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 fundamental 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 outcome would be the same. 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.
Time.
The power of time was not held by any Vala.
Even more critically, its authority had never been claimed.
Time existed, flowed, and governed all things, yet no being within Arda truly controlled it. With the Time-Turner in his possession, Sylas had stepped onto a path no one else had walked.
At Sylas's current level, further advancement 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 time was the most fundamental rule of all.
While conversing with Gandalf, Sylas deliberately steered the discussion toward the nature of power itself, particularly Gandalf's understanding of wisdom, flame, 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 time, 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 time passed, the effects of the Time-Turner finally faded. The other Sylas, who had remained in the office, completed his work and vanished from the timeline. The detachment that had surrounded Sylas suddenly dissolved.
In Gandalf's perception, Sylas fully merged back into the present, becoming real once more.
The transition left Gandalf deeply shaken.
He could only marvel.
Time truly was miraculous.
After restoring his depleted mental energy, Sylas did not immediately activate another Time-Turner. Instead, he accompanied Gandalf to meet 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 Time-Turners, granting himself more opportunities to perceive the River of Time.
Each Time-Turner could only grant him five seconds of direct temporal insight per day. His calculations showed that his mental endurance capped at roughly five seconds per session, after which complete exhaustion followed.
However, after six hours of rest, his mental strength would recover.
Thus, by staggering the usage of multiple Time-Turners, Sylas could extend his daily contemplation.
At the theoretical limit, twenty-five Time-Turners would grant him one hundred and twenty-five seconds, just over two minutes, of direct exposure to the River of Time each day.
To others, this seemed 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 mermaids.
From that point onward, Sylas entered a long cycle of creation and contemplation.
While refining time-sand, he observed time.
While observing time, he refined time-sand.
Using the three Time-Turners already in his possession, Sylas divided his existence. Within his workshop, it was common to see three Sylases sharing the same space:
One maintained the time-washing of the sand
One crafted conduits and vessels
One either assisted, rested, or spent time with his family and allies
At the same time, he used the brief fifteen-second total daily reversal to observe the River of Time with his spiritual perception.
Though fleeting, the gains were immense.
Each glimpse deepened his understanding.
And so, ten years passed.
By then, twenty-five Time-Turners had been completed.
The benefit of the Time-Turners was equivalent to six extra days of time for anyone else.
By fully exploiting the Time-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 Time.
To achieve this, Sylas equipped each Time-Turner with an interconnected control device. Whenever one Time-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 extreme time expenditure would have caused an ordinary person to age uncontrollably, their lifespan burned away in moments.
Under this relentless cycle of temporal manipulation and contemplation, Sylas's transformation became increasingly evident.
As he immersed himself deeper into the inner workings of time, his existence itself became subtly infused with it. He appeared youthful, yet carried an air of immeasurable 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 time 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, time flowed backward. The massive tree rapidly shrank, its bark smoothing, its branches retreating, until it transformed 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 Time-Reversal Curse, refined far beyond the unstable magic he once used in his early years.
Unlike crude time magic, this spell could be applied with precision to a single target, an object or a living being, forcing its personal timeline 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.
Time 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 measures.
Sylas had also considered expanding the spell's scope, from a single target to an entire domain, reversing time across a wide area.
But the idea proved untenable.
The backlash from time 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 time, 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 time across space, he would push further along time itself.
If one day he could rewind thousands, or even tens of thousands of years, then the time magic he wielded would no longer be merely a tool.