Work Text:
Light is the average state of all creation. Mash Eru’s makings up into a paste, strain it through a fine sieve to take out the troublesome grains of individuality, and you’ll be left with is a glowing soup, like the sea when Yavanna stirs her hand through it.
There is the light that eyes can see and the light beyond. Light radiates from each speck of existence, each bar of gold, each pound of flesh. Ilmarë sees it exuded from the flushed cheeks of elves, though they themselves seem unaware. She sees it in cooling flowers and the bouncing, jostling air. When she accompanies her mistress beyond the boundaries of this estate they have built–an idyllic aerated platter of delights made for the children they serve–she sees greater feats of illumination.
The outer rings of Eä where Varda walks teem with palm-sized stars, tiny and shrill with new life, nurseries of billowing gas that blaze with the potential of future constellations. Her firmament is a perpetual work of progress. There are blue-hot infants and roly-poly round tots pinking with age. When the lady cradles her oldest works, shuddering red ghosts on the verge of implosion, pulsing densities of strange materia, a furrow crosses her luminous brow.
They change, she confides to her handmaiden. There is no breath here for songbird-voice; older means of communication must prevail. Even Valarin would not capture the despair that leaks through as she touches Ilmarë’s mind. They move. I cannot stop it. Someday these stars will all collapse.
Her great hand trails across the Valacirca, sending them spinning in their places. Pressed up against her hip, watching the primordial heavenly sea bubble, seethe, each mote absorbing light according to its miniscule nature and spinning it back out again, Ilmarë tries to reassure her–this reality is young. It will be young for eons yet.
It will be as it will be. When these stars go out you will make new ones. I see no shortage of light, not until the children have lived ten thousand ages and their makings fill the middle world to bursting.
And yet, we will one day run out. Even you, loyal one, cannot lie to me here. Varda sighs. Her breath is hot the way creation was shortly after they entered it, a churning mass of plasma and air. In her resides a greater coal from the first hearth. But even the best banked embers die out. They both know this, understanding stretched between them like a single spider’s thread.
Speaking of what we stretch and stretch, putting off destruction for the future, the Queen of Stars decides, abandoning her celestial strings. There is baking to be done.
They call it bread, for it is formed in immense heat. By its physical properties a better description of what Ilmarë and her mistress make is beer—liquid, frothy, everything about existence melted down to foam.
It starts with two seeds of iron, plucked effortlessly from a middle-aged star. Ilmarë holds one, Varda the other, and they sprint at each other from opposite ends of the star-river, slamming them together with such immense heat that a fraction of the world discombobulates, melting into a softer, older version of itself. This ancient fire would dissipate nigh instantly if Varda did not scoop it up in a container of Lady Vairë’s making; silk waxed with lipid time.
She hands the little bag of distilled light to Ilmarë. It is Ilmarë’s job, after all, to feed the spider.
They return to the world of breath and wind and fragile things. Both of them must shrink to fit here; too much radiance will wreck the delicate works their siblings have made. Ilmarë, who is only an aspect of the light, the dimensionality of it—the quibbling numerical details of how energy flits and flows, not the pure force of it burning through the cosmos— knows she has it easier than her lady. Varda walks sometimes among the Children, but more often retreats to her scorched mountaintop, safe with her husband in Ilmarin’s thin lower atmosphere.
As the queen rests, Ilmarë takes leave, flying south to find darkness.
Because light floods almost everything, on a universal scale, the absence of light is rare, a precious commodity.
It exists more and more in these later days, in the spaces between stars and high-heavenly cloud banks, great gaps of nothingness where even the dull glow of gases or the glint of passing meteors is rare. The world is expanding as the children conceive of greater and greater sizes for it. None can add notes that were not in the original song–they are constrained by the limits of the music, even as the dreams of the audience blossom. Even in the gaps between stars, between spinning-top star-cities, even in that emptiest space, Ilmarë can still find the pinprick shine of sand grains, a liberal coating of dust spread across all of Eä.
Real darkness is not just light-in-absentia. It is light-obverse, light gone wrong, light that has curdled, turned in on itself. Unlight. Instead of outward qualities, there is only an inward disintegration. Instead of a scintillating leading edge, there is a rim of destruction.
Ilmarë sprints south, faster than even Eönwë of fleet wing. In early days, the spider moved in small orbits, now she spins herself a single web, deep in a ravine in verdant, deadly Avathar. Weight is different here, the climate muggy with invisible portent. There are spots Ilmarë steps through where her skin rends, compresses, her hair whips away into unseen whirlwinds. So little in this world is unseen to her (for all that is light touches her eyes) but whatever the spider weaves she cannot comprehend. There are strands of dark webbing here, Lady Vairë says, but she can only feel them, tugging her shell in multifarious directions.
Lady Vairë would know the weft of this net best; drawing near the heavy mark of gravity begins to warp her tapestry. From the outside, looking in, time seems to slow. It terrifies her. She wants to pick it apart and see how it works—nothing here makes sense to her, not even the passage of light.
Ungoliant is spinning gently underneath a crag. In many ways, she is just an orb of blackness. The blackness is not her, and yet is her in every way that matters. Ilmarë can comprehend very little about their stranger-sister, their late coming enigma, but she knows on a fundamental level that the heart of the spider dwells at the very center of the unlight. At the same time, nothing that ventures into her orb-nest ever comes out, not light, not a scrap of intelligible quanta, certainly not the small animals Lord Oromë used to feed to her in the early days of curiosity. One little collegiate, a Maia of small workings, of calcite eyes and the vision of prototypic ocean dwellers, dared put themself in the darkness and was lost entirely, along with all they held sway over. What the spider eats is gone forever.
Or—almost forever. She is not wholly of the Void. She speaks, she reasons, she metabolises. There is a power that radiates from her, a steady flow of outward energy that bears no resemblance to the substance of her meals. This, Ilmarë can taste. This, everyone understands, would kill their cannibal cousin if left unchecked.
The horrible truth is that no one knows where the spider came from. No one remembers her in the singing, no one can recall sensing her in that emptiness before sight or form, when they were only voices resounding in their maker’s throat. One day, early in the making of the world, they found her. She was very small and alone, leaking power, starving for light. After she ate the Maia, all were happy to leave her alone; spinning webs in Avathar. But she is just fragile enough that the Trees and the background light of the universe cannot sustain her. None of the Valar can countenance the death of one of their own (if she is their own; not something else, something drawn out of the Void, endless hunger come to taunt them.)
Varda peels off scraps of stars and flash-freezes them in Vairë’s nets. Aulë donates fists full of rare earth, humming with power. Once a Valian year Ilmarë comes to feed the spider, because no one else really wants to. She asked to be allowed. Light is always fascinated by the death of light.
Ungoliant is rotating, hung from a jet of fizzing dust (which Ilmarë can see) and leaden unlight (which she can not). Even now, gorged on Manwe’s air, Aulë’s pitchblende, Oromë’s flesh, and Varda’s starlight, she is only five inches in diameter. When first she came to their attention she stretched a measly ligne. They have fattened her on worlds’ worth of matter since then. All around her, treelight lenses, making her perfect sphere a strange ellipsoid ringed with twin girdles of warped red-gold.
You’ve come to feed me, she sighs into Ilmarë’s mind. Then, growing from her pitch carapace of nothingness eight equally formless legs and a face that blends into the perfect darkness of her body. She chitters. Strange how easily she makes something out of nothing–forces the abstract into a physical mold. It’s the best piece of evidence that she’s one of theirs. “Starlight, your eyes set my heart at ease. I could drink of the flame inside you for hours.”
“I’ve brought you a different kind of fire,” Ilmarë steps closer, into the shadow of the bluff, and fishes out Lady Vairë’s satchel. She holds it out fearlessly, letting the saucer-sized ball of unlight dip closer before she opens the bag. A flash of heat and light rolls out across the canyon before the plasma either dissipates or gets swallowed up by darkness. Sated, the spider sways, mere breaths from her skin. Close enough to leap on her, close enough for Ilmarë to feel her inexorable pull.
Ungoliant has never been a hunter; not when she can rely on others to bring her supper. An elf might lack the wherewithal (or structural stability) to escape her tug but for Ilmarë it’s as simple as leaning back.
She doesn’t retreat far. She is still fascinated. Fascinated by how perfectly the tide of light evaporates inside of her, fascinated by the infinitesimal shrink and bloat of her form, fascinated by the sheer size of her—by some counts Ungoliant is the weightiest thing in Arda. Vairë has had to stabilise the ground around her to prevent the entire disc from collapsing inward, sewing in an extra layer of support to account for Ungoliant’s disproportionate presence on the temporal weave.
“Are you full?” Ilmarë asks. It’s an old question, one they have asked each other many times.
“I will be full when you are,” Ungoliant answers, still spinning. Somewhere, deep inside the orb of unlight, Ilmarë can feel the whirring pendulum that is her making little circles too. “When you have all the answers because you’ve finally decided to look down my throat–I will know your light and you will know my unlight. Then I think I will be happy. For a while.”
Like her queen, Ilmarë favors an elven form even when she wanders the airless reaches of Ilmen and the flame-licked lands of the stars. Always she has a face, always she has hands. The size, material, and relative corporeality might vary but the shape remains the same. It draws them closer to the Children they serve, even when they do not walk among them, Varda claims. And eyes are good for blinking with, a mouth is good for twisting into shapes–even if Ungoliant won’t appreciate the effect. “I won’t ever come out. Does anything live on inside your belly?”
“I–I cannot tell. I need someone to see for me. Please, won’t you see?”
Folding up Vairë’s bag, Ilmarë reminds her, “I would not be able to tell you anything from inside your gullet. Besides, I’m the last person you’d want. Much of your dark webs confound me.”
“That is true,” a hint of softness creeps into Ungoliant’s clicking voice. “Baryon-daughter. Knowledge-maiden. Eä unfolds for you like a flower—except for me.”
“Except for you,” Ilmarë echoes and fights the impulse to shove her hand, her veil tethered so tightly to the baser stuff of her existence, into the pit of Ungoliant’s abdomen.
Nothing comes back from the spider’s belly but Ungoliant-sized parcels of faint heat, the barest hint of light. Yet somewhere, in the back of Ilmarë’s mind, she can’t stop wondering what the inside of her mouth looks like.
“I cannot imagine satiation without you,” Ungoliant confesses abruptly. “You have fed me for so long. It’s your face I think of when I think of light.”
The blue edge of her shifting scarf falls over Ilmarë’s shoulder as she shakes her head; another elven habit she’s performing for an audience that barely seems to register it. “I am not the one who makes it, nor the one who preserves it for you. I keep the stars’ secrets. I do not forge them.”
“You are the one who bothers to come feed me.” Her eight black legs flex, spasming then curling in on her body. Spiders curl their legs like this when they die. Still, her light-rung sphere of darkness keeps rotating. “You stay to talk. I eat the heat of this body you’ve made and glancing fire in your eyes.”
Ilmarë will not have herself counted as the kindest of her kin. She is not Eönwë, who always has jubilant words on his tongue, or Uinen, famed for loving unflinchingly. Her interest in Ungoliant is a grotesque attraction. It is unfair on every level to their maybe-cousin (who never asked to be made in such a ravenous state) that her last remaining visitor wants to know more about her anatomy than the workings of her soul.
(Ilmarë thinks she has the soul worked out. Ungoliant is very hungry through and through.)
“I only want to know where the light goes,” she says feebly.
A stray breeze sweeps through the ravine, sending the pinions of gravity shuddering again. Dust kicks through the clefts and little gulches, sticking to bits of web Ilmarë cannot see, forming a momentary disc of dirt and glow at the edge of Ungoliant’s unlight. The spider sways a little on her thread–so dense and yet so frail. She grazes the edges of Ilmarë’s spangled sleeve.
“So do I,” Ungoliant clicks, fangs briefly visible in profile before they disappear into the rest of her. “No one has been able to tell me what I am. No one knew light well enough to fill me up to bursting.”
Their conversations always end the same way. Ilmarë takes a firm step back and tucks Lady Vairë’s bag under her arm. “I have my duties. I did not enter into Eä to feed you, nor can I sate myself at the cost of what we’ve undertaken. I am sorry. I cannot imagine what it’s like to be hungry as you are.”
Ungoliant’s privation, the diminishment of matter, is foreign to her. But, in truth, Ilmarë knows what it’s like to starve. Ever since they met the spider she has known a confusion and appetite she never imagined when the shape of the world was sung.
“And when the world ends?” Ungoliant demands, halting her mid-step. This line of questioning is new. “When your lady’s stars all wink out, when the light is barely a wisp scattered throughout a cold existence, when there are no small creatures to tend to, then will you sate your curiosity?”
Until the children have lived ten thousand ages and their makings fill the middle world to bursting.
A strange hope fill Ilmarë’s chest, as if she’s drunk of Nienna’s deepest, strangest pools. “Maybe then. Maybe.”
“I will wait for you!” Ungoliant calls. “And I will try not to starve.”
Ilmarë looks back at her one more time and lets her drink a little more of the fire from her eyes. This world is, on average, built of light. What harm is there in giving a drop to a begging spider?