Facing Elrond and Gandalf, two beings whose wisdom has been forged over millennia, Zac feels the weight of his strange story bear down on him like a cloak of lead. The whole truth is a luxury he cannot afford, but a lie would be an insult to these ancient sages. He weighs each word like a jewel, seeking the perfect balance between revelation and caution, knowing that even a single misstep could shake the fragile trust just beginning to form.
"I was a prisoner," he begins, his voice barely above a whisper. "Not in a cell of stone and metal, but in an abyss beneath the very foundations of the world."
The two sages listen without interruption, their piercing gazes seeming to peer far beyond his words. The air in the hall is utterly still, as if suspended in anticipation.
"In the depths of Mordor, there is a prison not built by mortal or immortal hands. A place where time is not a river but a mire, where centuries become trapped and tangled." He pauses, searching for the right way to describe the indescribable. "I spent there what felt like millennia, dying and being reborn in an endless cycle of suffering and learning."
Elrond raises an eyebrow. "Dying and being reborn?"
"Yes, Lord Elrond. There, death was not an end but a lesson. Each failure returned me to the beginning, with only the memory of my mistakes as inheritance."
"What I found in that abyss, at its deepest, was not an evil that can be fought with a sword. It was a Hunger, a primordial, malevolent presence infesting the world's foundations. It does not feed on flesh, like the creatures you know. Its sustenance is fear, despair, pain. Every negative emotion is a feast. I saw unspeakable things: creatures that haunt that shadow realm, titanic worms burrowing through stone as if it were soft earth, spiders looking like Ungoliant, and deeper still… I saw things worse than I can name."
"This… Hunger, as you call it," Gandalf interjects, "was it a servant of Morgoth?"
"I cannot say for certain, Mithrandir. It seemed to exist outside the categories we know. Not good, not evil, just insatiable. A dissonance in the Music of the world."
At these words, Elrond and Gandalf exchange a glance heavy with significance. The Music of the world, a reference to the Ainur's Song, understood by few mortals and truly grasped by even fewer.
"How did you escape this abyss?" Elrond asks, his grey eyes boring into Zac with renewed intensity.
"I did not escape," Zac replies, his calm tone belying the gravity of his words. "I was… remade. My being re-harmonized with the very essence of creation. My prison was not destroyed, it simply ceased to matter."
He then speaks of his transformation, deliberately omitting the details that might betray his foreign origins. He describes an awakening to the world's fundamental nature, a process that changed his perception, ignited the strange light in his eyes, and granted him knowledge that feels engraved on his soul rather than learned.
"And this," he says, drawing his mithril sword, "was born of that purification."
The blade catches the moonlight and transforms it, suffusing the hall with a silvery glow that seems to sing in silence. It is not merely an object, but a presence, crystallized into a note of the original Song.