Let There Be Light by StarSpray

Let There Be Light

But when the Valar entered into Eä they were at first astounded and at a loss, for it was as if naught was yet made which they had seen in vision, and all was but on point to begin and yet unshaped, and it was dark. For the Great Music had been but the growth and flowering of thought in the Timeless Halls, and the Vision only a foreshadowing; but now they had entered in at the beginning of Time, and the Valar perceived that the World had been but foreshadowed and foresung, and they must achieve it. - Ainulindalë

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When the Valar descended from the Timeless Halls into Eä, they found all in darkness, with nothing there of the world they had seen and sung. Even Manwë halted, momentarily uncertain. Even he had not realized that what the Music had been was only a foretelling. But Varda did not hesitate. She remembered her part in the Song well, and knew that this was its time. She therefore put forth her power and lifted her voice. The gasses and tiny particles drifting through the emptiness responded to her call, coming whirling together and igniting in the first stars. She cradled them to herself before flinging them out into the darkness, where they swirled in a dance of their own, pulsing with music to harmonize with the voices of the Valar, bringing light to the vast darkness.

But Melkor was also there, and it was he who spurred the first stars to burst, to grow bigger and bigger and absorb more and more gas until at last they died in a brilliant explosion, sending the heavier matter they had made far out into the void. The other Valar cried out in dismay when it first began, but Varda laughed. For what Melkor had sought to destroy had instead given Aulë and Ulmo and Manwë all that they needed to begin to build a world fit for the children. Here was iron, here was carbon, here were the ingredients that made water, that Ulmo loved most.

And stars, too, were living things after their own fashion, things that were born and that, in time, died—though not all of them went so spectacularly. Varda sung together great clouds of gases where new stars were born, and these she gave into the care of her closest follower Ilmarë. Ilmarë tended the stars with care, singing of light and warmth and color as she danced through the clouds, spinning them with her dance into marvelous shapes—towering cliffs of gas clouds, or whirling circles of varying color. She rode waves of heat from star cluster to star cluster, and scooped the newborn stars up and flung them outward into spiraling galaxies that Varda crafted with infinite care. Their voices and the stars’ echoed through the vastness of Eä, and Ilmarë delighted in it all.

The time came, at last, for the Valar to descend onto Arda, the world made solid of stone and iron and of flowing water and breathing life, to await the coming of the Children. Ilmarë went also but did not linger. Though she also was eager to meet the Children at last, her siblings in Ilúvatar’s thought, her heart lay rather with the star nurseries, with the nebulae and the comets and the strange and wondrous things far from the shores of Arda’s seas.