Transmigration in Mordor

Zac couldn't tear his eyes away. Before him, the skeleton of Ancalagon the Black was not a mere carcass, it was a landscape, a mountain range of calcium that redefined the geology of the cavern itself. Its spine formed a tectonic ridge supporting the vaulted ceiling, and its petrified wings were continents of silence. Even dead for eons, an aura of pure malice, a fossilized power, emanated from its bones, so dense it seemed to weigh down the air.

Once the vertigo of the initial shock had subsided, a cold and unsettling certainty settled within him. He was sure: that skeleton had not been there during his first passage. In his desperate flight atop the giant worm, he hadn't paid much attention to the ceiling's details, but a presence of such magnitude, such oppression, could not have gone unnoticed. His corruption made him sensitive to these things. He would have sensed it.

How was this possible? He had lost all sense of time since arriving. Days were a hollow concept, a fable from the world above. In the eternal darkness of the deep, only the cycles of his own suffering remained: dying, learning, rebirth. Yet he was convinced, at most, a few years had passed. Not millennia.

So what he'd seen on the surface, Gondolin, was it just a mirage? A vision of a past so distant it had become myth? How else to explain the presence of the greatest dragon, whose death was supposed to have happened long after the fall of the Hidden City, and thousands of leagues north of Mordor?

It was Ancalagon. Zac was certain. No other creature in Arda's history had ever reached such immensity. If this was true, then the pillars of his former knowledge were false. He began to wonder if he should trust his own memory at all. Either the world was lying, or his memory was the lie. In this hell, both options were equally terrifying.

He shook his head, pushing away the metaphysical vertigo threatening to paralyze him. He had to keep moving. Find answers. He walked on through the Valley of Bones, searching for a clue, a sign that would lead him to his next adversary.

The legions of motionless specters did not block his path. They remained frozen, statues of silent regret. He didn't know if it was his growing corruption that rendered him invisible to their desperate eyes, his coward's stealth that masked his living presence, or if these spirits were simply ignorant, trapped in eternal stasis.

He walked among their ranks, a living ant in a graveyard of giants. More than once, he stopped to tilt his head up, contemplating the cavern's immensity, the lifeless skull of Ancalagon looming over him from a new angle, like the empty eye of a dead god. The discomfort of being surrounded by so many spirits never left him, a constant pressure on his soul.

"Morngul, then," he whispered to the dagger at his hip, just to break the oppressive silence. "Impressive, isn't it?" 

He thought he felt the blade vibrate in response, a dark, eager pulse. Or maybe it was only the trembling of his own hand.

His journey finally led him to the base of a tower reaching all the way to the ceiling, a spire made entirely of interwoven bones. He paused to catch his breath, crushed by the sheer scale. Not just the scale of the cavern. Since his arrival, everything had been immense, brutal, and cruel in ways his mind struggled to imagine. Every staircase took days, even weeks to climb. Every rock face became a torture. This was his punishment, not just through suffering, but through the overwhelming scale of his own powerlessness.

He pressed on, entering the bone tower through a gaping arch that served as a door. As soon as he set foot on the first step of a spiral staircase, an implacable, cold wind rushed over him. It wasn't a draft, it was a warning. A clear, icy feeling that he was not welcome.

Summoning his courage, he began the ascent. The staircase, made of fused vertebrae and ribs polished by time, spiraled along the tower's inner wall. Looking down, the ground fell away in dizzying perspective. He climbed, one step after another, the cold intensifying at every turn, the unease growing into a tangible presence beside him.

No other obstacle presented itself. At last, he reached the top, and emerged into the last room he would have expected.

A library.

A circular chamber, its walls lined with shelves sculpted from bone. But time had taken its toll. The books were literally turning to dust. Piles of rotting pages blanketed the floor, a carpet of forgotten knowledge. The air was thick with the scent of dust and moldy paper. The volumes were so decayed that when Zac tried to pick one up, it crumbled between his fingers. On one of the few remaining fragments of cover, he spotted runes, angular and cruel, etched in the Black Speech.

Intrigued, he set his bag down on the filthy floor, ignoring the dust rising in a suffocating cloud. A new goal, clear and precise, took hold. He began to search the room with the desperate patience of a man who has nothing left but secrets to find.