Follow and support me on patreon @Ras Knight for more content
Mara Thorne's Journal Entry: Two Days Later, The Iron Stare
Captain Kael has a fever. It burns him from the inside, a struggle for his life. But when the fever breaks—or perhaps when the will overcomes the flesh—he is terrible in his clarity. He doesn't look at us. He looks through us, at the world. He makes no attempt at comfort. He is only concerned with efficiency. This morning, he forced the farmer to leave the injured woman—she was too slow, a liability. The Captain gave a cold coin and a map point to the man and whispered: "Survival is not shared." We watched the woman cry until the distance swallowed her. It was cruel. But we are still moving. And we are still alive. This is the first cruelty I have seen him commit.
— Mara Thorne, Scribe, Conflicted
The Border Princes were aptly named. They were the margins, the frayed edges of the Old World, where the ordered civilization of the Empire bled out into lawless savagery. To Sauron, anchored precariously within the feverish body of Kael Ironhand, these lands were the final, damning evidence that his own great failure had been localized, a mere historical footnote compared to the endemic, eternal catastrophe of this realm.
His immediate survival depended on movement, but his body was a forge of agony. He could only manage a hobbled, unsteady march. The small group of refugees he commanded—Mara Thorne, the farmer (a man named Thomas), and the older woman (now a casualty of his first, clinical act of triage)—moved southward, guided by Kael's raw intuition for terrain and the faint, stolen knowledge of a ruined map.
The Anatomy of Evil
During the slow journey, the fever in Kael's body burned like a ritual pyre, forcing Sauron's attention inward, yet his mind remained fixed on outward observation. He was still the silent, analytical god, now riding a broken horse.
He watched the landscape pass, reading the narrative of the Border Princes in the details:
The Soil: Barren, tainted, unwilling to yield sustenance without a brutal fight.
The Ruins: Older than the Empire, hinting at civilizations destroyed not by natural calamity or internal decay, but by the overwhelming external pressure of disorder.
The Air: A constant hum of ambient psychic noise, the bleed of the Warp. He had to construct a psychic shell around Kael's mind, focusing the mercenary's low-grade bitterness and cynicism into a shield against the pervasive mental pollution.
He began to understand the sheer scale of the evil he faced. In Middle-earth, his master, Melkor, had a finite, tangible goal: to corrupt Arda, to twist the Great Music into discords that would make the world his. But the Chaos Gods he had glimpsed in the Aether had no such finite goal. They were pure consumption, an endless, self-sustaining loop of emotion and destruction.
Sauron's former malice was a carefully structured system; the Chaos of this world was an untamed, vibrant ocean of malignancy.
His first prolonged study subject presented itself on the third day: a ravaged village near the dusty trade route they followed.
The Massacre and the Study
They approached the village cautiously, drawn by the plumes of dark smoke and the silence—a silence more terrifying than any scream. When they finally crept over the ridge, the scene was laid out: a masterpiece of casual destruction.
A Chaos warband had passed through—a larger group this time, bearing the colours of different gods, a terrifying coalition of cruelty. Sauron instantly began studying their tactics.
Efficiency of Terror (Khorne): The bodies were torn apart, the buildings reduced to rubble, and the grain stores systematically incinerated. This was not foraging; it was total annihilation, designed to eliminate resources and break the will of any potential survivors for miles around. They aim to end resistance by making existence impossible.
Psychic Pollution (Nurgle/Tzeentch): The walls were smeared with foul, ritualistic symbols. Not random vandalism, but intentional foci for corruption. The air around the village felt sick, heavy with an unseen decay. Sauron felt the subtle, nauseating shift in the Warp-energy, an infectious quality that sought to rot the spirit as well as the flesh. Their goal is not just to kill, but to contaminate the essence of the world.
The Absence of Hope (Slaanesh): The massacre had been orchestrated with a level of prolonged, baroque cruelty that transcended mere battle lust. This was torture elevated to an art form, driven by a perverse joy in the extreme. They do not merely hate order; they revel in the sensual excess of its destruction.
Sauron's ancient, analytical spirit was gripped, not by fear, but by a cold, searing professional contempt.
This is not evil, he thought, the word a whisper of ice within his host's feverish mind. This is a structural flaw in the universe. It is entropy made manifest. It lacks elegance. It lacks control. It is wasteful.
He had always viewed the destruction of his foes as a necessary prelude to the establishment of his flawless order. These Chaos followers viewed destruction as the end itself. They were not builders of empires or systems; they were agents of universal dissolution.
Mara, the scribe, was weeping silently behind him. Thomas, the farmer, was violently sick. Their mortal fear was palpable, a pungent, overpowering cloud.
Kael Ironhand, however, was still standing, anchored by a will far older than their terror.
"Observe, Mara," Sauron whispered, his voice still a rasping scrape of dry stone. "Do not look away."
Mara flinched, but forced herself to look at the carnage. "Why, Captain? Why do you make us look?"
"Because," Sauron hissed, his eyes tracking the muddy boot prints of the warband, "they are predictable. They are slaves to their passions. And slaves leave trails. If you understand their tactics, you can predict their failure points."
He pointed with a trembling finger, not at the bodies, but at a broken fence post. "They wasted effort. They burned the wood when they could have used it to fortify their passage. Wasteful. Inefficient. Chaos is poor strategy."
A World Where Evil Has Won
The profound realization settled over Sauron, colder than the grave: In this world, evil has already won.
It was not a case of good versus evil, or even order versus chaos. It was a case of a single, localized, flawed order (The Empire, Bretonnia, the Dwarfs—all scattered and failing) struggling against the overwhelming, self-generating momentum of universal chaos. There was no outside force—no Valar —to check the tide.
This changed his entire strategic calculus. He was not here to corrupt a world—it was already corrupted. He was here to save it, to impose an absolute, external order that would act as a psychic bulwark against the Aether.
His former life—the forging of the One Ring, the slow corruption of Númenor—suddenly felt small, almost petty. His ambition must be grander, his methods more ruthless, his focus infinitely sharper.
To defeat this chaos, he realized, staring at the sickening yellow light of the setting sun over the ravaged village, I must first become the most absolute form of order this world has ever known.
The Whispers of a Rival Ordering Force
As they began scavenging the ruins for viable resources (Sauron forced them to be mercilessly clinical, ignoring the pleas of the dead), Sauron felt a subtle shift in the ambient Warp. It was a faint, almost imperceptible psychic static.
It was not the massive, overwhelming presence of the Chaos Gods. This was smaller, more focused. A tingling, localized sensation, like the hair standing up on a dog's back.
Someone senses me.
Chaos cultists, sensitive to the eddies of the Warp, were capable of sensing powerful disturbances. The sudden, localized manifestation of a Maiar spirit—a being of immense, ordered power—into a fragile mortal shell in the Border Princes would create a momentary ripple. They would not know who he was, only that an unfamiliar, immensely powerful rival ordering force had suddenly appeared on their chessboard.
A cold, thin smile—the first true Sauron smile, chillingly detached—crept across Kael Ironhand's bruised face.
Good.
He needed enemies. To forge an army, he needed a threat. To consolidate power, he needed an opposition that was both visible and repulsive to the common man. The immediate attention of the cultists was a tactical gift. They would come for him, drawn by the scent of a rival power, and they would unwittingly become the first sacrifice upon the altar of his new dominion.
He was still weak, still struggling to hold the mortal shell together, but he was no longer merely surviving. He was planning. He had studied the world, understood its fundamental horror, and identified the flaw in its predominant evil.
Sauron, the spirit, settled deeper into the bone and sinew of Kael Ironhand. The whispers of the Chaos cultists would grow, and soon they would name him: The Rival. It was an acceptable temporary title.
The true name would wait. For now, he was simply the pragmatic, terrifying Lord of Order rising from the carrion lands. He directed Mara to begin marking the location of the massacre on her crude map, not as a point of mourning, but as a datum point in their strategic planning.
The first spider thread was now taut.