Follow and support me on patreon @Ras Knight for more content
Mara Thorne's Journal Entry: Year Unknown, The First Scrawl
I saw a man rise from nothing. Not from the earth, though the earth here is all ash and dying grass, but from a shadow that seemed older than the mountains. Before him, we were less than dust, scattered and hunted. He came and stood between the horror and our final breath, and when the light of the sun touched his face, the shadow fled. The Iron Hand. Kael. They say he's a mercenary, a captain of outcasts. I write what I know: he is a miracle. And where he walks, we are, for the first time, safe.
— Mara Thorne, Refugee, Scribe (Self-appointed)
The transition was not a sudden rupture, but an agonizing, endless stretch.
Sauron, the spirit once known as Mairon, was accustomed to the experience of unmaking. He had faced true destruction twice before, at the hands of Numenor's ruin and Isildur's blade—each time, a shattering of form, a reduction to agonizing essence. But this was different. This was not a defeat; it was a cosmic displacement, a violent rejection from the fabric of his own creation.
His final memories were of the sickening failure of the One Ring and the cataclysmic, deafening roar of Mount Doom's collapse. He had expected the Void, or perhaps the long, humbling journey back to the Halls of Mandos. Instead, the raw power of the erupting volcano—a geological fury combined with the concentrated psychic scream of a failed, world-altering artifact—had not merely destroyed him. It had propelled him.
He was flung across a gulf not of space, but of Aether.
The experience was pure noise. The Great Music of his original world, the Ainulindalë, was a symphony of order, intention, and divine harmony, however corrupted he had made his part. The realm he traversed now was a deafening, discordant cacophony. It was a boiling ocean of pure, malignant thought, raw emotion given form, a storm of psychic waste that screamed the names of his primal enemies: Tzeentch. Nurgle. Slaanesh. Khorne. The names were meaningless to him, yet the sheer, overwhelming presence of them—a collective, ravenous consciousness—was horrifyingly clear.
This was not the quiet, measured malice of Morgoth, nor the subtle corruption of the Valar's design. This was the universe's open wound.
When the tumult finally subsided, Sauron's spirit coalesced—not in fire, but in ash.
He found himself anchored, infinitesimally, to a place of crushing desolation. He was not yet a body, only a whisper of will, a cold core of consciousness struggling to hold its shape against the prevailing currents. He knew he was weak—dangerously so. His power, the innate Maiar strength of flame and shaping, was perhaps ten percent of its former might, bled away by the catastrophe of his defeat and the rigors of the dimensional transit. He was the weakest he had been since the earliest days of his service to Melkor, a flickering shadow.
The air was heavy, cloying, and faintly metallic, tasting of distant storm and fresh blood. Below him—or around him, for he lacked senses of direction—was a fractured landscape of cracked earth, skeletal trees, and ancient, crumbling fortifications. He was in the Border Princes , a region of the world so perpetually embroiled in conflict that the air itself hummed with the resonance of war.
He spent what felt like weeks as an invisible, silent observer, a disembodied intelligence trapped in the shattered silence of the ruins. He could only whisper and watch. His presence was a subtle chill in the air, a faint, metallic taste on the wind—nothing more.
His first coherent observation was one of chilling certainty: This world has already been lost.
In Middle-earth, the forces of evil were contained, resisted, and ultimately defeated by the Valar and the free peoples. Here, the very cosmos was corrupted. The sky above was not the ordered canopy of the stars he knew, but often a bruised, angry canvas where the veil between reality and the other place—that maelstrom he had traversed—seemed impossibly thin. The psychic pollution was constant, a pervasive, low-level thrum of despair, violence, and perversion.
He studied the artifacts of war: broken swords of unfamiliar alloy, the crude, ritualistic carvings on ruined stone, the strange, three-pronged arrows that littered the ground. He had mastered the art of observation long ago, and even in this weakened state, his mind was a sharp blade, cutting through the sensory overload to find the patterns.
The people, he deduced, are weak.
He saw scattered settlements—villages little better than hovels, fortified by desperation and thin walls of wattle and mud. Their lives were an endless cycle of toil and terror. They were the sheep of a slaughterhouse that had run for millennia, their hope ground down to a faint, residual bitterness.
The faith, he realized with grim interest, is a lie.
He had once manipulated the faith of men to worship him as a god. Here, he saw temples dedicated to a figure called Sigmar, a human champion elevated to divinity. Yet, where was this god's protection? The ruins of shrines and the mass graves outside every hamlet spoke volumes. The prayers were empty appeals, the rites hollow gestures in the face of ever-present, overwhelming horror. This world had no Valar, no divine intervention to halt the tide of darkness. There was only survival.
The darkness itself was different. Sauron knew Shadow—the calculated, strategic darkness that swallowed hope. He knew Fire—the destructive, forging heat of his will. But the Chaos of this world was something else: a sickening, vibrant tapestry of all things vile.
He spent days watching a group of wretched, starved refugees—his first intensive study subject. They were fleeing something that had driven them south, into the Border Princes. They were weak, disorganized, and demoralized. Their tactics for survival were pitiful: hiding in crumbling ruins, fighting over scraps of foul water, and praying to a god who clearly wasn't listening.
Then, the something caught up to them.
It was a small, ragged Chaos warband —no more than twenty men, but they were monstrous. Their armour was haphazard, crusted with ancient blood and strange, chaotic glyphs. They moved with a predatory, careless efficiency, driven by a simple, brutal urge.
Sauron, the disembodied whisper, watched the massacre. It was quick, savage, and without any higher purpose than the sheer joy of cruelty. He studied their tactics. They were tactically crude, relying on shock and terror, but they possessed a terrifying, almost supernatural endurance. Their minds were shielded from the mental pain of their actions—they were not merely cruel, they were joyful in their cruelty.
The fundamental horror is not that evil exists, he noted, his consciousness a cold, analytical machine. It is that here, evil is the natural state.
He began to comprehend the pantheon: Chaos Gods, Nagash, and the remnants of the Empire. Chaos was the raw corruption of the Great Music, the forces of disorder he had always sought to contain and master, made manifest and worshipped. Nagash was something older, a singular will of undeath, a horrifying vision of order achieved through eternal stagnation. The Empire was merely a failing kingdom, the last gasp of organized humanity, too consumed by internal strife and distant threats to recognize the true nature of its environment.
His thought process was a pure, icy calculation, devoid of the passion and pride that had ultimately undone him. How to survive?
He needed a body. A conduit. A shell to anchor his will against the screaming Aether and allow him to interact with this brutal material plane. Manifesting his own form, even the weakest shadow-shape, required energy he did not possess. He needed a host. And not just any host—it had to be a shell of sufficient strength and will to withstand the torrent of his being, yet weak enough for his will to dominate.
He searched the Border Princes, a tireless, invisible hunter. He sought the convergence point: a vessel on the brink of death, its own will already broken, its physical form still viable.
The opportunity came not in a grand battle, but in a squalid, forgotten skirmish over a muddy river crossing.
A company of mercenaries, flying a tattered, unrecognizable banner, had been ambushed by a roving band of Greenskins. The battle was chaotic, swift, and one-sided. Sauron watched from the periphery as a figure of imposing stature, a mercenary captain, went down.
The captain was magnificent in his death. He fought with a desperate, professional ferocity, a broken sword in one hand, ignoring the cleaver lodged deep in his side. He wasn't a hero. He was just a soldier, focused solely on the mechanics of killing until the final, mortal blow—a crude, heavy mace to the skull—sent him sprawling into the churned mud.
The captain's name, Sauron heard in the fleeting psychic echo of his dying mind, was Kael Ironhand.
His will was not noble, but stubborn. His mind was a wasteland of greed, violence, and bitter regret. His body, even broken, was a machine of scarred muscle and hardened bone. And now, his consciousness was dissolving.
This was the perfect vessel.
Sauron did not possess him in a blaze of dark power; he simply coalesced into the dying mind, like water filling an empty glass.
It was a moment of excruciating, violent merger. The pain of the fractured skull, the cold shock of the massive wound, the sudden, overwhelming sensation of a thousand mortal aches—it flooded Sauron's consciousness. For a second, he was just Kael Ironhand, a dying man whose last thought was a curse.
Then, the sheer, ancient will of the Maiar asserted itself.
The pain did not vanish; Sauron simply crushed it, folding it into the background hum of the world. He took the mortal agony and made it his anchor. He mastered the muscles, the nerves, the memory.
He was Kael Ironhand. The identity was taken, the history annexed.
The Greenskins were moving on, ignoring the apparently dead human, drawn to the looting of the camp. The Ironhand body was heavy, cold, and desperately weak, the spirit-anchor of Sauron only just managing to keep the dying flesh from failing.
I am alive, he thought, the thought vibrating in a mortal skull for the first time in an age. No. I am anchored. And I am visible.
He was a hulking man of thirty years, scarred, unshaven, and now mortally wounded. He tasted blood, mud, and a profound, exhilarating solidity.
Slowly, painfully, Kael Ironhand pushed himself up onto one knee. The world tilted, a red haze of pain pulsed behind his eyes, but his will was absolute. He pulled the cleaver from his side, a sickening wrench of tissue and bone, and dropped it into the mud. The bleeding would kill him if he did not act.
He did not pray to the dark gods of his former master, nor to the false gods of this new realm. He relied on the only truth he knew: Knowledge is power.
In the dying mercenary's memories, he found crude knowledge of battlefield medicine. He tore a strip of fabric from the tattered banner, wadded it into the wound, and bound it tightly with his belt, the pain a distant, buzzing annoyance. He needed shelter, a place to heal, and a source of power.
He scanned the immediate area, his vision now filtered through the limitations of human eyes. He was alone.
But in the distant ruins, where the smoke of the slaughter rose against the perpetual twilight, he saw a faint glimmer of movement. A small group of survivors, perhaps three or four, scurrying like insects. They were witnesses. And in this new world, witnesses were either a liability or a tool.
He chose the tool.
With a grunt, the heavy captain, mortally wounded but impossibly alive, began to walk towards the rising smoke. Every step was an act of pure will, a calculated expenditure of his severely depleted essence.
The first step is taken, he thought, surveying the wreckage of the world around him. The first lie has been enacted.
He was no longer Sauron, the Dark Lord. He was Kael Ironhand, the Dying Warlord. And from this shattered vessel, in these desolate Border Princes, he would begin the long, methodical work of forging Order. He would not conquer through brute force, but through strategic domination.
The spider had spun its first thread. It was thin, almost invisible, but it was anchored to a human shell and stretched across a ruined land, waiting for its first victim—or its first believer—to walk into the web.