Chapter 432: The Valar
The highest peak of the Pelóri was Taniquetil, upon whose summit stood Ilmarin — the palace of Manwë and Varda. The mountain was often wreathed in mist, but when the clouds cleared, the light that poured from it could be seen from every corner of Aman.
Valinor proper occupied the heartland of Aman — the primary dwelling place of the Valar and the Elves who lived among them.
The true rulers of Aman were the Valar, fourteen in all: seven male and seven female, the latter sometimes called the Valier.
The seven male Valar were: Manwë, lord of the airs and winds of Arda and leader of the Valar; Ulmo, lord of all waters; Aulë, the craftsman and smith; Oromë, lord of forests and the hunt; Mandos — whose true name was Námo — lord of fate and the halls of the dead; Irmo, whose other name was Lórien, lord of dreams and visions; and Tulkas, the champion, embodiment of strength and courage.
The seven Valier were: Varda, Queen of the Stars and wife of Manwë; Yavanna, lady of earth and growing things and wife of Aulë; Nienna, the Lady of Pity; Estë, the Lady of Rest and wife of Irmo; Vairë the Weaver, wife of Mandos; Vána the Ever-young, wife of Oromë; and Nessa the fleet-footed, wife of Tulkas.
Of the fourteen, only two lived apart from the rest. Ulmo dwelt in the deeps of the sea and did not make his home in Valinor — he came to the councils of the Valar only when matters of great importance required it. Oromë, for his part, was drawn to the lands of Middle-earth and spent much of his time riding there, hunting Morgoth's creatures in the wild places. It had been Oromë, in the earliest days, who first found the Elves awakening at Cuiviénen and brought them the invitation to journey west.
Beyond the fourteen Valar, Valinor was also home to many Maiar — beings of the same order as the Valar, likewise descended from the Ainur, who had entered Arda at the beginning and served the Valar as companions, assistants, servants, and helpers of the Valar of the world's many aspects. The Maiar were numerous, and their power varied widely. Even Gandalf, sociable as he was, could not claim to know all of them. Some took forms as creatures — Thorondor, King of the Eagles, was a Maia who had always worn the shape of a great eagle. Others existed in states with no physical form at all, spiritual presences so subtle that even Elves and Men standing near them would feel nothing and see nothing.
The mightiest of the Maiar was Eönwë, herald of Manwë. In terms of combat power, he had no equal among the Maiar — during the War of Wrath, he had led the armies of the Valar against Morgoth's forces, and it was he who had bound Morgoth himself with the chain Angainor, forged by Aulë. His strength came close to that of the Valar, though it did not quite reach it.
Sauron, before his fall, had also been a Maia of the first rank — a student of Aulë's, who had gone on to forge the One Ring and very nearly subjected all of Middle-earth to his will. Only the defeats of the War of Wrath and the drowning of the Númenórean Empire — for which the Valar had stripped him of most of his power as punishment — had prevented him from becoming wholly uncountable. Without those losses, nothing in Middle-earth might have been able to stop him.
Gandalf — Olórin — was likewise among the greatest of the Maiar. His power in Middle-earth had been constrained by design, and what little he had shown there gave no real indication of what he was. With those constraints lifted, the strength he now moved through the world with was well above that of an ordinary Maia — and the service he had rendered to Middle-earth had brought him further recognition from the Valar, elevating his standing and his power further still.
Kael's own strength, by honest assessment, placed him somewhere in the range of an ordinary Maia — and not at the upper end of that range. He was among the weakest at that level.
But this required a certain clarification. In a strict sense, Kael could never become a Maia, regardless of how strong he grew. The difference between them was not one of degree but of nature. The Maiar were Ainur — beings who had existed before the world, born from the thought of Eru Ilúvatar himself, inherently divine, possessed of a relationship to the rules and powers of Arda that was written into their very origin. Kael was flesh and blood, however exceptional that flesh and blood had become. The gulf between a being born divine and a being who had grown strong was not crossable, no matter how far the latter progressed.
Put plainly: the Valar and the Maiar were innate powers — primordial and divine from their first moment of existence. Kael and the Elves were created beings — mortals and immortals who had come into being within the world rather than before it.
Created beings could grow stronger without limit, in theory. They could reach levels of power that equalled or matched the Maiar. But they could not become Maiar. The category itself was closed to them.
When Kael's strength had grown to where it now stood, the right way to describe it was that he was Maiar-equivalent — not that he was a Maia.
The same limitation applied from the other direction. Maiar were divine by birth, and their divine nature came with gifts and certainties that no created being could replicate. But that same origin placed a ceiling on them too. Their essential nature, however powerful, was relatively fixed — and it was almost unheard of for a Maia to rise to the level of the Valar. Even Eönwë, whose strength pressed as close to Vala-level as any Maia ever had, who had fought and bound Morgoth himself, could not become a new Vala. The only path by which such a transformation might be possible was through the direct intervention of Eru Ilúvatar — a bestowal of enhanced fundamental nature from the creator himself. Such things happened vanishingly rarely, if at all.
Created beings, by contrast, had no such ceiling in principle. From a starting point of mortal flesh, the path upward was theoretically open without limit. But theory was easy. In all the history of Arda, the number of created beings who had climbed from ordinary flesh to Maiar-equivalent power could be counted on one hand. As for reaching Vala-level — that was not simply rare. It had never happened.
——
With that broad understanding of Valinor settled in his mind, Kael turned his thoughts to something more immediate: the Time-Turner.
Constructing one was not, by itself, a great challenge for him at his current level. What he was really interested in was what lay behind it — the principles of time magic that the knowledge he had received contained.
Time was among the most mysterious forces in Arda. Even the Valar had not mastered it. The Three Elven Rings, remarkable as they were, had only ever managed to slow the passage of time's effects — to delay decay, to preserve beauty and life. That was the limit of what the greatest Elven magic had done with time. True command of it — the capacity to act on it, to move through it — belonged to Eru Ilúvatar alone.
And yet the Harry Potter world had produced Time-Turners.
If Kael could gain even a partial command of time magic, the effect on his power would be profound. In Valinor, surrounded by Maiar at every turn, simply matching their level was not enough to give him a real foothold. A capacity for time magic — something that lay entirely outside the framework of powers the Maiar and Valar worked within — would change that.
The path forward was clear: build a Time-Turner, use it to establish contact with the actual force of time, and from that foundation work toward a deeper understanding of time magic's underlying principles.
Time-Turners had been invented accidentally by a wizard of the ancient Harry Potter world — a fact Kael found genuinely astonishing, the more he thought about it. His own magical ability had long since surpassed Dumbledore, Voldemort, Grindelwald, the Four Founders of Hogwarts, and even Merlin, whose name was still spoken with reverence in the Wizarding World. And yet, without the System's provision of the crafting method, he would have had no idea how to make a Time-Turner even knowing it existed. The original inventor had managed it in an entirely mortal body, with no divine assistance of any kind, and had somehow reached a technique that gods themselves had never touched.
It was worth admiring.
The most essential component of a Time-Turner was the Sands of Time — the material held within the hourglass, the actual substance that carried temporal force and enabled the return to the past. Before anything else could be made, the Sands of Time had to be made first.
That was where Kael intended to start.