"So they are known to be Ungoliant's children?"

"Not known, but it seems likely; children by power if not physically. They were absent before she arrived."

"I might go pick a fight with a spider or two to have an idea of their threat level - some of the newcomers may want to try their hand at pest control and I'd like to have information for them when I'm next there. Anything I should know besides that they are spiders of thus and such a size? If I try baiting them with illusion light what precautions would you advise?"

"Our archers can kill them in significant numbers at no risk. The newcomers are likely not as competent, but should be able to engage safely. I don't know if they eat light like Ungoliant did, but if so, anything you do would have to be brighter than sunlight to noticeably change them."

"So pretty safe," Loki concludes. "Sounds like a nostalgic sort of afternoon. Thank you very much." She tucks spider facts into her notebook. "Is here the best place to talk about sorcery?"

"We should perhaps retreat to my rooms." She stands.

Loki smiles over her shoulder at Lúthien and follows Melian.

"Seems like it might be expedient if I'm hoping to fight the Enemy. He doesn't seem to have anything generalized that fights illusions over Angband, but I assume he could install something."

"I'd expect he'd try if you attempted to silence Angband as you mentioned considering. For me, this is done with attention, but I have more attention than you and would win a contest of that type. I'd expect you'll want to find a different angle to take. Do you have a sense of what you did, when we contested wills in my forest?"

"I just concentrated on it. Unopposed once I establish an illusion it stays until I dismiss it, no concentration needed."

"Hmm. In general, specific abilities can work around general ones, still abilities are advantaged against moving ones, and deeply connected abilities do better than ones that are discrete and entirely separate from the space around them. Are any of those observations helpful for you in how you could craft an illusion against opposition?"

"...Maybe. Mostly it's making me think how I could have designed the spell better for this application. It's a very general illusion spell. By still over moving do you mean literally traversing space - if I turn something invisible, will it be harder to keep it that way if I throw it across the room? - or static versus changing - if I make a frozen picture will it hold up better than one that animates? And my visual illusions can pick up changing light conditions around them, if they are of things that would respond to that as opposed to 'darkness' or 'nothing'."

"Static over changing. It is more difficult to alter things than to maintain their existing state."

"Silence would be static. And technically I had silence and invisibility before I had anything that would let me appear sights and sounds that weren't there, so it may be a more 'specific' ability than creating, say, music. But it would not respond at all to the environment."

"That may make your objective simpler, then."

"Maybe. But I can't concentrate when I'm asleep; he'd just wind up taking oaths from the orc children at night once he had the slightest opposition in place."

"True. Hmmm. What did you desire of me, when you asked to speak of sorcery?"

"I'm without the library I usually go to when I need to tailor a spell to the underlying nature of things," Loki says, spreading her hands. "Even if I could effortlessly silence Angband as I once imagined likely it would not solve the problem; it would only force the Enemy to teach orcs sign language, or oblige him to move the oathtaking elsewhere because I'm hardly going to silence the whole continent, or cause him to rely on another form of ensuring his armies' loyalty. The most decisive advantage I can offer is access to other realms. I am certain I can invent teleportation but I need to know about what forces of space I am playing with, as I needed to learn about birds, and light, and how the body works. You seem a likely reference and you may be interested in the problem from a technical standpoint, and it is especially important because I am not sure things behave here as I'm accustomed - in particular, it is not typical for a sun to come to exist after its planet."

"The Sun is a remnant of the Trees of Valinor which were destroyed. An old friend of mine is towing it across the sky in a chariot of Aulë's making."

"...This bears a lot of resemblance to the sort of thing some races tell themselves about their suns before they can look at them more closely, pardon me my amusement, but under the circumstances I must assume it's literally true. The Void across which Ungoliant came, what can you tell me about that? The stars, what are they?"

She projects, rather than speaking, the music of the creation of the world. There was the Void, and Eru who desired that something else would come to be, and then it did, rapidly, in forms unrecognizable and miraculous and beautiful but swift-changing and incompatible with life, cooling as it came into contact with the Void, pushing the Void outwards.

"Are you certain there were no stars visible even to vision much better than mine, before that...?"

Yes. Before that there was nothing at all.