Transmigration in Mordor

The noise of the cavern was alive, a beast lurking in the shadows, and Zac listened to it with a new kind of attention. He had lain there for hours, his mind drifting through the troubled waters of his recent revelation. The cavern was alive. A stomach. And the worms were its servants. As he stopped focusing on external sounds and instead attuned himself to the energetic signature of this place, an echo of his previous discovery returned to him with the force of certainty. The staircase.

It was not a mere trap. It was a barrier, a runic seal of unimaginable power, a lock forged to contain an abomination. And he had just found the key. He didn't yet understand all the complexity of the grammar of hate carved into the stone, but he grasped the concepts, the fundamental verbs of power: repel, bind, contain.

A wild idea, birthed in madness and utter despair, took hold in him. He could alter the seal. He could corrupt its meaning, twist its power. It was no longer about escaping. It was a plan to purge hell with hell.

His return journey became a pilgrimage of vengeance. He scrambled for days along the cliff faces, each hold an act of will, every meter gained a promise of destruction. Arriving at the base of the cursed staircase, he no longer felt fear, but a kind of perverse familiarity. He began his work, a long, exhausting ritual. Climbing the titanic steps, he identified the crucial runes, those nodes of power he had spotted. Then, with Morngul, he did not simply destroy, he rewrote.

His cursed blade became his chisel and pen. On one side, he hammered the stone, smashing entire symbols and erasing phrases of the evil grammar in a rain of black shards. Each rune destroyed was a silent scream, a release of energy that made the air vibrate. On the other, he used the tip of his sword to draw new lines, to connect existing symbols, to twist the spell. He felt the energy of the Black Speech flow through his blade, into his arm, a cold, intoxicating power responsive to his will. He acted only on intuition, guided by Morngul's whispers and his own hatred for this place.

Once finished, a strange silence fell over the staircase. The oppressive pressure evaporated, replaced by an expectant emptiness. Exhausted, he dashed to a nearby ledge, hiding in a crevice. He waited, heart pounding, praying his mad theory would work, even as he dreaded the consequences if it did.

The waiting was torture. An interminable moment dragged on, and doubt gnawed at him. Had he failed? Had he simply broken the seal for nothing? Then, he felt a vibration. Faint at first, then stronger. The ground began to shake, not with the regular pulse of the living cavern, but with the frenzy of a thousand earthquakes. The tremors grew so violent that Zac had to cling to the rock to keep from being hurled into the void.

And then he witnessed a scene out of time, a spectacle fit for a pre-apocalyptic flood.

In the distance, at the very top of the immense black staircase where sight was lost to darkness, something appeared. A wave. A tide of flesh and chitin. Nameless creatures, worms of all sizes, hideous crawlers, and grotesque amalgams spilled out of the tunnels, scrambling over one another at breakneck speed, their empty eyes fixed on some invisible destination.

The monstrous tide swept onto the staircase. The enchanted rocks were too hard for their teeth and claws. They could neither grip nor burrow. The staircase became a macabre slide. Creatures tumbled endlessly, piling up, forming a chaotic avalanche of flesh, dust, and blood. Those lower down were crushed by the weight above, reduced to an organic slurry that lubricated and hastened the descent of the rest. Still, they did not stop.

At the foot of the staircase, the Balrog lake's lava sizzled, then erupted. The impact of thousands of creatures dropping into the magma triggered a series of deafening detonations. Geysers of fire and ash shot hundreds of meters high. Then came the wave, an immense surge of molten rock, dozens of meters tall, rushing up the staircase and engulfing the continuing flood of monsters.

The noise was infernal, a hellish symphony composed of the inhuman shrieks of millions, the sinister cracking of shells and bones, the sickening squelch of flesh becoming pulp, and the almighty rumble of the furious lava.

Zac was transfixed, frozen, fascinated, and terrified by the onrush of chaos. It was power beyond comprehension, destruction on a scale he had never imagined. He was the architect of this apocalypse.

The spectacle lasted for what seemed like endless hours, until the torrent of crawlers subsided, the flow slowing to a trickle. The lava finally calmed, having consumed and petrified thousands upon thousands, creating a new sheet of black rock over the staircase.

When silence returned, the staircase was unrecognizable. It was buried beneath a thick layer of petrified corpses, a grotesque sculpture of death and suffering, fused by cooled lava. Only the last few steps, at the top, remained: relics of a bygone era.

Zac remained motionless, trembling, shocked by the cataclysm he had unleashed. He had purged one hell but felt he had created another. He had altered the evil magic of the staircase, changing its function from 'repel' to 'attract', targeting the worms and crawlers, condemning them to certain death. He had used their own language, their own magic, binding them all into the lava.

There was no escape, only transformation, and the cost was another layer on the endless spiral of damnation.