Like Gandalf, Sylas possessed multiple core powers. However, although Gandalf could use these forces, the authority behind them belonged to a higher order. They were not his to command.
This was the fundantal limitation of the Maiar.
They wielded power, but they did not own it.
Their authority was held by the Valar.
Thus, Gandalf could invoke fire, inspire spirits, and guide wisdom, but he could not define those forces, reshape their laws, or elevate them beyond the boundaries set by their true masters.
If Sylas were to follow Gandalf's advice and apprentice under Aulë, the Vala of Craft, then no matter how far he advanced, the outco would be the sa. He would gain increasingly profound knowledge of creation, forging, and invention, but the authority of Craft would forever belong to Aulë.
That authority would never be relinquished.
At best, Sylas could approach Aulë's level infinitely, yet he would never surpass him.
Only one path remained different.
Ti.
The power of ti was not held by any Vala.
Even more critically, its authority had never been claid.
Ti existed, flowed, and governed all things, yet no being within Arda truly controlled it. With the Ti-Turner in his possession, Sylas had stepped onto a path no one else had walked.
At Sylas's current level, further advancent was no longer a matter of accumulating magical energy. He had already reached the limit of raw power.
What he lacked was depth.
Understanding.
Comprehension of the world's higher rules.
And ti was the most fundantal rule of all.
While conversing with Gandalf, Sylas deliberately steered the discussion toward the nature of power itself, particularly Gandalf's understanding of wisdom, fla, and spiritual guidance. Sylas did not seek to imitate these powers, but to understand how powers were acquired, stabilized, and wielded without authority.
This knowledge was invaluable.
For as a beginner walking the path of ti, Sylas needed references, examples of how higher forces interacted with lesser beings.
Gandalf, for his part, did not conceal anything. He patiently explained his understanding of power, the difference between wielding and ruling, and the invisible boundaries imposed by authority.
As ti passed, the effects of the Ti-Turner finally faded. The other Sylas, who had remained in the office, completed his work and vanished from the tiline. The detachnt that had surrounded Sylas suddenly dissolved.
In Gandalf's perception, Sylas fully rged back into the present, becoming real once more.
The transition left Gandalf deeply shaken.
He could only marvel.
Ti truly was miraculous.
After restoring his depleted ntal energy, Sylas did not imdiately activate another Ti-Turner. Instead, he accompanied Gandalf to et Círdan, Lord of Swan Harbor, and his wife. There, he reunited with Elrond and Galadriel.
After more than a year at Swan Harbor, Galadriel and Elrond prepared to depart, returning to their city. Gandalf, too, had to leave, he served Manwë, and as Manwë's Maia, he was bound by his will.
He also wished to remain near Nienna, his teacher.
Sylas declined their invitation to leave with them.
He chose to remain at Swan Harbor.
His goal was clear: to create more Ti-Turners, granting himself more opportunities to perceive the River of Ti.
Each Ti-Turner could only grant him five seconds of direct temporal insight per day. His calculations showed that his ntal endurance capped at roughly five seconds per session, after which complete exhaustion followed.
However, after six hours of rest, his ntal strength would recover.
Thus, by staggering the usage of multiple Ti-Turners, Sylas could extend his daily contemplation.
At the theoretical limit, twenty-five Ti-Turners would grant him one hundred and twenty-five seconds, just over two minutes, of direct exposure to the River of Ti each day.
To others, this seed trivial.
To Sylas, it was priceless.
Thus, he once again descended into the sea to visit Ulmo and Uinen, who graciously provided another basin of ancient seabed sand, carefully selected by the rmaids.
From that point onward, Sylas entered a long cycle of creation and contemplation.
While refining ti-sand, he observed ti.
While observing ti, he refined ti-sand.
Using the three Ti-Turners already in his possession, Sylas divided his existence. Within his workshop, it was common to see three Sylases sharing the sa space:
One maintained the ti-washing of the sand
One crafted conduits and vessels
One either assisted, rested, or spent ti with his family and allies
At the sa ti, he used the brief fifteen-second total daily reversal to observe the River of Ti with his spiritual perception.
Though fleeting, the gains were imnse.
Each glimpse deepened his understanding.
And so, ten years passed.
By then, twenty-five Ti-Turners had been completed.
The benefit of the Ti-Turners was equivalent to six extra days of ti for anyone else.
By fully exploiting the Ti-Turner system, Sylas effectively possessed one hundred and forty-nine hours within a single day, along with one hundred and twenty-five seconds of direct insight into the River of Ti.
To achieve this, Sylas equipped each Ti-Turner with an interconnected control device. Whenever one Ti-Turner was exhausted after six hours of usage, the next would automatically activate, rewinding the previous five hours. This process repeated continuously, stacking layer upon layer.
In effect, Sylas lived six days within a single natural day.
Fortunately, Sylas had already reached the refined level of existence and attained immortality. Otherwise, such extre ti expenditure would have caused an ordinary person to age uncontrollably, their lifespan burned away in monts.
Under this relentless cycle of temporal manipulation and contemplation, Sylas's transformation beca increasingly evident.
As he imrsed himself deeper into the inner workings of ti, his existence itself beca subtly infused with it. He appeared youthful, yet carried an air of imasurable age, his presence calm, distant, and difficult to place, as though he stood slightly apart from the normal flow of the world.
His understanding of ti soon bore tangible results.
Raising his magic staff, Sylas pointed it toward a towering ancient tree and cast a spell.
A pale blue stream of temporal energy surged from the staff, washing over the tree's trunk. In an instant, ti flowed backward. The massive tree rapidly shrank, its bark smoothing, its branches retreating, until it transford into a fragile sapling.
Had Sylas not halted the spell, the sapling would have continued to regress, eventually becoming a seed.
This was Sylas's perfected version of the Ti-Reversal Curse, refined far beyond the unstable magic he once used in his early years.
Unlike crude ti magic, this spell could be applied with precision to a single target, an object or a living being, forcing its personal tiline to rewind.
If used on an ordinary human, it could reverse aging entirely… or, if taken too far, reduce the target to infancy or even erase their existence before birth.
However, the spell carried a severe drawback.
The greater the reversal, the stronger the backlash.
Ti resisted intrusion with ruthless force, and every additional year reversed demanded an exponential increase in magical energy. The strain on the caster grew correspondingly.
With Sylas's current strength, even at full output, he could reverse no more than one hundred years.
In Valinor, this limitation rendered the spell largely ineffective against immortal beings such as the Valar or the Elves, whose lifespans extended far beyond such asures.
Sylas had also considered expanding the spell's scope, from a single target to an entire domain, reversing ti across a wide area.
But the idea proved untenable.
The backlash from ti would be overwhelming. Even maintaining such a spell for a fraction of a second would tear him apart.
It was like attempting to create a bubble within the raging torrent of ti, large enough to shelter many people. The larger the bubble, the greater the pressure it endured, until it inevitably shattered under the river's force.
Reluctantly, Sylas abandoned this line of exploration.
For now, he chose not to pursue breadth, but depth.
Rather than reversing ti across space, he would push further along ti itself.
If one day he could rewind thousands, or even tens of thousands of years, then the ti magic he wielded would no longer be rely a tool.
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