Transmigration in Mordor

Euphoria was a drug, and Zac drowned in it with the greed of a man who had known absolute thirst. He remained for hours on the mountainside, his gaze lost in the perfection of Gondolin, his mind rebuilding the broken bridges of his hope. Each pulse of light on the city's towers seemed to erase a scar from his soul. He had survived. He had won. Beauty was his reward.

Then, he felt the trembling.

It was not an earthquake. The mountain did not move. It was an internal tremor, a vibration that came not from the rock, but from the marrow of his bones. A subtle dissonance in the symphony of his happiness. At first, he ignored it, blaming it on fatigue, on emotion. But the trembling grew, turning into a dull throb, a heartbeat that was not his own.

And with the pulsation came a sensation. A pull.

It was not a sound, nor a voice. It was a tug, an invisible force that seemed to have latched onto his mind and was pulling him gently, but with a monstrous insistence, away from the light of Gondolin. Toward the shadow of the mountain, behind him.

He tried to resist, forcing himself to focus on the city's beauty. But the splendor of the towers began to fade, their whiteness appearing flat, inert, like a washed-out painting. The song of the fountains became an irritating white noise. The joy that had filled him drained away like sand through his fingers, replaced by a cold, familiar anxiety.

And then, he recognized the sensation.

It wasn't a simple attraction. It was an abject familiarity. It was the mental contact of the Void Entity, that ancient, infinite intelligence that had judged him upon his arrival. The presence that had opened his mind like a book and nearly driven him mad before his punishment had even begun.

The euphoria died in an instant, strangled by a terror so deep it was silent. The hope he had felt was not liberation. It was permission. A short leash he had been granted before being reeled back in.

Slowly, with the movements of an automaton whose strings had just been re-tensioned, he turned away from Gondolin. Every fiber of his being screamed at him not to, to cling to the light, but his will was no longer his own. He turned his back on the perfect city and began to walk.

He plunged into the shadow of the mountain. The soft grass became dry and brittle under his feet. The flowers withered at his approach. The air, once pure, grew heavy with the smell of ash and despair. He did not know where he was going, but his legs did. He was a pilgrim walking toward an altar he could not see, drawn by a faith he had not chosen.

He arrived at the edge of a chasm.

A gaping wound in the crust of the world, a volcano whose crater plunged into unfathomable darkness. At the bottom, miles below, a lake of magma pulsed with a sick, red glow. But it was not just lava. It swirled, contracted, concentrated at its center to form something that defied reason.

An eye.

An iris of molten rock, a pupil of absolute black void. An eye the size of a city that stared at him. And the gaze of this eye was the same as that of the creature from ancient times. It was not a gaze that saw; it was a gaze that knew. It saw his brief joy, his pathetic hope, and it judged him with an indifference as vast as the universe.

His ordeal was not over. In a flash of unbearable clarity, he understood. It was only just beginning. Everything he had experienced—the skeletal spider, the Balrogs, the worms—was just the prelude. The real torture was psychological. To give him paradise only to tear it away.

He was at the edge of the void. His legs continued to move forward, the pull of the eye becoming irresistible. He was going to fall.

In a final spasm of defiance, a last surge of his old will, he turned around. He had to see it one last time. One last memory of beauty to accompany him in his fall.

He turned to gaze upon Gondolin.

And there was nothing.

No ruins. No ghost city. Just the bare mountainside. A slope of sterile rock and dry earth, swept by a freezing wind that howled its loneliness.

The city was not there. It had never been there.

The understanding struck him with the force of a mental supernova, annihilating the last vestiges of his sanity. The beauty, the joy, the hope... it had all been an illusion. A perfect hallucination, projected into his mind by the same entity that was now reclaiming him. The greatest masterpiece of his torture.

The ground gave way beneath his feet. Or perhaps it was his mind that gave way to the world. His balance lost, he tipped forward.

He fell into the void, his gaze fixed on the desolate landscape where his paradise had existed a second earlier. He did not scream. There was nothing left in him to scream.

The very moment his being crossed the crater's rim, the earth began to tremble. A tectonic rumble rose from the depths, a howl of stone that spread through the world. Zac, in mid-fall, felt the tremor travel up the volcano's walls, shake the mountain, then expand. He imagined it shaking the cavern of the Nameless Things, panicking the giant worms, vibrating the black iron bridges in the sleeping kingdom of the Balrogs, raining bones down in the skeletal spider's lair. The prison itself was crying out. Because the tremor did not come from the rock. It came from him. His fall into the eye of fire was not a death. It was an offering. The conclusion of a transaction. As he plunged toward the pupil of nothingness, a final, terrible lucidity came to him. Gondolin was not a gratuitous torture. It was cultivation. They had grown in him the purest hope, the most intense joy, only to harvest it at the moment of its destruction. To create a rare vintage of despair. The earthquake was not the prison breaking. It was the system digesting his soul. There was no escape, because he had been looking for a door. The truth, more monstrous than any monster, was that there had never been a prisoner. Only fuel.

There is no escape.