Sylas had come to understand a pattern: in moments of great peril, the War of Wrath, the Downfall of Númenor, and countless other catastrophes, the souls of those present would blaze with their most brilliant light, pouring vast reserves of energy into his spiritual sea.
And when they died, their spiritual essence did not simply dissipate. Instead, it carried with it the full weight of their emotions, dissolving completely into the depths of his soul.
Sylas could absorb these ownerless energies, using them to strengthen his own spiritual power. The only cost was this: he would live through every memory, every feeling, every flicker of consciousness that had once belonged to the dead.
If his spiritual foundation were not strong enough, those borrowed emotions could overwhelm him, reshaping his very self until nothing of the original remained. But at his current level, that risk was negligible. Every great power demands a price, and the ability to draw upon a near-inexhaustible sea of spiritual energy was well worth it.
He had also noticed that adversity sharpened the soul. People yielded more energy to the sub-space when pushed to the edge, and death returned their essence to him in full.
Yet even knowing this, Sylas did not move to accelerate the process. He did not manufacture war. He did not slaughter the living to seize their spiritual seas for himself.
To do so would drag everything down with him, and worse, it might push the Tower of the Divine Path beyond his reach entirely.
He understood the old wisdom: drain the pond and you catch the fish, but you also lose the pond. He was not greedy for what he held in this moment.
So long as spiritual power continued to flow inward, building like a gathering storm, his sea of souls would only grow. In time, this entire sub-space would become the very foundation from which he ascended.
But perhaps fate could not bear to let him rise unopposed.
As he sat drawing in the spiritual energies of all living things across every thread of time and space, a presence that had long been lurking in shadow suddenly materialized in the original space, the one place that had always belonged to Sylas alone.
She was a woman.
Her expression was languid and seductive, her eyes wild with an insane hunger, and her body radiated dark power. She stared at Sylas's carefully cultivated Spiritual Sea with undisguised, drooling greed.
Though what had entered the space was not her physical form but her spiritual projection, the aura she exuded was no less dangerous or terrifying for it.
"Who are you?!" Sylas's expression hardened. He asked the question with sharp, guarded caution.
Only he could enter this space. Anyone else who wished to pass through required his explicit permission, their consciousness guided in by his will. Yet this woman had entered without his leave, slipping her spiritual form past every boundary he had set.
He had been caught completely off guard, and he watched her now with absolute vigilance.
The woman laughed, low and delighted, her entire being radiating a terrible, magnetic allure. But the look she turned on Sylas was the look of a predator sizing up its prey.
"You have given me such a pleasant surprise," she breathed. "Your ability to manipulate time, I never anticipated that."
Her gaze swept hungrily across the vast expanse of Sylas's spiritual sea stretching out behind her. Surprise flickered through her eyes, followed immediately by greed.
"I had already woven my net," she murmured. "I was simply waiting for you to fall into it. I never dreamed I would find you had built an entire world instead." She laughed again, soft and covetous. "What an abundance of power.
If I were to claim this place for myself, I could feed forever. I would never go hungry again."
Sylas's mind raced. He kept his voice level.
"Are you Ungoliant?"
The woman paused, then smiled, slow and appreciative.
"How clever, young man." She tilted her head, studying him the way one studies something beautiful before consuming it. "I do like intelligent creatures. So allow me to devour you. Let us become one."
Even as she spoke, her spiritual form began to swell and shift, expanding and twisting until it filled half the sub-space entirely. What stood before Sylas now was no longer a woman but a vast, sky-blotting spider, its form enormous beyond reckoning. Beside it, Sylas was an ant before a planet.
Yet his expression did not break.
"No one enters my sub-space without my permission," he said, his voice carrying a cold, precise edge. "How did you get in?"
The great spider of Ungoliant let out a long, hissing laugh, a sound that echoed and reverberated off every wall of the sub-space.
"Did you not invite me in yourself?" Ungoliant's laughter dripped with amusement. "It is a shame my physical body cannot follow, but even with only my spiritual form, you have nowhere to run."
"I invited you?" Sylas repeated, uncertain for only a moment before the realization hit him. "You hid your own spiritual power among the others and fed it into the sub-space."
It made sense. Every intelligent being, whether good or evil, possessed spiritual power. Ungoliant had concealed herself within the countless souls Sylas had been drawing from, masking her presence among them.
When he swept up their spiritual energy into the sub-space, he had unknowingly swept her along with it. From there, she used that connection to force her way past the restrictions he had set, allowing her spiritual body to slip through.
It was, as she said, ultimately his own doing. He had not anticipated that Ungoliant would be lurking somewhere in Arda, and so when he cast his net across the spiritual consciousness of all living things, he had not thought to look for her among them. Instead, he had locked her inside along with everyone else and handed her the opportunity she needed.
The one saving grace was that Sylas had already modified the sub-space with restrictions barring any entity other than himself from entering at full power. That alone had kept Ungoliant from arriving whole.
"There, Sylas, I have answered your question." Ungoliant's enormous eyes fixed on him with bottomless hunger. "Now, in return, let me devour you."
She did not wait for a response. Her vast, black-hole mouth split open and she lunged.
Ungoliant was a being of Sylas's own tier in terms of raw power. As an Evil God who had drained the sacred trees dry, she had grown beyond even Morgoth at his strongest.
Even here, reduced to a spiritual form, her power was immense, and she carried the full confidence of something that had never known defeat.
"Time Stop!"
Sylas unleashed the power of time and the sub-space froze solid in an instant. But before he could draw a single breath of relief, Ungoliant tore through the constraint by sheer force of will and resumed her assault without missing a beat.
Sylas pulled back sharply and dove into the river of time, attempting to cross into another dimension entirely. But it made no difference. Whether he moved upstream or downstream, every point in the flow was sealed off by a vast dark net stretched across the whole of space and time, blotting out every exit like a starless sky.
And beyond the net, enormous, monstrous shapes waited in the dark, hungering.
"Do not even think of escaping, Sylas!" Ungoliant's triumphant laughter poured in from every direction at once, echoing out of each sealed dimension. "I cannot enter the river of time, but I am darkness itself. Darkness pervades every corner of every age. There is nowhere you can go."
Her eyes tracked him through the river of time as though he were a small fish thrashing in a net.
Sylas watched the sealed dimensions around him. Then his expression went cold, and something shifted behind his eyes. He stepped out of the river of time and returned to the sub-space.
"Oh?" Ungoliant's voice turned almost tender. "Have you chosen to wait quietly for me? Rest assured, we will become one. We will never be separated again."
Her vast mouth opened wide, and the devouring force that poured from it was immense, pulling at Sylas from every side, beginning to seal him in.
Sylas looked into that bottomless maw and smiled.
"You want to devour me?" he said quietly. "Then let me devour you first."
The Spiritual Sea, which had been perfectly still, erupted.
Colossal waves rose and crashed through the sub-space as the full reservoir of spiritual energy Sylas had accumulated across countless dimensions suddenly found its outlet, pouring in a roaring torrent directly into Ungoliant's open mouth.
The sea of consciousness held within it the beliefs, fears, loves, hatreds, and dying thoughts of every living being across every age and dimension Sylas had ever touched. The sheer density of emotion and will contained within it was so overwhelming that even Sylas himself could only absorb it gradually, piece by piece, careful not to let it shatter his own sense of self. Now every last drop of it was flooding into Ungoliant at once.
Even she could not withstand that.
The danger registered immediately. Ungoliant snapped her mouth shut, desperate to stop the flow. But it made no difference. The spiritual sea did not need an open door. It surged through her regardless, forcing its way into every part of her being.
"No!"
Terror crossed her face, a genuine, wild terror, and she thrashed against it, fighting to escape the sub-space entirely. But the balance of power had already shifted. Sylas sealed the space completely and left her no opening.
The entire sea of consciousness crashed through her spiritual defenses in a single overwhelming wave. Every voice, every memory, every raw and violent emotion of every creature that had ever lived poured into her at once, and it was too much. Her consciousness cracked.
Her soul splintered into countless fragments. With a deafening crack that shook the sub-space to its edges, Ungoliant's spiritual body was torn apart and consumed, swallowed entirely into the void.
Far away, in some lightless corner of the world, Ungoliant's true physical form collapsed where it lay. It did not move. It lay like a husk with nothing left inside it.