So depends on the meaning of 'casteth afar', and he should be able to work with that - no, don't bother -

Good. I'd hate to turn on allies to prevent a stupid war again.

She floats herself over toward the battlefield, slowly and carefully.

Melian! I've got a plan. I swear it's not a trick to get the Silmaril.
I'm going to need animal spirits. Bats, lizards, birds, anything that eats bugs. Can't control this, but we can hope it goes after the spider. Call them! 

Doriath has an ecosystem, right? There have to be animal spirits, and Doriath ones would answer to Melian...

Yep, that works fine. Mostly birds. Birds like Melian.

Exact breakdown doesn't matter a whole lot. While they're streaming in, Amber is drawing circles. 

There are boatloads of light spirits still shimmering around the Silmaril. Others can be bound with like instead of opposite, if they're weak enough. Or conversely, if the thing they're bound with is just that strong. And Maitimo did say a Silmaril could light a whole country.

Concentric circles, expanding outward. Each layer entraps the one before, and she sets it up to absorb the extra light if an inner layer approaches being too (comparatively) weak to be sealed in by mere similarity.

Silmaril here! And keep brightening it, far as you can go before losing contact!

That'd destroy the surrounding area - I can contain it, but not with you there -

If you need to, this didn't work. It should be...if I set this up right we could say it's containing itself.

I see.

The Silmaril gets brighter. The Silmaril gets dramatically brighter than staring directly at the Sun. The Silmaril gets brighter than staring directly at the Trees Amber never saw.

The spirits floating around the jewel follow it to the center of the circles. They're both feeding on and putting out light, and at the moment there's a lot more to take in.

The light gets diverted into the innermost circle. It overwhelms the light elementals and binds them in, like against like. The glow spills over when Melian turns the dial higher, and the next circle accepts enough light that the first counts as weak compared to it. The entire setup couldn't handle literally infinite, but it's a quickly increasing exponential limited only by the number of diagrams.

One of the light elementals grows bigger and brighter. If it wasn't being drowned out by their even brighter surroundings, it would by now be visible even to non-practitioners. The animal spirits crowd in and get absorbed.

A glowing talon steps out of the circle. It's less blindingly bright, no longer painful to look at now that all the light is going to either empower the elemental or hold the whole thing together. The apparent fading reveals a toothed beak, two feathered wings, and an anatomically improbable set of hind legs. Its long bony tail is the last out.

The dragon turns to where Ungoliant is being pelted with ineffective distractions, and joins the fight.

- how -

It's not a real dragon, exactly, I don't think. Dragons are recursive loops, a god that manages to worship itself or an elemental that takes in more than it puts out. This one does have an endpoint in the center there, but it's the Silmaril so it might as well be infinite.

The shape is just because the world remembers the dinosaurs and humans have stories about dragons shaped more or less like this, so the spirits fill the niche. And because Melian provided animal spirits.

Ungoliant now does in fact appear to be taking a battering.

So is her opponent, but whenever it gets hurt it oozes light and replenishes the injured area.

It's even harder to follow now. Spots of Ungoliant's darkness interspersed with drops of dazzling light, and neither one of them fades when the combatants move on. But at least now it's not sending as much light down Ungoliant's throat as against her hide.

People who try to make dragons do usually end up dead. I'm hoping either making it out of spiders' predators is enough to keep it pointed the right way or Melian can control it, but if it comes after us we might be in trouble.

(That's to everyone including Melian, who didn't get the first round of warning labels.)

It is not obvious to me how I would control it.

You're powerful enough that if you order it to do something there's a decent chance it might listen? No way to tell in advance.
Mostly I was just thinking it's strictly less bad than Ungoliant and there's no way we end up fighting both.

I agree. Can you now that the time can be afforded explain more precisely what you did -

One of the light spirits is feeding on what the Silmaril puts out. Or maybe it started as more than one, I don't really know. When an elemental takes in more than it puts out, it grows and expends power until that equalizes, and I'm not even sure if the Silmaril has an upper limit. The diagrams were to make sure it's funneling the light to the right place. Most of it's going to a binding so the result stays a cohesive single thing, and the rest is empowering the light elemental at the center.

The shape is... something like this happens when there's a closed loop, an Other that can power itself and have something left over. This is mostly the same, since it has the infinite free energy generator inside it.

Dragons are concentrated. One that started as a jumped-up cold spirit might be able to freeze a lake with a touch. Creating a light dragon was the largest-scale magic I could think of to do with a Silmaril.

And what is it potentially capable of?

Potentially? Killing people who anger it, and a lot of property damage. It is—should be—more animal than person, so it won't be consciously trying to hurt anyone but also can't really be reasoned with.

I see. And the Silmaril -

Um. I didn't really think through what happens after it either saves our bacon or turns on us.

It'd be pretty straightforward to defeat the dragon and get the Silmaril back out if we had some hard-to-get equipment...

What specifically?

The safe way to beat dragons is to outdo them. For the one that freezes lakes, you need to use something that can just be colder than it.

So– another Silmaril.

That does not seem available to us.

No.

The other way is to charge it head-on, convince the universe you're a The Valiant and the kind of person who charges dragons head-on, and supposedly sometimes that works. It's suicidally dangerous. Works a lot better for people who have the backing of a god, which is also not available.

I will contemplate better solutions. You are reckless and a danger to your own allies, Amber first of Men.