
"A being who commands Time itself." A long pause, filled with something that might have been reverence, and was certainly avarice. "I can smell your aura. If I devour you… I will never know hunger again."
The crimson eyes burned brighter.
"I will find you."
And then the immense shape began to change. The darkness contracted. The planet-spanning mass of shadow drew inward, smaller and smaller, compressing centuries of hunger into a single concentrated point, and from that point stepped a woman.
Tall, pale, devastatingly beautiful, cloaked in dark fabric that seemed to drink in the light around it rather than merely block it. She adjusted her hood, glanced once toward the distant shudder in the River of Time, and stepped silently across the world-barrier.
She entered Arda without a sound. Nothing noticed her arrival. Not even Varda.
This was Ungoliant.
She was not, properly speaking, a creature of Arda at all. She was a dark spirit of the Void, an autonomous, materialized hunger given shape and will, dwelling at the world's outermost margin, answerable to nothing and no one.
In power, she stood comparable to the Valar themselves, and after her great feast upon the Two Trees of Valinor, draining them of every drop of their accumulated light and life, her strength had grown further still, swelling past what it had been before until even Morgoth could not stand against her without aid.
The story of that final confrontation was well remembered, at least by those few who kept such records.
After Morgoth and Ungoliant had destroyed the Two Trees and fled together into the outer dark, a dispute had arisen between them over the spoils, over the Silmarils and the other jewels Morgoth carried. Ungoliant had turned on him without hesitation, spinning her webs around him, intent on taking everything by force.
Only the intervention of Morgoth's Balrogs, his great Flame-demons, who came at his cry, had driven her back.
Ungoliant was not evil in the way that Sauron or Morgoth were evil, she was not malice or domination given form. She was appetite. A darkness that desired only to consume, an endless void that could not be filled but never stopped trying to fill itself.
Her cloaks of shadow were so perfect that even the Valar could not perceive her within them. And her hunger was not merely strong, it was a defining law of her existence. Ordinary things could not satisfy it. Only beings of supreme magnitude could quiet it, even temporarily: the Two Trees had bought her peace for several ages.
But that peace had long since faded.
The great feast was a memory now, and the hunger had returned, worse than before, sharpened by the long years of waiting, pressing at the edges of her mind like a tide against a crumbling wall. Ungoliant knew, with the clarity of self-preservation, that if she allowed the hunger to grow unchecked, it would eventually turn inward. She would begin to consume herself. She had seen it happen to lesser beings. She would not allow it to happen to her.
She needed something immense. Something worthy.
She was aware, dimly, that the Two Trees had been somehow restored, but the details were unclear, and the Blessed Realm was heavily guarded. The Valar were more alert than they had been in the age of Morgoth's betrayal. That path was not simple.
But Sylas, this being pulsing in the River of Time with the combined energy of a sun, a moon, the stars, and the Song of Creation, was a different matter. He was in the middle of a transformation. He was vulnerable. And she had already caught his scent.
As a predator of the highest order, Ungoliant had absolute confidence in one ability above all others: once she had tasted the aura of her prey, she could track it across any distance, any dimension, any moment in time.
There were no walls between now and then that her hunger could not follow. She had already begun to weave her net in the shadows of the temporal current. She would simply wait for Sylas to emerge.
She moved through the darkness of Arda like a shadow moving through shadow, patient and purposeful, drawing not a single eye.
Within the River of Time, something shifted.
The cocoon trembled.
A single ripple moved outward from its center, then another, then a cascade, each one larger and more violent than the last, until the River itself was shaking, erupting in a temporal storm that made the first seem gentle by comparison. The shockwaves rolled through all of time and space simultaneously, rattling the bones of every dimension that had ever existed or would ever exist.
And from within the upheaval, a shape emerged.
Colossal. Impossible. And unmistakably Sylas.
But not Sylas as he had been. His form had grown beyond the scale of a body, beyond the scale of a being. His head rested in the deep past, somewhere before the Music had been sung. His body stood in the present, in the living moment of the world as it currently breathed. His feet extended forward into the future, treading across moments that had not yet arrived.
He existed alongside countless dimensions simultaneously, not visiting them, but present in all of them at once.
From the primordial world to the world's end, touching every corner of Arda in every moment at once. Then Sylas opened his eyes.
Time flowed within them, from past to future. Across countless dimensions, his time-clones came in one by one, willingly or otherwise, merging back into his body through the River of Time. With each clone absorbed, his power grew and the aura of time around him deepened. When the last clone merged, the River of Time stopped entirely. All of time and space froze.
A tremendous force erupted from Sylas's body, radiating outward across past and future, then immediately snapped back, withdrawing completely into him. Time resumed. Aside from a faint, fleeting sensation of being briefly held still, no living creature noticed anything had happened.
The River of Time, now calm, formed a bubble in the void. Sylas stepped out of it.
His eyes had changed. One shone like the sun; the other like the moon. A single glance could illuminate past and future alike, and every secret buried within time lay open to him. Then, in the next instant, the sun and moon faded from his eyes. They returned to black. He descended back into the real world.
"Congratulations, our Lord of Time!"
Manwë arrived on his great eagle, landed, and smiled warmly at Sylas. "Valinor has welcomed its fifteenth Vala, this is cause for celebration!"
The other Valar appeared alongside him, their expressions open and friendly, each offering their congratulations. A Vala who commanded time was not something any of them could take lightly. Varda and Yavanna, who were closest to Sylas, were visibly overjoyed.
Though the Valar had long regarded Sylas with high esteem and expected him to one day stand among them, nothing had been certain until it actually happened, and the gap in their power had made true familiarity difficult. Now that he was unambiguously one of them, that distance dissolved. They treated him as a genuine equal, and their manner became noticeably warmer and more natural.
Sylas accepted their congratulations and invited them all to Hogwarts as guests. They accepted gladly.
News of Sylas's ascension spread quickly through Valinor. Maiar, Elves, and others came in great numbers to pay their respects and meet the newest Vala. The celebration ran for seven days and seven nights before it ended.
The Avathar, too, was transformed. A Field of Time now enveloped it, holding everything within it at its most beautiful moment, suspending life there in a quiet eternity. It became a place others longed to reach and linger in. Graceful, ethereal beings arrived in numbers, pledging themselves to the Lord of Time and choosing to remain in his service.
In time, legends spread across Valinor: that within the castle of the Lord of Time, there were mysterious doors, each one opening onto a different era, capable of carrying a traveller into the past or forward into the future.