Morgoth gave Sylas no time to act. He launched his full force against the Gate of Sorrow without pause, pressing the assault from the outside while his soul clones pushed against it from within. The inner surface of the Gate shuddered without stopping. The walls of the boundary flickered in and out of visibility, threatening to come apart entirely.
The devastation spread outward. The shockwaves from Morgoth's attack reduced the Halls of Mandos to rubble. The ancient walls fell. The tapestries that Vairë had spent all the ages of the world weaving, every moment of history preserved in thread and color, were obliterated in an instant.
Sylas did not try to save the Halls. He did not move to stop Morgoth directly. He used his power over time for one purpose only: to wrap the countless souls of Elves, Men, and Dwarves within a separate temporal space, shielding them from annihilation while everything around them came apart.
Morgoth, meanwhile, moved through the river of time like a creature born to it. He could not match Sylas as its master, but he did not need to. He was fluid and elusive, slipping through the current with cunning precision, dodging every attempt Sylas made to use time as a weapon against him, turning the river into a maze rather than a battlefield.
And the deeper Sylas looked at Morgoth, the colder he felt.
This was not the Morgoth he had glimpsed once before in the river of time. That being had been vast and terrible. This one was something beyond that. He had grown stronger even than Ungoliant at her most gorged and monstrous, stronger than anything Sylas had measured against the upper limit of what power in Arda could mean.
Every force of nature, every law of the world, manifested in him simultaneously: the raw elemental fury of his ancient strength, the light of Varda blazing from him with an intensity that made it impossible to look at him and see a fallen dark lord, the ability to reshape matter according to his will. He wore all the powers of the world at once as though they were his by birthright.
Sylas did not hesitate. He threw a time barrier around the souls he had been protecting, sealed them into a separate temporal space beyond the reach of the battle, and then turned to face Morgoth directly for the first time.
He swept his hand out and stopped time across the surrounding space, then used the stillness to close the distance instantly, striking at Morgoth with full force.
His movement was layered, not only crossing space but threading through time simultaneously, attacking from multiple moments at once.
Morgoth barely paused. A ripple of temporal energy spread across his body and shattered the time-seal from within, restoring his freedom in a single instant. Then, rather than evade the attack bearing down on him, he smiled, and the space around him cracked apart like a broken mirror and solidified into something tangible and deliberate.
Sylas's time storm hit the spatial barrier and vanished. No impact. No recoil. The barrier absorbed it completely, swallowing the force without reaction.
Sylas pulled back immediately, wrapping himself in layers of time. His expression had changed.
"Spatial power."
Even in the depths of the Void, among every order of being he had encountered there, none had wielded authority over space itself. The lord of that realm commanded air and wind, the sky and its reaches, but space as a fundamental law had belonged to no one. He had never imagined Morgoth would be the one to claim it.
Morgoth took his time enjoying the look on Sylas's face.
"I have you to thank for the inspiration," he said, the satisfaction plain in his voice. "After the War of Wrath, after my defeat and expulsion, I spent a long time understanding what had gone wrong. Then I learned about you. About your power over time.
And I thought: if a single being can claim mastery over something as fundamental as time, what is stopping me from going further? I already had access to every great and pervasive force in the world except time itself. So why not take the one thing that underlies all of it?"
He spread his hands slightly.
"Space. The foundation upon which all of Arda rests. Even your time requires space in order to manifest. Once I hold authority over space, I can draw time into my domain as well, along with air, water, nature, matter, death, every power and law that exists. All of it folded into one. All of it mine."
His eyes brightened with something that had moved past ambition into a kind of ecstatic certainty.
"And once I obtain the Secret Flame, I will create a world entirely my own. A life entirely my own. I will be a second Creator God. Everything will move according to my will."
Sylas stood very still for a moment.
The scale of it was genuinely staggering. Morgoth was not simply planning conquest. He was planning to become Ilúvatar. To gather every law of existence into himself, claim the Secret Flame as the final piece, and remake creation from the beginning with himself at its center.
Sylas had never conceived of ambition at that scale. He found himself wondering, with a strange and unsettled feeling, what Ilúvatar had been thinking when he made this being, a being that now lacked only the Secret Flame to be, in every practical sense, omnipotent.
There was no more time for reflection. Morgoth released his spatial power outward, and the space around Sylas began to push back against him, compressing and crushing from every direction at once.
Sylas shifted himself into different points in time and space to avoid it, moving through the layers of existence to stay ahead of the pressure. But it made no difference which point he moved to. Morgoth's will was threaded through all of it.
In every time and every space, the world itself was turning against him, each layer repelling and attacking, working together to trap him inside a collapsing vortex of shattered space.
Sylas did not panic.
He opened the full force of his time reversal ability and pushed back, flooding the surrounding space with reversed time, dismantling Morgoth's spatial assault by unwinding the very moments in which it took shape.
For a suspended instant the two forces met in the ruins of the Halls of Mandos, and then the collision erupted outward.
Time turbulence and spatial storms tore across the landscape simultaneously, each feeding and amplifying the other. The sea was consumed by collapsing space, mountains and land breaking apart into raw matter.
The devastation spread in distinct and terrible patterns across the surrounding region.
In one area, time locked into a continuous loop, plants cycling endlessly between seed and towering tree and seed again. In another, time ran in reverse, unwinding everything within it. One stretch of land was reverted so far back that it became the primordial void of creation itself, emptied of all life and history.
Any living spirit that wandered into it would be instantly reversed to the moment before their birth, erased from existence as though they had never been. Another area lurched in the opposite direction, time accelerating toward the twilight of the world, the final age when all things return to the Void. Even the most powerful beings caught within it would age in an instant and be the first to die.
Everywhere else, chaos. Temporal distortions and spatial ruptures spread in overlapping waves, each zone a different kind of ruin.
And yet the rest of Valinor was untouched.
The Halls of Mandos had always stood apart from the other great places of Valinor, remote and deliberately secluded, and that distance now served as a buffer. Sylas was also consciously holding the battle within boundaries, preventing the devastation from spreading.
Morgoth, for his part, kept his focus narrowed on the Gate of Sorrow, unwilling to let the battle draw him away from his objective. Between them, the rest of Aman was kept safe.
But the stalemate held. Neither of them was breaking through.
Sylas changed his approach.
He opened the sub-space.
The Spiritual Sea poured outward, larger and more saturated than it had ever been, carrying within it the accumulated consciousness and emotion of every being across every age and dimension Sylas had touched.
He released it as a focused psychic assault, a tidal wave of pure spiritual force that crashed toward Morgoth with the weight of uncountable lives behind it.
It was an attack that operated outside every conventional boundary. Physical defenses meant nothing against it. Magical barriers were irrelevant. Spatial authority could not block it. It bypassed all of that and struck directly at the spirit and soul, forcing into Morgoth in a single overwhelming flood the grief, rage, love, terror, and dying thoughts of every conscious being that had ever lived.
Ungoliant had been destroyed by exactly this.
Morgoth's face went white.
His spirit and soul absorbed the impact and staggered under it, his immense mental fortitude bending under the sheer volume of what was being pressed against it. His body swayed. For the first time in the battle, something that looked almost like vulnerability crossed his face.