Transmigration in Mordor

There was no longer a strategy. There was no longer a fight. There was only flight, a desperate sprint through the bowels of the world, his lungs on fire, his muscles screaming under the strain. Behind him, the Balrog's breath echoed like the thunder announcing the end of time, each step of the creature of flame and shadow vibrating the stone and shaking Zac's soul. Death pursued him, not as a possibility, but as an implacable certainty, a predator toying with its prey before the final blow.

And death caught up with him. Again and again. An incandescent whip that cut him in two. A breath of black fire that consumed his flesh to the bone. A fall into a chasm opened by the demon's fury. Each end was a spasm of absolute pain, a plunge into nothingness. But each time, he was reborn, his body violently reconstituted in an explosion of pain, tortured, broken, but alive. And each time, he reappeared a little closer to the narrow tunnel he had chosen as his sanctuary, that fragile landmark in a world of nightmares. Resurrection was no longer an asset. It was a leash that dragged him inexorably back to his tormentor.

He ran, but he was no longer just fleeing the monster. He was fleeing the madness creeping into his mind like a slow poison, a terror born of this senseless repetition. But the Balrog was no stupid beast. It was an ancient spirit, a corrupted Maia, and in its rage, there was a malevolent intelligence. It sensed the pattern. It sensed the pulse of abnormal magic, that forbidden knowledge that allowed this insect to defy the natural order of death. It understood that Zac was not fleeing randomly, he was fleeing toward something.

In a final assault of nameless brutality, the Balrog killed him once more. But this time, it did not resume the chase. Guided by this new knowledge, it turned, its eyes of ember scanning the walls, and it found it. The tunnel. The narrow passage from which the echo of profaned life emanated.

With colossal strength, a power that could have moved mountains, the Balrog destroyed the entrance. It didn't just widen it. It pulverized it. The rock was shattered, the stone turned to dust, the walls vitrified by an infernal heat. It opened a gaping path to where Zac would resurrect. The last door had just closed.

Hell began.

Zac, reborn once more, found himself trapped. Before him, blocking the only exit, the Balrog sat. A mountain of flame and shadow, a statue of contemplative hatred. It no longer moved. It waited. And then, with deliberate slowness, it opened its maw and spat.

A jet of black fire.

The flame struck him. The pain was something he had never known. It was not the burn of magma. It was a burning cold, a fire that froze the soul while boiling the blood. He felt his skin blacken, crack, then melt, his muscles liquefy, his bones char. He died screaming, a silent cry in the din of his own destruction.

He was reborn. The process was an agony in itself, a brutal reassembly of his atoms, the flesh reforming on still-smoldering bones. He gasped, sucking in a gulp of superheated air, and his eyes opened to the same sight. The Balrog, sitting, watching him with cruel curiosity.

And the demon spat again.

The cycle lasted for what felt like an eternity. He was trapped in a loop of pure suffering, a custom-designed personal hell. He was constantly bathed in a pool of black fire that crackled on the ground, a puddle of his own liquefied agony. His body was gnawed, torn, devoured by this unholy flame, then regenerated by a magic that did not ask for his consent, in an endless cycle of torture and rebirth.

Suffering no longer had meaning, no limits. It was his only reality. Each death was worse than the last. He knew the pain of the slow burn, of instant explosion, of asphyxiation by ash. The Balrog varied its pleasures, fully savoring its victory, testing the limits of this strange being's resistance, like a sadistic child tearing the wings off a fly, again and again.

Zac's distress spread like a black sea in his mind. The memories of his old life, of Gondolin, of his own identity, all began to dissolve in the ocean of pain. He was no longer Zac. He was a consciousness trapped in a body that no longer belonged to him, a machine for suffering and regenerating. Madness was no longer a threat, it was a refuge he could not reach, his mind forcibly brought back to the lucidity of agony with each resurrection.

And yet.

In the heart of this endless night, in the deepest recesses of his devastated being, one thing persisted. A tiny, stubborn, irrational thing. Not hope. Hope had died long ago. Not anger. Anger had been consumed. It was a more primal will. The simple desire to continue to be. A tiny ember, glowing in the midst of a world of black ash, that refused to be extinguished.

Zac was broken. But not yet totally annihilated.