Transmigration in Mordor

There was no fight.

In a perverse way, it was more terrifying than any confrontation. Zac entered the immense cavern not as an intruder, but as a pilgrim returning to his unholy land. The air, once vibrant with menace, was now almost calm in his presence. The small spiders swarming on the walls of silk and bone stopped as he passed, their multiple eyes fixing him with a fearful curiosity before they retreated, clearing a path for him.

He could feel the reason for their deference. The scent of his own soul had changed. It no longer carried the reek of human fear, that scent of prey that drove the creatures of Mordor mad. It now carried the musk of the Void, the dry, hungry aroma of their original mother. The corruption he had distilled within himself was a silent song, a lullaby for monsters.

In the center of the cavern, the titanic mass of the skeletal spider rose. Its dozens of empty sockets turned toward him. There was no shrill cry this time. Just a slow, terrible movement of recognition. A low rumble, a clicking of mandibles that didn't sound like a threat, but like a strange greeting. It saw him, it sensed him, and it didn't see an enemy. It saw an aberration, a lost fragment of its own essence walking on two legs.

The monster within him soothed the monster before him. Zac walked past the creature, his heart a silent drum in his chest, each step an eternity. He didn't look at it, but he felt its attention on him, a weight as tangible as gravity.

On his way to the back of the cavern, he saw the horrors he had always fled. Larders, where creatures still half-alive struggled weakly in their cocoons while wolf-sized spiders devoured them piece by piece. Further on, nurseries: clusters of hundreds of translucent, pulsating eggs, from which hatchlings emerged, killing and devouring each other in a cannibalistic frenzy. It was the life cycle of this place: consumption, birth, consumption. And he was part of it.

Behind the skeletal spider's throne of chitin and bone, he found it. The exit. A fissure in the rock, a gaping, vertical maw that plunged into an even deeper, more absolute darkness. The air coming from it was dry and ancient. This was the next step.

The journey that followed was an eternity of descent.

There was no staircase, no path. Just a sheer rock face that seemed bottomless. With an insight born of his new instinct, he tore long threads of silk from the cavern walls. The material was incredibly strong, sticky, and perfect for rappelling.

Meter by meter, he descended into total darkness. Time became an abstract concept. He measured it in the calluses that formed on his hands, in cycles of hunger and thirst he ignored, in the slow erosion of his memory of sunlight. His mind, freed from immediate fear, set to work. He was mentally mapping. Every ledge, every change of angle in the wall, every different echo produced by the sound of his boots. He was no longer a mere prisoner. He was an explorer of his own prison.

The deeper he descended, the more the air changed. The damp coldness gave way to a dry heat, then to a stifling furnace. The smell of dust and decay was replaced by a stench of sulfur and burnt stone. Along the walls, his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and he began to notice metallic veins that shone with a faint internal glow, like the tears of a forgotten god. It was Mithril. Beautiful, pure, and utterly out of his reach—a useless treasure in the depths of hell.

After what felt like a lifetime of descent, he felt the ground beneath his feet. He had arrived on a wide ledge, a natural balcony overlooking an immense void. The silence was gone, replaced by a low, constant rumble, the pulse of a molten world.

A faint red glow emanated from below, pulsating slowly. He stepped to the edge and what he saw froze his newly hardened soul.

It was not a cavern. It was an underworld. A landscape of desolation stretching as far as the eye could see beneath a vault so high it was invisible. Rivers of bright orange lava flowed in wide channels, emptying into boiling lakes of fire. Islands of jagged basalt and obsidian floated amidst these seas of magma, connected by bridges of black iron that seemed forged from hatred itself.

But it was not the infernal geography that chilled him with dread. It was its inhabitants.

Everywhere, as far as the eye could see, they stood motionless. Some, half-submerged in lava, the molten rock flowing over their shoulders like a cape. Others, standing on the obsidian islands, silent and erect as statues.

Balrogs.

Dozens of them. Perhaps a hundred.

They were exactly as Tolkien's descriptions had etched them in his imagination, but infinitely more terrible in reality. Massive, humanoid forms that seemed made of both shadow and flame. Their silhouettes were wrapped in a darkness that had weight, a physical presence, as if they absorbed the faint surrounding light. Through the cracks in this armor of night, one could see the fire that constituted their being—a heart of magma and hatred. Horns of obsidian crowned their heads, and wings of smoke and ash rested, motionless, on their backs.

Zac stood speechless, his mind reeling. The horror he felt was not just visceral; it was intellectual. He understood. The skeletal spider was just a watchdog posted at the entrance. The tunnels, the Orcs, everything he had endured was merely the vestibule, the outer courtyard of the true prison.

This was not a game level inspired by Mordor. It was a recreation of a much darker age, a nightmare drawn from the lost chapters of the Silmarillion. He stood above the foundations of the world, looking down upon the true army of Angband, sleeping and waiting.

The scale of his damnation had just expanded to cosmological proportions. He had managed to escape a small cage, only to realize he was in the kennel of the most powerful monsters his imagination had ever conceived.