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Mara Thorne's Journal Entry: The Day After
He did not look like a savior. He looked like a man made of old iron, broken and bloody, dragged from the earth. The cleaver wound was deep, foul. But when the light caught his eyes—just for a second, before the pain made him close them—there was something there. Not pain. Not hate. Just… calculation. We bandaged him with the remnants of my shawl. We shouldn't have. He was a dying man. But none of us wanted to leave him. He saved our lives with an ambush we never saw, turning the Beastmen's savagery against them. And now he rests. A flickering shadow, holding onto a name: Kael Ironhand.
— Mara Thorne, Witness, Tentative Follower
The possession of Kael Ironhand was a triumph of will, but the body itself was a constant, screaming liability. Sauron, the Maiar spirit, found himself reduced to the role of a meticulous, unseen mechanic, desperately holding together a mortal machine ravaged by trauma. The spirit that had once commanded legions of Orcs and shaped mountains with fire now struggled to regulate a human heartbeat.
He was a Shattered Lord. His essence was anchored, yes, but tenuous. He could only whisper and observe from within the confines of the dying flesh. The brute force that defined his physical self was a façade—if he exerted even a fraction of his true power to mend his wounds instantaneously, the weak mortal frame would instantly incinerate. All his efforts were dedicated to holding his form steady, fighting the creeping tide of natural decay and the aggressive pain that demanded his immediate attention.
The Anchor of Agony
The cleaver wound in Kael's side was deep, a gaping aperture into the body's interior. The crude bandage, applied by the survivors he had inadvertently rescued, was soaked through, but the binding was tight, an amateur attempt at stasis. Sauron suppressed the instinct to heal it with fire or shadow magic. He knew the arcane rules of this world were volatile, tied to the chaotic, corrupted energy of the Warp. His Middle-earth knowledge of subtle, constructive Arda magic was useless here. Healing through this realm's magic would likely invite a daemonic infestation or, at best, accelerate his own corruption by the gods whose names haunted the Aether.
He settled for control. He took the agony of the wound and used it as his anchor, a constant, physical reminder of the constraints of his vessel. He meticulously redirected the body's resources—slowing the bleeding, directing the meager remnants of the immune system, and focusing the mental energy of the host to resist infection.
The survivors—a handful of terrified, ragged refugees—had dragged him to a shallow, protected hollow between the roots of a gnarled, sickly oak. The air here, in the Border Princes, was heavy with the distant scent of ash and the faint, coppery tang of recent slaughter.
They huddled around him, their movements jerky, defined by profound fear and a nascent, desperate hope. He observed them from the darkness behind Kael Ironhand's closed eyelids. There was a farmer, a scared-looking older woman, and a young man clutching a broken spear.
And there was the girl: Mara Thorne.
She was young, perhaps nineteen or twenty, dressed in the dust-stained remnants of decent town clothes. Her hands were thin, ink-stained, and trembling, yet she moved with a methodical, focused energy. Her eyes, magnified by terror and exhaustion, were fixed on Kael's face.
Sauron accessed Kael's remaining visual memory fragments: Mara was the one who had bound his wound, the one who had organized the pathetic attempt at shelter. She possessed a flicker of organization, a desperate need for order, even amidst the ruin. She was an open book of fear and gratitude—a resource.
He listened to their whispers, which were merely the faint echoes of the universal misery of this world:
"He took down three of them," the farmer rasped. "The ones with the horns. Didn't even look at them, just… ambushed."
"He needs a real doctor," Mara's voice was low, sharp with worry. "Or he will bleed out."
The old woman shook her head. "No doctors here. Only priests. And they all fled."
Priests. Faith. False promises, Sauron mused within the silent vault of his host's mind. He had not engineered the ambush that saved them; his will was too weak to perform such an elaborate tactical feat. He had only emerged after the initial skirmish, possessing the dying captain near the site of their escape. The Beastmen, clumsy in their bloodlust, had been felled by Kael's residual actions, or simply by the sheer chaos of their own charge.
But the refugees believed he had protected them longer than he had. They needed a miracle, and in their trauma, they had manufactured one from the dying body in front of them. This passive deception, this willingness of the fearful to create their own savior, was far more efficient than any active manipulation.
The Study of the World
Unable to move, Sauron turned his formidable, ancient intellect outwards. He was trapped, but he was also free to observe with a level of detachment no mortal could achieve. He began a systematic study of the prevailing winds of power in this new dimension:
The Aetheric Tide (The Warp): The psychic resonance was constant, the 'War-resonance' that had pulled his weakened spirit across the dimensional gulf. He realized the Warp was not just a place, but a fundamental, corrosive force that bled into reality, a mirror to the chaotic minds of the sentient races. The Chaos Gods were not distant deities; they were the collective, malignant will of this world's inhabitants. This was far different from the controlled corruption of Melkor's malice. This was unending.
The Nature of Magic: Magic here was inherently chaotic, unpredictable, and prone to corruption. It was not a subtle art of shaping and making, but a violent siphoning of the Warp's energy. If he were to use it, it must be contained, channeled, and shielded, or it would consume him and invite the very foes he must eventually face.
The Political Landscape: The Border Princes were a lawless, fractured vacuum. The Empire was distant and concerned with its own borders. Local warlords rose and fell with the seasons. There was no unifying will, no consistent order. This was not a realm to be dominated through direct conflict, but through the careful, strategic domination of the cracks in the existing structure.
Sauron's spirit flickered within the darkness of Kael's mind, a tiny, cold forge. To master this world, he concluded, I must first master its chaos, not through emulation, but through absolute opposition. He would use the world's own instability as the mortar for his foundation.
The First Whisper
After a day of fitful rest, enduring the body's shivering descent toward fever, he felt the need to communicate. He needed information, resources, and above all, loyalty. The refugees, driven by terror, were his first potential building blocks.
He opened Kael's eyes. They were rheumy, red-rimmed, and intense.
Mara Thorne was sitting closest, cleaning a small, crude map she carried, which seemed to be her most prized possession. She jumped, startled, seeing the eyes open, but did not flee.
He tried to speak. The effort was immense, a struggle to force air over damaged vocal cords, coordinated by a spirit far too vast for this small throat. The sound that emerged was a dry, rasping expulsion of air—a sound that was neither a word nor a cry, but the painful friction of his will against the limits of the flesh.
He wanted to ask: Where are we?
What came out was a single, metallic syllable, thick with the residual trauma of the throat: "Water."
Mara reacted instantly, grabbing the farmer's waterskin. She held it to his lips. He drank—a painful, shallow swallow. The taste was muddy, metallic, and glorious in its solidity.
His voice, when he tried again, was barely audible, a profound, guttural whisper. He could not raise it above a murmur, the physical strain was too great.
"The… Beastmen," he whispered, his eyes locking onto Mara's. "They follow… patterns. Where… did they go?"
Mara was too relieved he could speak to question the strange, gravelly sound of his voice. She leaned in, her eyes wide. "South, Captain. They moved South, chasing the main road."
Sauron nodded, an almost imperceptible movement. He observed her closely, cataloging the subtle relief that crossed her features. She looked at him not as a monster, but as a potential bulwark against the darkness.
"You," he whispered, his gaze unwavering. "Your name."
"Mara Thorne. I was a scribe in Altdorf. We were fleeing from the North."
A scribe. A keeper of records. A maker of truths. An instrument.
"You bind wounds well, Mara Thorne," he whispered. "You are ordered."
This was his first test. He spoke not of hope, but of order. He offered no grand promise, only a detached, clinical recognition of her utility.
Her eyes lit up with a fragile intensity. "I... I try to keep things together, Captain. We must."
Sauron allowed the slightest, most subtle flicker of a smile to cross Kael Ironhand's bruised lips—a cold, calculated gesture designed to solidify her budding devotion.
"Good," he whispered. "Stay close. Observe. Order is the only defense."
He closed his eyes again, retreating into the fortress of Kael's mind. He had established his new identity, secured his first potential resource, and tested the limits of his new, shattered vessel. He was a flickering shadow contained within a massive, failing cage.
His next immediate goal was not conquest, nor magic, but simple, brutal survival. He needed to endure the fever, to stop the infection, and to gather the few outcasts that would inevitably be drawn to the single, desperate source of 'safety' they perceived him to be.
The long work of rebuilding the Dark Lord's power—not through brute force, but through artifacts, knowledge, and strategic domination—had begun in the mud of the Border Princes. The first thread was spun. Now, it must be reinforced with iron.